Open Source and Open Documentation
When OpenBSD was created, Theo de Raadt decided that the source should be easily available for anyone to read at any time, so, with the assistance of Chuck Cranor, he set up a public, anonymous CVS server. This was the first of its kind in the software development world: at the time, the tradition was for only a small team of developers to have access to a project's source repository. Cranor and de Raadt concluded that this practice "runs counter to the open source philosophy" and is inconvenient to contributors. De Raadt's decision allowed "users to take a more active role", and signaled the project's belief in open and public access to source code.
OpenBSD developers do not permit the inclusion of closed source binary drivers in the source tree and are reluctant to sign non-disclosure agreements. When no documentation was forthcoming before the deadline for the release of OpenBSD 3.7, support for Adaptec AAC RAID controllers was removed from the standard OpenBSD kernel because of issues concerning open documentation.
The OpenBSD policy on openness extends to hardware documentation: in the slides for a December 2006 presentation, de Raadt explained that without it "developers often make mistakes writing drivers", and pointed out that "the rush is harder to achieve, and some developers just give up". He went on to say that vendor binary drivers are unacceptable to OpenBSD, that they have "no trust of vendor binaries running in our kernel" and that there is "no way to fix ... when they break".
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