 [ISN] Open Season: OpenBSD perfects security by one-upmanship
From: William Knowles (wkC4I.ORG) Date: Wed May 17 2000 -
13:14:18 CDT   The great violin maker Antonio Stradivari is
reputed to have said that perfection consists not in doing
extraordinary things but in doing "ordinary things
extraordinarily well."  "Perfection" and "software" are two
words that rarely appear on the same cosmic plane, much less the
same sentence.  Still, when it comes to OpenBSD, the open-source
operating system that for the last three years has built up a
near-perfect track record for software security, it shouldn't be
too surprising that project leader Theo de Raadt espouses a
similarly reductionist design philosophy.  "On the grand scale
we're not doing anything perfect," de Raadt says. "But we are
doing a good job of making the little things perfect."  In a
year that has seen software security jump from the back room to
the front page, OpenBSD is getting a lot of attention. Although
open-source advocates have long held up t