Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 10:26:43 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: dg@root.com Cc: nate@mt.sri.com, terry@lambert.org, darrend@novell.com, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs. Linux 96 (my impressions) - Reply Message-ID: <199609041726.KAA06713@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199609040200.TAA03938@root.com> from "David Greenman" at Sep 3, 96 07:00:38 pm
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> I don't tend to agree with Terry's analysis, either. If anything, OpenBSD > suffers even more than other *BSD's in it's elitest attitude. Just start > asking about all the great "security" fixes and you'll find that it's not > as "Open" as the name implies. I think that OpenBSD will inevitably fall to the state of lowest potential energy below it's current state, when it achieves too many people to manage with its current model. This low potential energy state is "the core team model". This is not intended to be offensive to the NetBSD/FreeBSD camps, who happen to depend on the model (at present). It is merely an ovservation that OpenBSD has the leisure of taking the polotocal stance it does only because it has not hit a structural bifurcation point -- yet. Their only chance to avoid becoming what they despise is to have such extreme moral compunctions about it that they achieve a tunneling energy; this could lead them down the hill to chaos just as easily as up. Down the hill is, in fact, a state of lower potential energy. When you take a steamroller and flatten out a potential well, you remove the brakes... in both directions. As to elitism in OpenBSD inre: the security fixes, I really think that depends on how you ask, doesn't it? One method is to confront the people involved (who happen to be involved there instead FreeBSD or NetBSD because they believe they are granted a "moral high ground" by their involvement with OpenBSD). Because of the way humans work, this is unlikely to be a successful strategy; this should be obvious to even the most casual observer of human nature, and shouldn't take an observation from someone who mathematically models group dynamics to become readily apparent. An alternate approach to the problem of finding out what the security fixes are would be to ask their CVS log. This is permitted, encouraged, and has the side effect of removing the moral coloring from the answer you receive. Pretty obvious which approach has a better chance of being effective. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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