On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Kevin Gerrard <ke...@txwre.com> wrote:
> > Im going to chime in here a second, even though it probably is not my > > place. > > > > I am not a network guru, or computer wizard. I have made a living for > > the last 5 years by networking. We use nothing but OpenBSD routers for > this. > > With the help of the community I have been able to learn and market a > > superb firewall/router for clients. Some versions are many years old > > and still out there running for that client. Try doing that with > > Cisco.... (lol) we will not go into the differences there.... > > Kudos to this community for the help they provide...You show up in a > > forum or community and complain, whine and bitch about things that > > have to do with the community or project. Why do you waste your time > > here and the leaders of this forum. NOBODY is making you use OpenBSD > > and NOBODY wants to hear the bashing of their community within the > > city limits. > > This might sound harsh but people that go into a community or group > > and start whining should be shot. This is the problem with America > > today. One person is moving into a city and trying to make that city > > conform to that one person's ways and beliefs.... Seems to me the city > > should be able to shoot that person. > > What you are doing is just like if I was to go into Cisco Forums or > > Communities and start bashing and beating on the company and leaders > > in the forum.....Winks.... Do you think they would really care.... > > Humor in this is what I see, not a valid user with a valid complaint > > about anything that is worth listening to .... > > > > My two cents worth, I will not respond again to this thread. > > > > Written by a cowboy wannabe that couldnât make money doing it, now a > > half assed networking tech making money.... > > -----Original Message----- > From: owner-m...@openbsd.org [mailto:owner-m...@openbsd.org] On Behalf Of > Peter N. M. Hansteen > Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2015 6:51 AM > To: misc@openbsd.org > Subject: Re: Because Theo and various users told them that the projects > GnoBSD and Comixwall were worthless and that they weren't contributing to > OpenBSD? > > On 10/17/15 15:59, français wrote: > > I always find it amusing how OpenBSD is "audited", yet there's not one > > audit report on the OpenBSD website. The closest answer I've been able > > to find on the mailing list is to review all of the CVS commit logs. > > Yeah, that's not opaque in the slightest... > > I was going to let this just pass because my day is a bit overfull already, > but I guess I'm a glutton for punishment. Note that I don't have any formal > attachment to the OpenBSD project, so what follows is my opinion only, > formed by some years of interacting with the OpenBSD project as well as > other parts of the open source world. > > Your choice of words is a bit curious - 'opaque' is certainly not what I > would have called providing full access to the source code with close to > real-time access to commits as they happen, in almost all cases with > informative comments for each step. A potentially valid criticism at some > level would have been to say that this provides too much detail and making > sense of the overall picture is too hard for a newcomer. > > But keep in mind that OpenBSD is developed and maintained primarily for and > by its developers, who are most certainly capable of making sense of source > code and commit logs. We all get to use the system and enjoy the benefits, > but if you're looking for a high-level executive summary style document, > that's simply not something that's useful to the project itself. (Then > again, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that such documents have > been produced for their own internal use by organizations that were > considering implementing OpenBSD in their systems.) You will find quite a > few summaries of work done and planned at various stages in the papers and > presentations collection http://www.openbsd.org/papers/, some of them may > even be high level enough to give the less tech minded some idea of the > overall work. > > And of course, by now we're looking back at a full 20 years of work, so > even > a very high level executive summary would either need to be quite a few > pages or be essentially useless handwaving. > > That said, if reading commit logs and source code (even via the friendly > cvsweb interface http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/) is too much > work, start with the papers and presentations at > http://www.openbsd.org/papers/. > > > The bigger problem with OpenBSD is it's community. In the FreeBSD > > world, you have PC-BSD and pfsense, both of which are generally > > welcomed by the community. With OpenBSD, there were two sister > > projects that tried to target a similar audience: GnoBSD and > > Comixwall. Comixwall was the equivalent of pfsense for easy > > router/firewall management and GnoBSD was an attempt to make an > > easy-to-use desktop. Both, however, ended up shutting down after Theo > > and various users told them that their projects were worthless and that > they weren't contributing to OpenBSD. > > > > Because Theo and various users told them that their projects were > > worthless and that they weren't contributing to OpenBSD? > > If OpenBSD users and developers said that these projects were useless and > that the people behind them were not contributing back to OpenBSD, maybe > that was the (possibly unpleasant to some) truth? > > It's been a while since both and I can't be bothered right now to look > things up, but I can say this: I have yet to find a web interface to > firewalls adminstration that I personally found useful, and barring exotic > hardware trouble, I can get a useful desktop with OpenBSD up and running > within 20 minutes from bare metal, and it's a reasonable assumption that > most misc@ posters know enough pkg_add and package names to do the same. > > So essentially the projects were packaging of something that was either > trivial or not needed (or actively harmful, depending on who you ask), and > if the people marketing these trivial efforts were seen to be unlikely to > maintain a healthy relationship to their upstream project, I would call > them > useless too. > > If you're doing a derivative of an open source project, keeping a sane > relationship to your upstream is is an essential part of your self > preservation. If those derivative projects were run by people who didn't > see > that fairly basic fact, that's their loss, not ours. > > -- > Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team > http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/ > "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" > delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds. > > This is non-sense causality. Comixwall and GnoBSD are presented as being comparable to PC-BSD and pfsense, which they aren't. And then some share of the blame for Comixwall and GnoBSD's infant death is tied to caustic statements made on misc about them. PC-BSD is a project taken up initially and most commonly by FreeBSD committers, active ones at that. If Comixwall and GnoBSD could be stopped by a few negative comments on misc, they didn't have anywhere near the momentum needed to be successful open source projects. FreeBSD and Linux have a different brand of toxic communities around them, that cater to interests outside the stated goals of OpenBSD. Fine, when that benefits everyone, but largely they just make fettered junk that no one outside their ecosystems can take advantage of. FreeBSD is putting tons of effort into ZFS, a nightmare of licensing that no one understands, just to get a filesystem that really needs a ratio greater than 5 to 1000 between ram (ECC) and storage, which is really silly. I don't think anyone has a problem being a downstream project of OpenBSD, I believe that both bitrig and mirBSD are successful in that space, and it's really okay if OpenBSD is the project that's not a good candidate for PHP-ization of the core OS. This unique community achieves some very interesting unique milestones, let's call that a win for everyone.
