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Comment by kelp | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of OpenBSD's vibe. They tend to be ok with breaking backwards compatibility in favor of their idea of forward progress.

It's pretty counter to Microsoft's incredible investment in backwards compatibility. Or Linus' "don't break user land" philosophy.

I'd think if we had a spectrum of backwards compatibility, with the most being on the right it might look something like this:

OpenBSD ---> macOS/iOS ---> Linux ---> Microsoft

I think in the OpenBSD case, due to limited developer resources, and a cultural bias towards simplicity, this is the tradeoff they decided to make. Even at the cost of more users.

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Linux has terrible backwards compatibility, a fact well known to anyone who runs Linux on Parallels without wanting to pay the yearly tax.

macOS deprecated a lot of kernel APIs from Catalina to Big Sur, but there were tons that were around for a decade before.

>and a cultural bias towards simplicity, this is the tradeoff they decided to make

Literally the only point of an operating system is to be a stable API for other people to write software on top of. If you're not doing that, then why make an OS?

I don't think people are using PF to write software on top of -- they use OpenBSD specifically to run PF. You should look at upgrading OpenBSD in this use case to upgrading the firewall software.

It's a different case than mere "I compiled this application 6 months ago and I want to run it today", which is the "stable API" part of an OS that you mention.

If that were the only point to an operating system, why doesn't Windows have a monopoly in all areas of computing?

Surely there are other considerations beyond stability to be had when choosing an operating system?

Free beer being one of them, and people are willing to put up with lots of issues, even if it is given free warm.

A windows-system is always warm, even if it has nothing todo...and it's not even free ;)

Windows pays for the fridge.

Since the BSD's are not meant to run proprietary binary's on top, just recompile your code and everything is fine.

Linus want's that the OracleDB's of the World can run on his system...that's is fine i think ;)

NetBSD makes a point of preserving backwards binary compatibility.

Correction:

FreeBSD is also compatible down to FreeBSD 4 (March 2000)

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