What's the difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD?

[Nico Meijer]

Hi Andy,

Starting World War III, are you? ;-)

> Apologies if I should have found the answer already, but it would
> appear from both sites that xxxxBSD is a marvellous operating system,
> very secure, efficient, etc, based on Berkeley Unix, etc.

microsoft.com would like you to believe they make a marvelous operating
system, very secure, efficient and cost effective, with probably no
mention of the name "Berkeley" whatsoever, even though {a number of,
all?} versions of Windows contain Berkeley TCP/IP code if not the
complete stack.

I believe it has it's uses, btw, but that's for World War version IV.

> Both are free and maintained by
> really skilled technical people, etc, but what is the difference
> between them, why would one use one in preference to the other?

Use dmoz.org, Google and whatever rocks your boat, but it seems it
usually boils down to something like this:

- OpenBSD: security first, usability later; great number of platforms
supported
- FreeBSD: usability, stability and security take equal share
- NetBSD: "Of course it runs NetBSD", ie. portability

Roughly, FreeBSD's mailing lists are friendlier than OpenBSD's, unless
(and this can't be stressed enough methinks) you do your homework. So
make sure you do it.

I am hardly the person to comment on any of this, really, so I'll shut
up now.

Bye... Nico