What's the difference between FreeBSD and OpenBSD?

[Viktor Lazlo]

On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Andy wrote:

> 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. 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?

Try them both, and OpenBSD, to see which one you like the best and which
best suits your needs and works best on your system(s).  ; )

Originally the main difference was FreeBSD was optimized for the x86
architecture, while NetBSD focused on portability to most available
hardware platforms.  OpenBSD later split off from NetBSD to allow its
developer to focus on security.

Cheers,

Viktor