The typical IT person can have a life long career without ever even hearing about OpenBSD. One MUST know nothing about it. Get out of your bubble some more!
The typical IT person can have a life long career without ever even hearing about OpenBSD
A typical person in any occupation can have a life long career without ever knowing about a useful tool. It’s fine to say ‘OpenBSD does not solve any problems I have,’ but being ignorant of it means that you will never even evaluate it.
A lot of IT professionals had happy careers in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, costing their employers huge amounts of money in license fees and compliance, because they knew about Windows and didn’t feel the need to learn about Linux.
At work I notice a lot of clients trying to get rid of their Linux infrastructure. Usually the reasoning seems to be they have people that can admin Windows or i, but not Linux. It seems hiring a Linux person would be easier, but to them consolidation looks that way instead…
It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? You probably have Windows desktops anyway, so you need staff to do the admin of those, why not make them also maintain the servers? And then of course, corporate software tends to work better with other software of the same supplier, so a Windows server (with RDP, Exchange and what have you) works better for the desktop users due to “integration”. Nevermind the vendor lock-in and exorbitant charges etc etc etc.
The project develops tools that are used by the whole f*cking IT industry worldwide. Such as OpenSSH, LibreSSL or certain libc components that are included in every Android smartphone. Get out of your bubble some more!
I know all that, yet it is somewhat useless information. Is it useful to know how to use OpenSSH? Sure thing, to many people in IT it is. Is it important to know who wrote it? No, it is not. It is irrelevant. Do you remember by heart who wrote all the tools you use daily? I don’t. It is not important to get anything done nor to master these tools.
Do you think the average developer knows who invented git or bash or who wrote gcc or nginx or postgres or react or kubernetes or whatever else? No, they don’t. They don’t care because they do not need to have this information to succeed.
We can all be grateful that these projects exist yet that is not the point. The point is that you don’t need to have intricate knowledge of how they come into existance. You can just use them without it and that is fine.
Is this some sort of performance art, or are you just a grumpy old git who repeats themselves? (Not an attack: I am very definitely the latter myself.)
I think that both times you’ve totally missed the point of this article.
Speaking as a writer, that probably means you haven’t read it. I have lost count of the number of times, in the last year-and-a-half as a daily-published writer online, that I get angry comments from people who manifestly have not read the article. Often then they claim that they have, which directly means that they have the reading skills of a 5 or 6 year old… something I find more plausible than their angry claims of comprehension.
What this article says, which you failed to notice both times, is:
If you work in IT, you should know about OpenBSD;
That means: if you know about, you will be better off;
That means 2 things:
You are using it – as in, you use OpenBSD code – and you ought to know that and be grateful;
You can very probably use the OS yourself and benefit from it;
It then lists a bunch of detailed worked examples of both.
It’s simple, it’s clear, it’s on-point, and there’s really not much to disagree with here.
“People in IT ought to know about it. If they don’t, here is why they should.”
That’s it. It’s not really something amenable to angry denouncement.
This story is a repost, so I don’t see why that’s okay but it’s somehow much worse for @fs111 to have the same opinion about it that they did last time.
If you work in IT, you should know about OpenBSD
Meh. I think I work in IT (whatever that means), I know enough about OpenBSD, and I don’t feel like those two facts have anything to do with each other. OpenSSH is great*, sure, but so is lots of other software people rely on all the time. They don’t need to know who wrote that. The provenance of one of many tools an IT person might use is just not important enough to make anyone better off.
As far as using OpenBSD itself, the article mostly just reads like a personal journey of OpenBSD discovery from one (now) true believer, which is great for them, but it’s not very interesting to me. Cool, it made your third laptop unbootable and you fixed it by disabling some of the laptop’s features and building a custom kernel. If I want to spend my free time breaking my stuff and then fixing it again, I can manage that without OpenBSD.
The pf example seems the most convincing to me (I’m not a fan personally, but trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who’s never heard of it), but it’s one of many in a list of examples that generally seem pretty weak. (For example, as a recovering mail admin, I’m not very impressed by “faster than exim + spamassassin”).
I think this sort of title is par for the course and in a world with plenty of overt clickbait I wouldn’t personally have bothered to complain about it. But it is a silly title, IMO: it suggests the article is going to give the reader some reasons to care about OpenBSD but the content seems more suited to existing OpenBSD fans.
* but it has a lot of the attributes that OpenBSD hates when it’s any other software—namely huge confusing config, code that’s only legitimately used in weird configurations, and features that are hard to implement securely
I am commenting because I am disagreeing with the authorative title in conjunction with the content presented under that title. Judging from the upvotes I seem to be not the only one.
If the article would have been called “OpenBSD - the story so far” or “What I like about the OpenBSD project” I would have not written the comment.
I think you’re missing the point, of the piece and of the title, and deliberately being hostile and confrontational about it, and I don’t know why.
(Aside: OpenBSD has Theo de Raadt and as such has no need at all of more people to be hostile and confrontational. ;-) )
What your proposed titles mean are:
“I like X and here is why”.
What the actual title means is:
“You already use tools that come from X, and so here is why X itself could be useful to you and save you money.”
That is not the same. It is not being controversial or challenging; it is saying “here is useful knowledge you might not have”. Apparently you take that as an affront, and I call this out both because it seems to me that you are grossly overreacting, but that you have been grossly overreacting for a year now and you have not assimilated the knowledge you were offered then and still have not.
If someone gets angry when asked “Hey, did you know X?” in 2022, then it is an odd and unreasonable response for them to get angry that they don’t know it. But if they are asked again a year later, and they are still angry, then that moves beyond odd and into borderline irrational.
I’m not sure what you mean here. OpenBSD hasn’t shipped CD-ROMs in ages. They stopped about a decade ago, and even at that point it was more of swag to thank you for a donation than a real install medium.
It was the first Unix system to support ipv6 out of the box (back in 2000), with ipv6 on by default in the installer.
Hardware is more hit than miss, too. It’s a smaller, less vendor supported community, but even so it supports suspend/resume on my t460s better than Linux does. (Linux supports suspend, but not resume)
I think you misread the article. The mention of CD-ROM was historical.
When I found OpenBSD more than twenty years ago, my main Unix exposure was from working with Linuxes and FreeBSD. What attracted me to OpenBSD and finally had me buy an OpenBSD 2.5 CD set was the strong focus on security…
Hm. So, you’d consider Linux out of date if I told you about my time downloading Redhat, Slackware and Debian CDs over dialup, and installing it on a 350 mhz Pentium II?
Linux feels obsolete, because who uses dialup these days, and hasn’t anyone made it run on newer CPUs since I was a teenager in the early 2000s?
The BSDs have way better documentation than Linux. The CLI tools are usually more detailed and include examples of common use cases. I can’t understand why Linux with it’s much larger user-base can’t also get to that point with its documentation. Is it just that not a lot of people are interested in improving it?
Hi. Poster who spent most of 5 years writing Linux documentation here.
It depends on the Linux and it depends what you want to do.
SUSE has great docs and has been justifiably famous for it for over 25 years. The manuals for SUSE were often cited as justifying the purchase price of the boxed distro on its own.
RHEL has caught up a lot since it became a commercial thing and the RHEL docs are also excellent.
In the free domain, the Arch Wiki is widely held up as an exemplar of excellent community documentation.
Canonical is very well aware of this and is working hard on catching up.
But, you know, aside from them… what did the Romans ever do for us?
The typical IT person can have a life long career without ever even hearing about OpenBSD. One MUST know nothing about it. Get out of your bubble some more!
A typical person in any occupation can have a life long career without ever knowing about a useful tool. It’s fine to say ‘OpenBSD does not solve any problems I have,’ but being ignorant of it means that you will never even evaluate it.
A lot of IT professionals had happy careers in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, costing their employers huge amounts of money in license fees and compliance, because they knew about Windows and didn’t feel the need to learn about Linux.
Many IT professionals continue to know a lot about Windows and nothing about Linux.
At work I notice a lot of clients trying to get rid of their Linux infrastructure. Usually the reasoning seems to be they have people that can admin Windows or i, but not Linux. It seems hiring a Linux person would be easier, but to them consolidation looks that way instead…
It kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? You probably have Windows desktops anyway, so you need staff to do the admin of those, why not make them also maintain the servers? And then of course, corporate software tends to work better with other software of the same supplier, so a Windows server (with RDP, Exchange and what have you) works better for the desktop users due to “integration”. Nevermind the vendor lock-in and exorbitant charges etc etc etc.
These people are paying IBM a lot the systems that actually power the mission-critical workload. MS or RH licensing is chump change compared to that.
Oh come on, if you’re excited about something it’s fine to generalize it to “everyone needs to know”. No need to take this literally.
The project develops tools that are used by the whole f*cking IT industry worldwide. Such as OpenSSH, LibreSSL or certain libc components that are included in every Android smartphone. Get out of your bubble some more!
I know all that, yet it is somewhat useless information. Is it useful to know how to use OpenSSH? Sure thing, to many people in IT it is. Is it important to know who wrote it? No, it is not. It is irrelevant. Do you remember by heart who wrote all the tools you use daily? I don’t. It is not important to get anything done nor to master these tools.
Do you think the average developer knows who invented git or bash or who wrote gcc or nginx or postgres or react or kubernetes or whatever else? No, they don’t. They don’t care because they do not need to have this information to succeed.
We can all be grateful that these projects exist yet that is not the point. The point is that you don’t need to have intricate knowledge of how they come into existance. You can just use them without it and that is fine.
This is basically the same comment you made a year ago.
Is this some sort of performance art, or are you just a grumpy old git who repeats themselves? (Not an attack: I am very definitely the latter myself.)
I think that both times you’ve totally missed the point of this article.
Speaking as a writer, that probably means you haven’t read it. I have lost count of the number of times, in the last year-and-a-half as a daily-published writer online, that I get angry comments from people who manifestly have not read the article. Often then they claim that they have, which directly means that they have the reading skills of a 5 or 6 year old… something I find more plausible than their angry claims of comprehension.
What this article says, which you failed to notice both times, is:
If you work in IT, you should know about OpenBSD;
That means: if you know about, you will be better off;
That means 2 things:
You are using it – as in, you use OpenBSD code – and you ought to know that and be grateful;
You can very probably use the OS yourself and benefit from it;
It’s simple, it’s clear, it’s on-point, and there’s really not much to disagree with here.
“People in IT ought to know about it. If they don’t, here is why they should.”
That’s it. It’s not really something amenable to angry denouncement.
This story is a repost, so I don’t see why that’s okay but it’s somehow much worse for @fs111 to have the same opinion about it that they did last time.
Meh. I think I work in IT (whatever that means), I know enough about OpenBSD, and I don’t feel like those two facts have anything to do with each other. OpenSSH is great*, sure, but so is lots of other software people rely on all the time. They don’t need to know who wrote that. The provenance of one of many tools an IT person might use is just not important enough to make anyone better off.
As far as using OpenBSD itself, the article mostly just reads like a personal journey of OpenBSD discovery from one (now) true believer, which is great for them, but it’s not very interesting to me. Cool, it made your third laptop unbootable and you fixed it by disabling some of the laptop’s features and building a custom kernel. If I want to spend my free time breaking my stuff and then fixing it again, I can manage that without OpenBSD.
The pf example seems the most convincing to me (I’m not a fan personally, but trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who’s never heard of it), but it’s one of many in a list of examples that generally seem pretty weak. (For example, as a recovering mail admin, I’m not very impressed by “faster than exim + spamassassin”).
I think this sort of title is par for the course and in a world with plenty of overt clickbait I wouldn’t personally have bothered to complain about it. But it is a silly title, IMO: it suggests the article is going to give the reader some reasons to care about OpenBSD but the content seems more suited to existing OpenBSD fans.
* but it has a lot of the attributes that OpenBSD hates when it’s any other software—namely huge confusing config, code that’s only legitimately used in weird configurations, and features that are hard to implement securely
I am commenting because I am disagreeing with the authorative title in conjunction with the content presented under that title. Judging from the upvotes I seem to be not the only one.
If the article would have been called “OpenBSD - the story so far” or “What I like about the OpenBSD project” I would have not written the comment.
I think you’re missing the point, of the piece and of the title, and deliberately being hostile and confrontational about it, and I don’t know why.
(Aside: OpenBSD has Theo de Raadt and as such has no need at all of more people to be hostile and confrontational. ;-) )
What your proposed titles mean are:
“I like X and here is why”.
What the actual title means is:
“You already use tools that come from X, and so here is why X itself could be useful to you and save you money.”
That is not the same. It is not being controversial or challenging; it is saying “here is useful knowledge you might not have”. Apparently you take that as an affront, and I call this out both because it seems to me that you are grossly overreacting, but that you have been grossly overreacting for a year now and you have not assimilated the knowledge you were offered then and still have not.
If someone gets angry when asked “Hey, did you know X?” in 2022, then it is an odd and unreasonable response for them to get angry that they don’t know it. But if they are asked again a year later, and they are still angry, then that moves beyond odd and into borderline irrational.
This needs a (2021) at least.
Also: https://lobste.rs/s/frfqdm/what_every_it_person_needs_know_about
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I’m not sure what you mean here. OpenBSD hasn’t shipped CD-ROMs in ages. They stopped about a decade ago, and even at that point it was more of swag to thank you for a donation than a real install medium.
It was the first Unix system to support ipv6 out of the box (back in 2000), with ipv6 on by default in the installer.
Hardware is more hit than miss, too. It’s a smaller, less vendor supported community, but even so it supports suspend/resume on my t460s better than Linux does. (Linux supports suspend, but not resume)
I think you misread the article. The mention of CD-ROM was historical.
[Comment removed by author]
Hm. So, you’d consider Linux out of date if I told you about my time downloading Redhat, Slackware and Debian CDs over dialup, and installing it on a 350 mhz Pentium II?
Linux feels obsolete, because who uses dialup these days, and hasn’t anyone made it run on newer CPUs since I was a teenager in the early 2000s?
[Comment removed by author]
https://isopenbsdsecu.re provides a lot of documented counter-points to OpenBSD’s security cargo cult.
Great presentation, but it does seem like OpenBSD is ahead on many fronts, like e.g. with pledge and unveil.
The BSDs have way better documentation than Linux. The CLI tools are usually more detailed and include examples of common use cases. I can’t understand why Linux with it’s much larger user-base can’t also get to that point with its documentation. Is it just that not a lot of people are interested in improving it?
Hi. Poster who spent most of 5 years writing Linux documentation here.
It depends on the Linux and it depends what you want to do.
SUSE has great docs and has been justifiably famous for it for over 25 years. The manuals for SUSE were often cited as justifying the purchase price of the boxed distro on its own.
RHEL has caught up a lot since it became a commercial thing and the RHEL docs are also excellent.
In the free domain, the Arch Wiki is widely held up as an exemplar of excellent community documentation.
Canonical is very well aware of this and is working hard on catching up.
But, you know, aside from them… what did the Romans ever do for us?