Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by adamnemecek 4211 days ago
"With the goal of bringing more experimental development to the OpenBSD code base, a few developers have announced a fork named Bitrig. According to their FAQ, Bitrig aims to build a small system targeting only modern hardware and "be a very commercially friendly code base by using non-viral licenses where possible." Their first step toward that goal was removing GCC in favor of LLVM/Clang. The project roadmap shows their future goals as adding FUSE support, improving multiprocessing, porting the system to ARM, and replacing the GNU C++ library with LLVM's."

http://bsd-beta.slashdot.org/story/12/06/13/1645211/openbsd-...
2 comments
danudey 4211 days ago
Portability and modernity instead of a security focus?

I'm not sure why I would use a fork of OpenBSD instead of just FreeBSD though. I've always seen the primary benefits of OpenBSD as deriving from their obsessive focus on security, but if this fork isn't focussed on that I'm not sure what I gain vs. other BSDs that already have these goals and objectives in place/completed.

link
sigzero 4211 days ago
Exactly. OpenBSD is very specific in what it is. That description is more a description for a fork of FreeBSD or NetBSD.
link
BBoingo 4210 days ago
OpenBSD has always had a strong focus on protability. It's just the focus on portability was never restricted to "modernity" for the reason that there's few interestingly different processors anymore you can compile against to check for breaking errors.

It would be interesting though if Bitrig became sort of a DragonflyBSD for OpenBSD, where weird experimental stuff can be tested in a separate playground.

link
renox 4210 days ago
> Portability and modernity instead of a security focus?

It is you who say "instead", can't it be "in addition to"?

link
ausjke 4211 days ago
I thought this is where NetBSD shines, why not just enhance NetBSD? or why pulling OpenBSD into embedded space?
link
Danieru 4211 days ago
Forking is the way of the BSDs. The BSD style is to develop the userland along with the kernel. Thus where Linux has multiple distro families BSD has full userland and kernel forks.
link
masklinn 4210 days ago
That doesn't explain why you'd start from OpenBSD.
link
clarry 4210 days ago
The people who started the fork are ex OpenBSD developers. It makes all the sense.

Why wouldn't they start with what they already know, find good, and are happy to work on?

link