OpenBSD's Success: Six-Month Releases With No Major Bugs

Six-monthly releases have become something of a talking point in free and open source software circles after the problems Ubuntu has faced with users unhappy over major bugs. While Ubuntu, which is now five years old, appears to struggle with this pace of development, the OpenBSD project has been doing six-monthly releases for the last 12 years - with no major bugs. The head of the project, Theo de Raadt, says he came to the six-monthly schedule as a result of his experiences with NetBSD; he started the OpenBSD project in 1996 after being shut out by the NetBSD team.

"NetBSD was dragging out releases - 'not ready yet!' - which ended up full of stupid bugs which should have been caught but were not, and I felt this was because it was just a replay of the vendor model of software development: 'product driven', 'must meet milestones' 'ship the new candy we planned'," he said in an interview with iTWire.

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