Theo de Raadt
Canadian computer security expert, programmer, a founder of NetBSD and the founder of OpenBSD.
Scaling isn't really our concern; I barely know what the word means. There is one group of people who we do know scales. Whiners. They scale really well.
It's the little things that make Freedom become Not Freedom.
What I do know is Theo is the kind of security genius that various state secret-service organizations would love to have on their side. If he were to waltz into the Department of Defense and promise to be a good boy, I think Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet would probably jizz all over himself.
Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix.
Complexity does not avert risk. Ever. Period.
Admittedly, I was apprehensive about interviewing Theo de Raadt.
This is a software monopoly but at least it was written by people who care about security, so it's not like Microsoft's monopoly.
I actually am fairly uncomfortable about it, even if our firm stipulation was that they cannot tell us what to do. We are simply doing what we do anyways — securing software — and they have no say in the matter. I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built.
Well, we do not do this so that other players can make profit. We've actually been doing this for a long time and I do not know of anyone who specifically makes money off OpenBSD. They may, at best, save some money by not having to re-engineer the same software that we have already written. It is not exactly that we are letting them make a profit, but that we are doing a proper job and saving someone else from having to do the same job in a corporate setting. In our eyes, that is perhaps a waste of planet-wide engineer talents, rewriting the same thing over and over. Why can’t we just get it right once?
So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.
Do you trust glibc? OK, perhaps that snide remark is overstating things a bit, but secure software only happens when all the pieces have 100% correct behavior.
On December 20, Theo de Raadt was asked to resign from the NetBSD Project by the remaining members of 'core'. This was a very difficult decision to make, and resulted from Theo's long history of rudeness towards and abuse of users and developers of NetBSD.
Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.
Why are you guys so fork paranoid? Do you want everyone to vote for the same political party, too?
It's widely claimed that I'm "the one" who ejected Theo from the NetBSD community. That is false. At that time in NetBSD's history, Chris G. Demetriou was playing the role of alpha male, and I wasn't even given a choice. I was certain it was going to bite us in the ass. I think the question for historians is not whether it did bite us in the ass, but how many times and how hard.
I say things as they are. Slackers are called slackers, people who can't read manual pages are called losers, and in general, calling things what they are results in developers wasting less time.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid.
What's so exciting is to be able to just take something and polish it so much that hopefully in the future people will start borrowing things from it.