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.
• Work towards a machine independent source tree.
• Pay attention to security problems and fix them.
• 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.
• 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.
• Import external packages with minimal modifications - making upgrading much easier. Also to submit back to the developers any changes made.