Project Goals

Each person working on OpenBSD has their own aims and priorities, but the goals of project as a whole are to:

• Provide the best development platform possible - with full source access for developers and users. Code should be as FREE as possible, for whatever purpose and agenda.
• Integrate good code from any source with acceptable copyright (Berkeley style preferred, GPL acceptable, NDA not). We want to make available source code that anyone can use for ANY PURPOSE, with no restrictions. We have a page that describes the copyright issues in more detail.
• Work towards a machine independent source tree.
• Pay attention to security problems and fix them. (Try to be the #1 most secure operating system).
• Work towards greater integration of cryptographic software where possible. This means IPsec, IPv6, key engines, and other forms of strong crypto. OpenBSD is from Canada and may export crypto as researched by a Canadian individual and as layed out in the Export Control list of Canada. The project is seeing active research and development on IPSEC and the Photuris key engine.
• Track and implement standards (POSIX, parts of X/Open, etc.)
• Support as many different systems and hardware as feasible.
• Be as politics-free as possible; solutions should be decided on the basis of technical merit.
• Provide a good cross compile/development platform.
• Import external packages with minimal modifications - making upgrading much easier. Also to submit back to the developers any changes made.

The OpenBSD project requires funds to operate, due to internet line costs and the same hardware upgrade issues everyone experiences. For this reason, we sell CDROMs of our most recent release. When you buy an OpenBSD CD, whether at a conference or via one of our other sales places as described on our CDROM ordering page, you are helping ensure that OpenBSD will make future releases. It is also possible to donate funds or hardware, in which case your name ends up on our Donations page. Please do not take this above statement too lightly, since the project is not in strong financial health.