Here you go: straight answers to your questions from Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD. Read, enjoy, and comment away. (Theo might even check in with a comment or two of his own if he has time -- although he's been awfully busy lately, so please don't hold it against him if he can't, okay?)

BSD Today carried this press release, announcing that BSDi has accepted a 4 million dollar investment from another japanese venture capital investment firm, GLQ Intrepia, led by a strategic partner Plat'Home, a japanese Open Source hardware vendor. I know this news is a few days old, but its interesting. Most of BSDi's recent big investments have come from Japan, where it is said BSD is almost as big as Linux is here.

Dr. Dobb's Journal has an interview with Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project, discussing the future of OpenBSD, where they are now, driver development, the teams that work on OpenBSD, and how OpenBSD is supported. An interesting read describing the fearless leader of the "Secure By Default" BSD.

Greg Lehey, author of several books, including The Complete FreeBSD, and FreeBSD core member, writes about the value of cooperation, not just with other BSDs, but with Linux as well, in this month's Daemon's Advocate in Daemon News.

rho writes "Stephan Somogyi at MacWEEK trumpets everybody's favorite security-concious *nix OpenBSD with an article telling why he likes it. Pretty plain jane, but introduces OpenBSD to a new audience (i.e. Mac users)."

Patrick Mullen writes "There are a lot of users out there looking to switch to *BSD or simply upgrade to the latest FreeBSD but have no idea exactly how it looks compared to the older releases or Linux. I have just posted a review of FreeBSD 4.2 which compares it to Linux, as well as its predecessor, 4.1.1."

Leto2 writes "I'm happy to see NetBSD has released version 1.5 of their OS. NetBSD-1.5 currently runs on about 20 platforms, with an additional 10 avaliable as experimental. Get it from your local mirror today!"

Upside Today has an article entitled "BSD community learns to get along". The interesting thing is that BSD seems to be getting more media attention lately. One of the notable points is the upcoming regular "dead-tree" edition of Daemon News, meaning that BSD will now have a print magazine in the US, completely devoted to it. The first copy is slated for January 2001, just a month away.

BSD Today carried an announcement today that BSDi has released BSD/OS 4.2. The press release says that BSD/OS now has XFree 4.0 support, robust SMP, VPN/IPSec, Linux binary compatibility through the Linux Application Platform, and Java 2 Runtime and Development environments on both SPARC and Intel platforms.

OpenBSD 2.8 was released today, so this seemed like a good time to ask project leader Theo de Raadt about OpenBSD -- or anything else. He's a rather colorful person; a pizza eater, kernel hacker, and devout rock climber, so even though this is a big day for OpenBSD you might want to discuss a few other things with Theo, too. We'll choose about 10 of the highest-moderated questions and e-mail them to him shortly after noon (US EST) tomorrow. His answers will appear next week.

I just logged into the OpenBSD ftp server and noticed that OpenBSD 2.8 is up and ready for download. From the Press Release, 2.8 contains improved hardware support for newer Apple Hardware (iMac, G3, G4, G4 Cube), security fixes, AES support, AES/Rindjael encrypted swap, OpenSSH 2.3.0, RSA libraries in base install, and many more ports in the ports tree. According to the project, this release commemorates 5 years of OpenBSD, on October 18, 2000. This is OpenBSD's 9th release. Happy Belated Birthday OpenBSD!

photozz writes "New from ZDNet about the coming of OSX and how some people see this as the rise of BSD, perhaps passing up Linux in numbers of users. " I'm still excited about OSX. I still am considering buying a mac to play with OSX... I mean, I can always install LinuxPPC if OSX sucks goat.

BSD Today has this story about IBM refusing to deal with the fact that FreeBSD will not boot on their laptops. The actual service page is on IBM's support site. IBM does support Linux on the A20m though, but only OpenLinux. Is it my imagination or does this seem strange for a company that seems to understand the Open Source idea? Update: Seems that the problem is a BIOS issue where IBM used partition type a5 (or 165) for their suspend partition, this was reserved for 386BSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD. (NetBSD has since started using a9.) Here's a list of partition IDs as well as an explanation.

NetBSD 1.4.3 is out; read the announcement, the changelog, or just start downloading.

The Openroot project has started. Evidently, they have opened up root on a FreeBSD 4.1 machine to pretty much everyone. They have disabled any access to connect out from the machine, but you can connect to it on several key ports (like telnet on port 30 and ircd on port 6667). They have taken some pretty heavy precautions (like jailing it, a feature that was introduced with FreeBSD 4.x).(Update 11/24, BSD-Pat) kaworu has decided to use OpenBSD 2.7 instead. Openroot will probably be down until later tonight.

Quite a number of people have e-mailed in the last bit about the release of FreeBSD 4.2. This is the release - you should try it out today, because CowboyNeal sez so, and he's currently updating it on his Vaio.

Jordan Hubbard, co-founder of the FreeBSD Project speaks out about OS X, its significance to the geek, and whether it may be the David that brings about Goliath Microsoft's downfall, in this Salon.com article.

CNN has an article originally from Macworld on the possibility that OS X will be ported to Intel-type hardware. There is much mention of Wilfredo Sanchez and his recent port of Darwin to Intel compatible hardware, and the economic state of Apple and how that may shape the decision to run with this idea. Most of it is speculation, but definitely interesting if it comes to pass, seeing as not much would be needed in the porting effort from where they are already.

Daemon News reports that the Software Development Times names BSDi a 'survivor' in the software industry. A must-read story for those interested in the financial growth of this BSD company.

Daemon News has done it again, this time with an actual contribution of code to the community. NewsDaemon is a content management system that has enough features to be useful. It is written in PHP and hosted on SourceForge.