It was created by Roy Marples, a NetBSD developer who was also active in the Gentoo project.

It is written in C and POSIX-compliant shell, making it usable on BSD and Linux systems.

The core part of OpenRC handles dependency management and init script parsing.

OpenRC works by scanning the runlevels, building a dependency graph, then starting the needed service scripts.

Scripts are assumed to have start(), stop() and status(); and the system uses variables already declared to create the default functions.