Since I have little experience with both I can only comment based on my experiences and things I know are common knowledge.

FreeBSD is designed to be more user friendly than openbsd, it is also more key towards developers and desktop users.

OpenBSD is much more secure, supposedly the most secure BSD available if not the most secure operating system in the world, only one vulnerability found in the last 7 years in the default install.

They also both have totally different branches of development which means each will have code and features that the other is missing.

All BSD's come from the same orginial sources but they have all branched off into seperate development trees to support different things and be keyed towards different tasks.

I am sure there is a major BSD geek going to give you a much more detailed answer than that but from my understanding and limited knowledge (I have been running openbsd for a year on 2 servers and freebsd on and off from about 3 years but I haven't ever gone into more detail in learning beyond what I needed to know to do the tasks at hand).

HTH anyway

Ben

Thanks for the help. It was most appreciated.

FreeBSD isn't neccesarily less secure than OpenBSD. It's just that OpenBSD is audited for exploits. Its default install doesn't have any remote security holes.

FreeBSD patches all of the holes that they find, so a properly updated FreeBSD is just as secure as an OpenBSD system. It is a little bit more user-friendly than a default OpenBSD install, though. That, and FreeBSD has a larger selection of packages available through the ports system.

Cool. Thanks for the info.

Just for everyone's information FreeBSD 4.10 is out. Grab it @ www.linuxiso.org