OpenBSD

OpenBSD is open software the right way. It is my favourite operating system and I run it on almost all my machines.

The project emphasises portability, standardisation, correctness, proactive security and integrated cryptography. Many nice things can be said about OpenBSD. These are some of them:

• It has taken a rock-solid stand against binary blobs. The developers want hardware documentation (without having to sign an NDA!), not binary blobs or "open source" drivers filled with magic values. Closed source firmwares which may be distributed freely are okay (note that a driver and a firmware are two different beasts).
• It runs on many hardware platforms.
• It is a really nice development platform.
• It is fast and easy to install (max 10 minutes and no annoying graphical installer).
• When a bug is found, it is common practice to search for the bug pattern in the rest of the source tree.
• Full disclosure of security problems.
• Solutions are almost always decided on the basis of technical merit, not political views.
• Every release is accompanied by an interesting theme that recounts -- through artwork and songs -- important events in the OpenBSD world since the previous release.

I especially like their thorough manual pages. The only problem is that you get used to quality and get disappointed on other, non-OpenBSD systems. There is nothing better than typing "man drivername" and getting everything you need to know about a particular driver displayed on your screen. In OpenBSD, documentation bugs are almost as important as code bugs. Well, one should always be careful not to deem everything important, but at least documentation bugs are taken very seriously. You can always count on the documentation to be on par with the code.

The OpenBSD developers often organise so-called hackathons, where they sit together for several days and do collaborative programming. See also this article on Wikipedia about hackathons. A lot of magical things happen during these events, which is witnessed by the source changes mailing list almost exploding due to the intense activity. Interesting summaries of the hackathons, including nice pictures, are usually posted in the OpenBSD Journal, undeadly.org.

The project leader for OpenBSD is a Canadian guy called Theo de Raadt, who often writes some interesting, right-to-the-point mails to the OpenBSD mailing lists. Here is a recent one that indirectly explains a lot about OpenBSD's principles:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=121452549117639&w=2

Don't hesitate to read more about OpenBSD at the official project website: www.openbsd.org