I agree with that reasoning.

But I'm just curious as to why they're so keen on driving potential customers away with a frigid attitude.

I even thought of buying the official CD set myself, but with the shipping charges and the price added to the fact that I don't have a credit card to order online makes it difficult for me to support the project as of now.

Just to let you know - I appreciate your answers on this thread.

But what is the philosophy of the *BSD community in general?

The philosophy is exactly what ocicat posted. You might not think that's true so much of FreeBSD, but most people don't realize a huge amount of the FreeBSD developers actually work for Juniper, Apple, Yahoo!, etc... (they throw great parties, BTW) their jobs are to make FreeBSD work better for their companies, hence again they're developing it for themselves, not really for consumers.

That's all very interesting, but my point is that here on LQ.org we're about actually encouraging newbies to ask questions and learn and also share experiences. I think your stance on the issue goes contrary to the spirit of LQ.org, whatever might be the attitude of the OpenBSD developers

I can understand your response if it had been on an official OBSD mailing list, but this is LinuxQuestions.org and Jeremy has more than once stated that we're about helping newbies.

That's all. Regards. And no ill feelings. Please ignore my e-mail to you on this issue if you wish to and I'm sorry I made such a fuss over your initial response.

Again, the intended customers of OpenBSD are the OpenBSD developers. The project's goals are not to attain world domination. The project's goals are to implement solid functionality:

http://openbsd.org/goals.html

The OpenBSD community is not against answering questions; see their mailing lists if you want to observe the culture at work. What the OpenBSD community is adverse towards are questions which have not been researched. Informed discussions are encouraged. I have had richly rewarding discussions with the developers both on & off-list, but I also did my homework first.

Also realize that those forums are read by developers. You don't see Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds answering newbie questions, & newbie questions on various Linux kernel forums aren't embraced either. The reason sites like http://www.linuxquestions.org exist is largely due to marketshare. The OpenBSD community is vastly smaller. The same infrastructure isn't in place.

Nevertheless, newbie questions are better handled elsewhere at independent forums like http://daemonforums.org.

If there is a philosophy, it is to support the BSD license which outside of attributing the source where it comes from is free of any other encumberance. Because of this & the common heritage, note that a lot of fixes & features made in one *BSD eventually make their way over to the other *BSD's. Nevertheless, each of the *BSD's has its own character & individual set of goals. They are not all alike.

Likewise, advocating the release of complete documentation defining hardware is championed. The OpenBSD community in particular refuses to encorporate unknown binary blobs into their codebase for both security & stability reasons. The result is an operating system which works, works well, & is exceptionally stable. I use it as both a desktop & server capabilities alike.

How true, how true. I've watched a few OpenBSD mailing list questions go awry (typically the individual asking the questions hadn't bothered to read the FAQ and/or manpages, or even attempt to think the problem through to understand it completely), but for each one that goes bad I've seen the developers bend over backwards to assist with hundreds of other questions. When it's bad, it's really bad...but when it's good, it's like talking to Linus himself to ask why this particular kernel configuration option isn't working.

No offense, but some of the people who reply on those list are brainless zombified fanboys.

This is exactly why FreeBSD (the most Linux-like under the BSDs) will continue to fail.
When I asked a question about a modified pine build (using gcc), the kept directing me to a meaningless faq and an even more retarded newbie guide.
I've never touched it since.

They were wrong, I was correct, ... and it took them three years to fix something I could have fixed for them from the beginning. They kept refusing any feedback because of some very misplaced "I'm holier than thou" attitude.

I like BSD, I don't like part of their users.
People who don't accept any feedback are *always* bad programmers.

EDIT: ...and most feedback really does come from "plain" users.

Every list will have the resounding gongs that serve only to fill the list with noise. It's a law of human nature, I guess...

Ouch. Sorry to hear you had such a negative experience with FreeBSD.

I agree. Rejecting mindless feedback and being able to take in the meaningful feedback is a characteristic that all programmers should strive for (in addition to honing one's programming skills and knowledge).

you guys actually make BSD sound quite interesting.

wether I personally ever will try it I really dont know, but I like the sound of fewer users (does this equate to better security?) and stability as well as excellent documentation.

I think *BSD is something I will look at from time to time over the next few years

Let me make it clear why we ask questions in spite of something being there in the manual.

Everybody in the *nix world thinks their own Operating System's (or software) manual is the essence of perfection and that nobody need to have any doubts after reading them. The point is you need an outsider with almost no education to review your manuals once you write them, because everything is so clear and obvious to developers that they don't spot the mistakes or the difficult bits.

A developer will always have blind spots to user needs. Technical manual writers need to think from an end-user point of view - even if the end users are other developers.

I am a technical documentation writer myself. People over here don't need to preach to me to "read the manual." I also know how critical it is to get your work reviewed from outside and how hard it is to write good documentation which others understand and can use effectively. My own documentation work (which went several revisions before being published) was recently praised by a client who had just one word for it: "Excellent". This is the truth. I wrote the user manual for our company's software based on the end user requirements, not from the developers' point of view.

I'd say that even if the OpenBSD Operating System is meant for their own developers, the documentation still needs to be geared to newbies. I am not saying that it's too difficult to understand at present. It's just difficult to find the information you're looking for sometimes. and you cannot just assume that because the documentation explains something, it becomes automatically clear to the end user.

Every manual has its blind spot. OpenBSD certainly has excellent docs, but let's not assume that every question of a newbie is answered in it.

If by "fail" you mean "be used as the basis for the fastest-growing consumer OS in the world" (OS X) and "used in some of the fastest networking gear in the world" (Juniper, IronPort, NetApp, etc) then sure...

Have you read NANOG lately? A lot of the big-time routing guys at huuuuuuuuuge global providers are using FreeBSD with OpenBGPD and/or OpenOSPFD to do full routes. Every time Linux and Quagga come up there's snickering.

Just because you personally don't like something doesn't mean it's failing. Apple is actually gaining market share faster than Linux is in the desktop OS space. Now go back to Slashdot and submit arbitrary, uninformed opinions to articles there while pretending like you know something. At least there everyone else does it too.

In this case, it's true. I've been using computers for well over 20 years and OpenBSD has hands-down the best documentation I've ever read, open source or commercial.

No, you don't. They wrote the documentation for people who know UNIX already.

You're exactly the kind of person they didn't write the documentation for: Someone who just barges right in and tells everyone how they should be doing things. Did they ask you to use OpenBSD? No. Did they write OpenBSD for you? No.

You have totally the wrong attitude to be an OpenBSD user. I give you maybe 2 more months before you blunder into a huge flamewar for acting like OpenBSD developers owe you anything, and they tell you to shove off. You won't be using this OS next year because you won't want to by then.

Chort, my remarks on documentation were general. I've already stated that OpenBSD's documentation is quite good, but not perfect. You, on the other hand, will never realize the flaws because you're an insider and you cannot spot them. It's human nature not to spot drawbacks in a piece of work you're associated with for as many years as you have so I don't blame you for thinking that way.

Also if you can discuss and debate meaningfully without quoting me out of context, and by not leaving out the relevant bits, do so.

Don't "divine" what I will do or how I will do it in future. Just because OpenBSD happens to be so technologically advanced (according to you) doesn't mean I'm impressed by, or agree with the attitude of the developers.

And who said I'm going to use OpenBSD even one week from now? I've already given up on it as it's obvious that it's designed to keep the "outsiders" away.

I'm not looking to pick up a fight with anybody as I have better use for my time. On the contrary it is your abrasive responses here that have caused me to respond the way I have and if that's a clear indication of the OpenBSD community's attitude, I know I don't even want to waste my time associating with such people.

I hang around on LQ.org for a reason. I don't use official mailing lists or newsgroups because I know exactly what attitudes I will encounter there. But when I encounter such elitism here on this forum, I don't care why - I'll not stand for it or get intimidated by it as it goes against the official policy of this board. Ask Jeremy if you wish to.

Are you socially retarded or just plain stupid.
I left Free for the reasons I stated and use Open instead.

Grow up.

OK girls, thread closed for the time being. There's not gonna
be any name-calling. Sorry Hari. I'm happy to re-open it when
people who have something valuable to contribute will contact
me via e-Mail.