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It is an official list: a list of airports visited by OpenBSD developers.

It's just a bit of culture, don't worry about it so much.

So if you were doing a more serious program you wouldn't use this?

I'm not familiar with BSD but when I was using Kali if I was using a share it was to feed into something else, classic example being wordlists fed into hydra[1] or something.

[1] https://sectools.org/tool/hydra/

Because that would require trusting some third party that claims (accurately? deceptively? who knows) that those airports exist. As maintainers of and contributors to a security-focused OS, OpenBSD devs want to verify the existence of each airport themselves before deciding it's fit for inclusion.

The official list is payware: https://www.iata.org/en/publications/store/airline-coding-di...

Alternatives are to scrape some other website (who presumably paid IATA for the data) or Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_airports_by_IATA_and_...) which may or may not be more complete/accurate than OpenBSD's own crowdsourced list.

Official lists are very often not permissively licensed (or openly at all).