Dan Harkless' Secure UNIX OSes Buying Guide: Introduction

Since all non-Enterprise, non-Fedora versions of Red Hat were to be end-of-lifed as of April 2004 (the Fedora Legacy Project notwithstanding), I needed to pick a new server OS. I'd always wanted to try one of the security-focused open source UNIX OSes, but in past surveys of the field, I'd found that very few of the candidates were affordable, stable, suitable for a production server, and had enough security enhancements to make it well worth using them rather than a more mainstream OS.

So I did another survey in February 2004, the results of which you can see in the database linked to below. Unfortunately it's still the case that very few OSes meet the above criteria. It's hard to beat OpenBSD when it comes to pure security focus. However, because of the larger Linux development community, its much broader hardware support, full support for non-open-source Linux binaries, etc., I elected to stay in the Linux world, and went with CentOS.

I have updated this data off and on since 2004. "Luckily", most of these OSes have been discontinued, making that easier. I can't promise to keep the info on the surviving OSes always up-to-date, but if you want to email me updates or additions, I will certainly include them, time permitting.

Now, you can either view the database on:

The latter is useful for side-by-side comparison of any two or more records. Note that (on desktop, at least) you can resize the frames as desired.