Summa Tetraodontidae: Thomas Aquinas Explores OpenBSD's Medieval Orderliness By: Corey Stephan

After cherishing the discourse that surrounded his talk "BSD for Researching, Writing, and Teaching in the Liberal Arts" at BSDCan 2023, the nutty assistant professor of theology Dr. Corey Stephan is returning to BSDCan with a new merger of his scholarly craft and his use of free and open source software. This talk showcases Stephan’s intended interdisciplinarity in its very title: Summa Tetraodontidae, “Summa (Summary) of the Pufferfish,” is a play on the names of the countless Summae projects of the late Latin Middle Ages, especially the famous Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas.

While nodding thoughtfully toward other key BSD operating systems (notably, FreeBSD and NetBSD), Stephan will focus the bulk of his attention in this talk on desktop OpenBSD. Stephan will cheekily adopt elements of Thomas’s communicative style – perhaps even preparing an articulus (or two) with obiectiones, a sed contra, a respondeo, and responsa ad obiectiones – as a way to explore OpenBSD's internal orderliness.

Stephan’s guiding thesis will be that desktop OpenBSD is overtly ‘scholastic’ in character. OpenBSD is, after all, (intensely) logically ordered. As a desktop operating system, OpenBSD is supposed to ‘just work’ – and cleanly so, with everything from the installation process itself to WiFi configuration to installing key research and writing software applications (from LibreOffice to TeXLive plus a GUI BibTeX manager and a GUI LaTeX editor) being radically simple. The project’s leaders reject what is not logically ordered ipso facto. Everything about how OpenBSD works is documented in an accessible, systematic way.

OpenBSD possesses an orderliness that even a persnickety medieval scholar like Thomas Aquinas could appreciate