I imagine supporting non-POSIX operating systems, or not exactly conforming ones, to have its challenges, but is it really hard to make this stuff working in Linux and Open/NET/Free BSD from day one? It seems to me a better approach to start this way, without to mention that the potential developers base you get if you support Linux ASAP can be larger.
I'm sure that portability is a major goal, but "from day one" isn't. Better to focus on correct, high quality, readable code first and then deal with a portable version. And OpenBSD C code tends more toward generic UNIX than some others, so shimming is less painful than it could be.
There really are a lot of parallels with OpenSSH's history. There were the "Oh, God! Theo forked SSH!", "It's just OpenBSD, who uses that?", and all the rest. Now everyone uses it, and it's a good thing. The wait time for it to be ready and available to all platforms was a small price to pay, well worth it, and quite small in retrospect.
OpenSSH also deliberately trashed cross-platform compatability. This makes it amusing whenever someone flounces off to OpenBSD because they think systemd should have been written portably.
OpenBSD cares about their own first and foremost. OpenSSH has a similar porting team, and has since the beginning, and there have been no problems there.
"OpenBSD cares about their own first and foremost.".
This is their choice, but their impact in the security of IT is much smaller this way because most servers are running Linux. It is surely a great result to have an operating system like OpenBSD that can be proud of the security level reached and the small amount of vulnerabilities over the years, however if you analyze the computer security problem from a vendor-neutral standpoint, there is more at it than the availability of niche secure systems.
I'd disagree. As I wrote in the second half of my post, they do the same thing for OpenSSH, and I don't think anyone will say OpenSSH has had a minimal impact on IT security. One of the reasons they develop this way is that they can work with a known set of functions, etc, which may not be available on other platforms, and then have people who grok portability handle that part of the puzzle. Additionally, functions and libraries that are not used in the OpenBSD world, like PAM integration, can be maintained by people who understand all the security implications of those libraries.
I don't use OpenBSD for my own environments, but at the same time, I can understand why they code the way they do. Everyone ends up a biased toward their platform of choice in how they code, what functions they use, etc, it's just that the OpenBSD team is militantly upfront and open in their biases. Given their track record in creating secure software, and in auditing others' software, I'd argue their end result is appreciable, even if I'm not directly using those results.
