, South Africa
, is a software engineer
who lives in Calgary
, Alberta
, Canada
. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD
and OpenSSH
projects, and was a founding member of the NetBSD
project.
Theo de Raadt is the eldest of four children to a Dutch
father, and a South Africa
n mother, with two sisters and a brother. Concern over the mandatory two-year armed forces conscription
in South Africa led the family to emigrate to Calgary, Alberta, Canada in November 1977.
Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue.
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.
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'.
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.
It's terrible, everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix it.
Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix.
I think it is astounding that people could argue for "you just must trust someone else to fix it" instead of "you could fix it yourself, or hire someone to fix it." There is a contractor base out there that can solve these problems as well as or better than the major vendors could. But I think the major vendors are still having more luck at getting the ear of the press.
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.
...Richard Stallman|you are being the usual slimy hypocritical asshole... You may have had value ten years ago, but people will see that you don't anymore.