Marco <marco@marylon.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> may I ask why should I go for FreeBSD and why for OpenBSD?

FreeBSD is fast, well-supported (most vendors will have a FreeBSD
binary; there is a lot of documentation; more people use it than
OpenBSD), and runs a wide variety of software. It's also a
mostly-complete desktop environment.

OpenBSD is very secure, very stable, and has very clean and well-written
code.

(Note that the above is relative; both systems are fast, secure, stable,
well-supported, and most of the code should be readable; in addition,
both can be used as a desktop - mine runs OpenBSD.)

It has a more strict stance on what is sufficiently open than FreeBSD;
this can be an advantage
(http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=a...de=expande d),
and is widely supported in the OpenBSD community, but it does mean that
OpenBSD will usually take more time to support hardware without free
specifications (reverse engineering takes more time than wrapping a
blob; OTOH, the OpenBSD community argues that the resulting drivers are
better, which is arguably the case).

OpenBSD has a simplistic threading model (work is underway to improve
this, but it will still take a lot of time), which means that for
instance MySQL won't run as fast. (OpenBSD uses an 1.3 Apache version -
with a lot of patches - which is not threaded, so Apache runs just
fine.)

Both have their merits; outside specific cases (a MySQL server would be
best handled by FreeBSD, if PostgreSQL is not an option; OpenBSD, on the
other hand, would be preferable for a firewall), the choice should
depend on what the administrator is most familiar with.

Joachim