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openbsd has a tremendously good track record with writing secure software, though. OpenSSH, anyone?



Well sure, OpenSSH is probably one of the most useful and versatile tools out there, there's no denying that it's a huge achievement.

That being said it's a program with mostly well defined use cases while OpenSSL is a library used in thousands of programs (including OpenSSH) on a variety of hardware and operating systems. The OpenBSD project naturally mostly cares about OpenBSD first and the rest second, which might be a bad thing if we end up with a multitude of forks each supporting a particular OS/architecture, increasing the chances of messing things up. After all, the latest big OpenSSH vulnerability was due to debian-specific patches...

Also, for what it's worth, sloccount tells me the latest snapshot of OpenSSH has about 90 thousand lines of code while OpenSSL has more than 360 thousand. It's a huge, huge library, forking and maintaining it is a tremendous undertaking, even compared to OpenSSH.




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