OpenBSD Journal

Just the Facts? A developer's comment on media portrayal & misinformation

Contributed by grey on from the cloder w/o password means I take the rap for flamewars today? dept.

Chad Loder (cloder@) writes:

Today I came across an article on ZDNet mentioning OpenBSD. It is called de Raadt, the suits, and the rebellion, in which Paul Murphy writes that Solaris has had "essentially no external exploits", and thus Solaris's security record is comparable to OpenBSD's.

That's awfully crappy journalism even by ZDNet's low standards. I've asked Murphy to issue a correction to his article. You readers should let Murphy what you think.

Oh, and there is a BSDNews article which references the ZDnet article. Talk about the echo chamber.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Nate (65.94.60.22) on

    I was going to point out how stupid it was too, but I refuse to register for ZDNet, so that wasn't a real option for me.

    Comments
    1. Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (70.134.104.122) on

        I also did not want to face the ZDNet registration and the following tip worked great and posted reply on ZDNet forumn.

        Thanks!

      2. By Charles (216.229.170.65) on

        Okay, I read that URL as buggermenot, which is probably more appropriate. :-)

  2. By Noryungi (82.127.29.248) n o r y u n g i @ y a h o o . c o m on

    Solaris may have a security record just as good as OpenBSD (ahem), but I know which one I can afford and which one is the most responsive on the kind of hardware I can afford. And it is definitely not Solaris.

    And before people start to flame me, yes, I use, install, configure, update and administer both OpenBSD and Solaris machines. Sun may be untouchable on the high-end, but the fact they are losing huge market share to open-source OSes running on x86 or AMD64 on the low and medium segments of the market reveals how overpriced their hardware and software offering is.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (66.11.66.41) on

      Solaris is free. And Sun sells affordable AMD64 machines. Quit talking out of your ass.

      Comments
      1. By takahide (84.217.110.36) takahide@openbsd.se on

        Solaris 10 is free but updates (not security fixes or hardware driver updates) require a service plan and the basic one is $120/year per CPU socket. Of course there's the option to run the developer edition, Solaris Express.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (66.11.66.41) on

          Huh? Updates are free, just like the OS. You can even just download the source and compile it yourself. Other software for Solaris isn't always free, and support isn't free, but the OS certainly is.

          Comments
          1. By takahide (84.217.110.36) takahide@openbsd.se on

            http://www.sun.com/service/sunconnection/solaris10patches.html

            You are wrong.

            Comments
            1. By cruel (62.221.44.170) on

              I hope, Solaris will not end up with "freedom" like that

              http://lwn.net/Articles/175793/

      2. By Gimlet (70.130.156.194) on

        Affordable, unless you want some storage or redundancy (even Apple is cheaper for disk!). And don't get me started on their resellers. I don't care much for Dell, but at least you can order their freaking products. Sun even has problems giving servers away for free (story).

        Their old gear is great, though, and of course our favorite OS makes it even better.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (70.17.143.232) on

          Interestingly, Paul Murphy is mentioned in this free Sun servers article/blog:

          "The first reaction most folks have to the performance is, frankly, disbelief. A while back I got into a spat with the technologists that built the machine about whether we could fairly call them 9.6Ghz machines (as a measure of clock frequency of the chip). Paul Murphy has an interesting analysis of whether that's a fair descriptor (I say interesting because he says we're underhyping the performance - a first for the industry!)."

  3. By cruel (195.68.219.2) on

    Sun are good PR guys, not open-source. They have plans to promote their systems, so they do PR. What are you expecting?

    I am not familar with Solaris. More of this: I even don't want to be.

    Because Sun (Intel, HP, Adaptec, IBM and more) has good mimicry skills. Mimicry means they are pseudo-friendly for open-source community. They are open enough untils they are in profit with this.

    So I don't want to play in their chameleons' games. That's because OpenBSD model (due to security/freedom ratio) is my choice.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.223.129) on

      I'm not sure exactly where they are in the process, but I believe Sun is moving to opensource Solaris (partly or completely .. I'm not entirely sure; see http://www.opensolaris.org/). If we are going to criticize others for getting facts wrong ... well ... keep in mind it is rather easy to make mistakes as soon as step a little to the left of your area of expertise, and it is not always so easy to know when you've made that step.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (24.46.21.229) on

        There already are three OpenSource Solaris LiveCD/Install Environments. On top of that, you can build the entire source from the OpenSolaris site.

        Comments
        1. By Nate (65.95.229.183) on

          And it's all useless, CDDL cruft.

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (24.46.21.229) on

            Malarky. They're dual licensing it under GPL. It's free enough to be used to create decent environments. Regardless of the amount of freedom we may want with the source, not everything can be BSD licensed. It's free enough to work. Besides, the CDDL doesn't make any monetary requirements, so unless the CDDL implies 'poorly written', there is fairly little cruft

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward (67.64.89.177) on

              Not free enough. It's a nice body of code and I wish it was free'er.

  4. By cruel (195.68.219.2) on

    Things are clear:

    - Sun is to promote security model,
    - Sun thinks "there is one big security player already - OpenBSD",
    - Sun need "good" PR shit to show:

    a) Sun is the best of the best of the best,
    b) OpenBSD team is just a street gang, not skilled programmers.

    Man, who need's to recall as they did?

    "Back in 1994 de Raadt got in trouble with his then colleagues in the netBSD group and was basically read out of the community. If you're interested in the details, he's got everything you want to know on-line and I think you'll find it doesn't exactly rebound to the credit of the people involved."

    If you want to do PR, take the shit and put it on the opponent's head. This is dirty game I don't want to play.

    Man, why don't Paul Murphy recall 6-month release cycle? Because it will be anti-PR: strong release cycle means team with skilled programmers, not street gang...

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (147.249.60.21) on


      Please learn English before posting again.

      Comments
      1. By cruel (62.221.44.170) on

        this community had started EXACTLY like that: someone said "good code is less important than good english".

        and i'd like to THANK to that "someone": now we have OpenBSD.

        i hop ya'll anda stan my pur engla...

  5. By enberg (81.224.154.131) on

    I like how the article implies that a 12 year old personality clash somehow has a bearing on todays OpenBSD security. Journalism at its finest.

    Comments
    1. By thomasw.xhrl (70.71.136.212) on

      rofl, exactly enberg: i love the verbal irony :)

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