[HN Gopher] How I would sell OpenBSD as a salesperson
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How I would sell OpenBSD as a salesperson
Author : hucste
Score : 64 points
Date : 2022-06-22 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dataswamp.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dataswamp.org)
| INTPenis wrote:
| I can immediately both agree and disagree with their first point,
| Learn once.
|
| I recently upgraded to a new router hw, which meant scrapping my
| old OpenBSD 6 and jumping straight to OpenBSD 7.1. One of the
| tasks was actually to renew all my old rules that had been
| hanging around from much older releases.
|
| While doing this I noticed my old rules referenced lo as the
| loopback IF, but it's clearly called lo0.
|
| Anyways, that was just one tiny detail. But I must say the rules
| did work out of box with 7.1, nat, port forwardings and openings
| all worked. All I did was set skip on lo so maybe it didn't
| matter so much. And maybe I can reference lo* with lo? Not sure.
|
| Either way the handbook is what backs up point 1. Sure when you
| search for an issue in OpenBSD your search results are miniscule
| compared to Linux, but on the other hand there are no out of date
| guides or documentation sites, it's all in the handbook. The
| final say so for all things OpenBSD. That is definitely a
| strength. But I don't think you can say that OpenBSD is
| completely immutable.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| > OpenBSD doesn't support Bluetooth, but you can see this as a
| security feature
|
| > You may think OpenBSD slow performance could hit your
| productivity
|
| > Maybe your favorite software is proprietary and will not be
| provided for OpenBSD, then your provider is entirely at fault...
|
| Sales really isn't for everyone....lol
|
| Also I haven't heard great things about their mailing list. Maybe
| this has changed, but they're in no shape to replace commercial
| quality technical support.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I see so many more cryptic comments about their mailing list
| than actual description.
|
| Anyone have a good resource to catch up?
|
| In the meantime, I recommend my perspective to anyone who asks
| (nobody asks): separate the OS from the dev mailing list.
| na85 wrote:
| >I see so many more cryptic comments about their mailing list
| than actual description.
|
| It's just not a very friendly list, or at least it wasn't in
| days of yore when OpenBSD was relevant.
|
| You have to realize that a lot of BSD enthusiasts are people
| who have let "being a *BSD user" subsume their whole identity
| and there's a lot of "Linux is for noobs"-style elitism.
| rollcat wrote:
| > You have to realize that a lot of BSD enthusiasts are
| people who have let "being a *BSD user" subsume their whole
| identity and there's a lot of "Linux is for noobs"-style
| elitism.
|
| As someone using Debian, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, and other OSs
| regularly, what I'm experiencing is perhaps less "elitism"
| on the BSD side, and more of: "hey, we're also here, it
| would be nice if you could consider us sometimes". The BSDs
| traditionally have different ways of doing some things,
| which are equally as valid, but e.g. OpenSSH considers the
| needs of Linux users, and provides sandboxing through
| seccomp[1] (which NB is quite an achievement to get right,
| contrast with pledge[2]).
|
| [1]: https://github.com/openssh/openssh-
| portable/blob/master/sand... [2]:
| https://github.com/openssh/openssh-
| portable/blob/master/sand...
|
| Meanwhile e.g. on the systemd or GNOME side of things,
| projects tend to act not only as if Linux was the only
| platform in existence, but almost as if any alternative or
| adjacent technologies had no right to co-exist either: e.g.
| when GNOME told SDL2 developers to link against GTK to draw
| native window borders under Wayland[3]; or as systemd
| continues to swallow every traditionally discrete UNIX
| service, such as cron or syslog, and tries to shove DBus
| into the kernel. This is a stance that I'd expect from
| Apple (who are shipping an opinionated but highly polished
| and desirable product), not an open source community, where
| value emerges from collaboration.
|
| [3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
|
| Of course there are plenty acts of both generosity and
| jackassery in all of these communities, however the picture
| you're trying to paint is a bit unfair.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It can seem unfriendly but what it really is, is not very
| tolerant of people who have made no effort to solve their
| problems, or even provide relevant information.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > or at least it wasn't in days of yore when OpenBSD was
| relevant.
|
| You do realize that a very _very_ large number of us here
| use OpenBSD code literally all day every day?
|
| Who do you think wrote OpenSSH? Or do you remember
| Heartbleed, when everyone switched or thought about
| switching to LibreSSL?
|
| Just because most of us don't run OpenBSD-the-OS very often
| doesn't mean we don't all frequently use it's code.
| na85 wrote:
| Re: relevance, I'm referring specifically to OpenBSD the
| OS. It has no real use case. It's a research OS at best.
| The performance is abysmal and "code correctness" or
| "cohesion" is worth its weight in gold from a practical
| standpoint, which is to say very little.
|
| OpenBSD fans like to make a lot of hay about its vaunted
| security posture but in real-world use cases I have no
| doubt that properly configured and up to date FreeBSD,
| Linux or even Windows Server is just as secure as
| OpenBSD.
|
| There are just vanishingly few reasons to use OpenBSD
| today.
| amatecha wrote:
| No real use case? I'm running it on multiple daily-driver
| machines as my personal computing OS. It works, and well.
| It's stable, reliable and everything works as expected
| and works as comprehensively-documented. I think there's
| more reason every day to use OpenBSD vs. all the other
| OSes you just mentioned. I've never seen such strict
| adherence to project goals/values than with this OS, and
| the resulting quality and correlating user experience is
| evident.
| na85 wrote:
| We'll have to agree to disagree on the UX part. I find
| the UX to be very poor compared to Fedora, for example.
| There's nothing OpenBSD does better than its competitors
| by enough of a degree to make up for its warts; it's not
| significantly more stable or reliable than FreeBSD or
| Debian.
|
| The documentation does tend to be pretty good, but...
| honestly? I just don't find that to be a compelling
| reason to choose an operating system.
| Infernal wrote:
| To be fair, those bullets are prefaced with "Of course, as a
| good salesperson, I would have to avoid some topics because
| this would make the customer lose interest into OpenBSD"
| henning wrote:
| AFAIK this is not how you actually sell tech products. You have
| to learn about what a customer does and what problems they're
| having. You cater your pitch to what you learn about their needs.
|
| If you just launch into a scripted speech rattling off features,
| I don't think you'll have much success. Are they having problems
| with GPL-licensed code? Why not FreeBSD, then? Maybe they have
| special security or compliance needs. Does OpenBSD solve those
| needs in a way that nothing else does?
| stepupmakeup wrote:
| This perfectly captures what a sales pitch is since it doesn't
| mention any of the negatives of OpenBSD.
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| That's true; however I can confirm the positives solene@
| enumerated are all accurate.
|
| I was using OpenBSD as a daily driver on my thinkpad for a year
| and a half. The motivations driving me to switch back to Linux
| were:
|
| * slow -- can't use hyperthreading because of developers'
| security concerns with that technology.
|
| * no Bluetooth support
|
| * can't use Discord's electron app, meaning no screen share
|
| * NTFS write support needs FUSE which is extremely slow. I
| worked around it by using exFAT which is fast
| ptidhomme wrote:
| I'm pretty sure OpenBSD is (relatively) slow regardless of
| hyperthreading,
|
| Agree about NTFS-3g, it's next to useless. I've read
| somewhere that some optimizations are not enabled on OpenBSD.
|
| Still, I like it and use it on my laptop and servers. I'm
| 100% in line with the first point of TFA : learning OpenBSD
| is a good investment, you feel that you steadily build up an
| coherent understanding of the system.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It's getting better, but they still have an older SMP model
| based on a giant lock
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_lock#BSD
| rahen wrote:
| I've been there too, although with NetBSD. Lack of proper
| virtualization and containerization subsystems eventually
| became a serious issue and I eventually moved back to Alpine.
|
| Net/OpenBSD still mostly caters to the needs of hobbyists, I
| seldom see them in production (besides maybe network
| appliances).
| matrix12 wrote:
| NetBSD has nvmm. Qemu is quite fast as as result. I run
| many distros ontop of it. Plus Xen. My laptop has been
| running Xen with pv instances for app isolation. Never as
| fancy as Qubes though.
| cylinder714 wrote:
| Thank you for reminding me: I want to study OpenBSD's vmm
| and vmd virtualization tools, and getting Alpine to run
| thereon should be fun.
| sdze wrote:
| Containerization is overrated in the sense, that you can
| have it all for "free" with chroot in openbsd or jail in
| freebsd.
| rahen wrote:
| chroots have a filesystem namespace but miss user,
| process and network namespaces. Besides, the Docker
| registry is fairly convenient.
| kstrauser wrote:
| FreeBSD jails have those things.
| sdze wrote:
| In Regards to registries:
|
| My "builds" are also reproducible. Why? I run the same
| build and deploy script each time. Wow.
|
| For me this all is old wine in new pipes. Cold coffee.
| Registries.
| rahen wrote:
| Jails can use the Docker registry?
|
| The nice thing with Dockerfiles and the Docker registry
| is how quickly I get a reproducible, stateless, isolated
| environment for any large, proprietary or foreign app I
| may need, without resorting to a VM or polluting my
| system. All it takes is an Ubuntu or CentOS base, pull
| the apps and its dependencies, throw it away when I'm
| done while keeping a lean Alpine system underneath.
|
| Jails would require me to set things from scratch each
| time I need a new app, even for a short while. It's just
| impractical.
|
| I'm considering Nix as a potential alternative, but it
| doesn't work on the BSDs yet. If you know a way to run
| "modern workloads" in a KISS, convenient, Unix-y way,
| please let me know.
| sdze wrote:
| Aha... ? And? What do you want to achieve? That is the
| question.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| It's pretty sweet in a server or for networking/edge network
| stuff, but I've never really bothered to use it as my desktop
| daily driver and it's all because of what you mentioned.
| Props to those who have the patience and will to do this
| though.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Can't discord's web version share a screen? If not, why?
|
| If the only issue with bt is sound, there are some usb
| dongles that are recognized as a sound card and do the
| bluetooth part outside of the OS. You have to trust the
| manufacturer though. If there are other requirements such as
| file sharing, they usually can be done easily another way.
|
| I am not sure who and why would anyone using openbsd want to
| mount an ntfs filesystem on a regular basis to do large
| transfers.
| ainar-g wrote:
| You can enable hyper-threading at runtime though.
| sysctl hw.smt=1
| sudobash1 wrote:
| At the bottom of the article he did mention a list of
| negatives. Sure it is non-comprehensive, but so is his list of
| positives.
|
| https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2022-06-22-openbsd-selling-arg...
| mfincham wrote:
| The first sentence of the page says the author is a woman.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| BRB calling the police
|
| ;)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| We use it in Finance applications in my work - security
| requirements and hacking attempts are through the roof, and
| OpenBSD is a pretty easy sell when it comes to not losing insane
| amounts of money.
|
| Microsoft/google/meta really like OpenBSD, they throw large sums
| of cash at it and I think it's partly because of the licensing.
| [1] Windows itself takes a lot of security enhancements out of
| OpenBSD even before Linux catches on, and I also think OpenSSH
| with a permissive license has been a big factor in them including
| it in Windows now.
|
| [1] https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html
| elchief wrote:
| I wish someone would make an OpenBSD-only cloud
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| vultr.com works well with OpenBSD.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| https://openbsd.amsterdam/
|
| Does this count?
| matrix12 wrote:
| Poorly written, if I may be honest. Having attended cookouts with
| Theo, and also contributed to their system. I'd say "OpenSSH
| BSD", if I had to sell it. Hide any of the mailing lists from
| potential customers. Fixate on well known supported hardware. Use
| what the devs use. If one must use the mailing lists, you never
| EVER ask a question. Instead state a contrary fact, and await the
| answers. The distro is Theo, simply put. So you get a regular
| release where most things just work.* But you must know what you
| plan to run it on, and exactly which chipsets are in use. The man
| pages on drivers for OpenBSD are superb for listing all known
| hardware that is compatible.
|
| And if software, or hardware X is not supported, go do it, or get
| supported software/hardware instead.
| chasil wrote:
| Unfortunately, there were periods in the past where it did not
| sell well.
|
| "The bad news is that OpenBSD for the past 2 years has turned a
| loss of approximately $20K USD ($40K total). I don't think I
| need to explain in many words what that is doing to our beloved
| OS, and worse, our main systems architect. This is starting to
| seriously impede the development of OpenBSD and OpenSSH...
|
| "What I want to point out what a lot of people don't seem to
| realize is that OpenSSH development is paid from the same pool
| of money as OpenBSD. OpenSSH is in use by millions around the
| world however the revenue stream just simply isn't there."
|
| https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20060321034114
| matrix12 wrote:
| As a follow up, I'd suggest taking a livecd of OpenBSD to a
| place that sells laptops. Test boot it, verify it works, and
| purchase it. I've done this before, although your mileage may
| vary.
| alberth wrote:
| Selling 101.
|
| Don't sell benefits, sell what problems your product solves that
| the buyer has.
| srcmap wrote:
| Solve one problem compare to Linux: It is not GPL - the reason
| Apple and Juniper Network choose BSD.
|
| The sale person needs to talk to the Corp Legal IP team.
| xwdv wrote:
| I would sell it first by instilling the fear. We live in a
| dangerous world and all operating systems are vulnerable, but
| only OpenBSD is the safest choice.
| what-imright wrote:
| OpenBSD is awesome, but what about the future? After the coming
| nuclear war the developers will be gone and all that will survive
| is the last stable sitting in a lucky AWS bunker. For a while,
| humans will use it for everything, but soon enough the AI beings
| that started the war will poke a million holes in it and we will
| all be enslaved. What we NEED is an AI that recognizes exploits,
| formulates a mitigation, and automatically adds it to OpenBSD.
| For humanity. Then I'll buy a license
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Actually funny you mention that because they rely a lot on
| coverity running on the github mirror already to cover those
| exploits
|
| Bro we dev this in Brasil nobody's going to nuke us here
| what-imright wrote:
| See your message probably came from the future AI through a
| micro wormhole, just to keep us off guard. OpenBSD needs to
| become an adaptive defense system and it needs a catalog of
| exploits to hit back, ideally generated by AI locally
| orangepurple wrote:
| They can't train their AI on OpenBSD because it doesn't
| support CUDA
| rollcat wrote:
| Don't worry, Theo has clones of himself rigged to a dead man
| switch.
| ttymck wrote:
| What?
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