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.
www@openbsd.org
$OpenBSD: goals.html,v 1.24 1998/02/14 07:18:23 deraadt Exp $