Are you sure about that?

See for instance http://www.webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?sourceid =Mozilla-search&va=Biannual+ [webster.com] which says biannual means "occurring twice a year" compare with biennial http://www.webster.com/dictionary/biennial+ [webster.com] "occurring every two years"

Turns out a specialized OS for a small number of users often ends up being something that can't be easily replaced. PF has availability features no one outside of Cisco can match, and they can't match them for what it costs us to use OpenBSD for the job.

For example, our Internet connection at work is managed by OpenBSD. If I rebooted our firewall, no one would notice, because the backup would kick in and it would preserve state for everything, even pre-existing TCP connections. You could be streaming music and it wouldn't even skip. How can I do that with Linux again?

"I can't run any of the stuff I need to run under OpenBSD, so why the heck should I even care about it?"

Hm. Whenever I have that problem, I just download the Linux version and run it under binary emulation.

Even better is you can run them in a sysjail. This way, when your Linux executable is exploited, the whole box isn't compromised.

This is a dream for those of us forced to have to run linux executables

If you had read the articles linked you'd know that OpenRCS is an almost completely compatible replacement for the GNU RCS, it is a clean reimplementation. The idea being security and reliability improvements. OpenCVS will more of the same once completed, and perhaps after it's features are all complete will add additional things, but until then it is seeking only to be a complete replacement for the GNU CVS.

I have a Soekris vpn1401 [soekris.com] and it works well, although I don't believe all the features are supported. IIRC, this is because hifn has not been forthcoming with their documentation. The vpn1201 [soekris.com] is known to work as well. I'm not sure if later revisions (like the lan1461) work-- OpenBSD does not have a good relationship with hifn at the moment. BTW, I haven't done any benchmarking with my 1401, but the machine handles crypto much faster with than without it. That's all I can say.

You obviously don't know OpenBSD, it's the one that gets new drivers for wireless cards and removes ipf because of it's developer's interpretation of his licence. It's the one that will never move to a newer version of Apache, since it's licence is too restrictive. It's the one that rewrites compress to include all the functionality of gzip, just so it can remove gzip, and it's done the same for size, and diff, and grep...

The gcc is one of the last remaining non-BSD licensed bits in OpenBSD, OpenBSD has actively removed GPL and other licences from their codebase. No new GPLed software will ever be added to OpenBSD. If there was anything close to as portable as GCC and was BSD licensed, it would quickly get adopted and replace the GCC in OpenBSD. Tendra is nowhere near good enough and it is a long way away from being there, the kencc of plan9 is desirable, but under too restrictive of terms. OpenBSD developers have sought Bell Lab's release of the compiler under BSD-like terms, but without sucess.

While both NetBSD and FreeBSD lack in the constitution to be a BSD, instead seeking to compete and perhaps be a Linux distribution, by including binary blobs, Project Evil and various CDDL and APSL bits. OpenBSD is the fighter, it's the FSF of the BSDs and hates the viral and restrictive nature of the GPL. It also hates the increasingly bad support for non-i386-based hardware, thus it having to ship two gcc versions.

Really, if the developers cared about BitTorrent, it would be reimplemented and in the base - obviously that is not the case. So if someone wants it integrated, they would have to make the implementation, having it be in C and licensed BSD, and submit both a patch set to integrate it and an explaination of why they think OpenBSD developers ought to give a damn.

Even then, if the developers didn't want it, it wouldn't be integrated.

But as I said, you obviously don't know OpenBSD, or you'd have known that is how things work there.

Also worth noting, OpenBSD is not a, "distro," it's a fully functional, self-contained operating system. It's ps is the OpenBSD ps, not the GNU one, or the FreeBSD one, or the OpenSolaris one, or the Darwin one, but the OpenBSD one. The same goes for pf, cat, arp, ifconfig and the other bits and bobbles inside, true, there are programmes from external sources, such as bind, apache and gcc, but those are the exception rather than the rule.