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Dr. Dobbs and Theo de Raadt

Posted by AilleCat on from the security-for-the-future dept.

Dr. Dobb's Journal has an interview with Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project, discussing the future of OpenBSD, where they are now, driver development, the teams that work on OpenBSD, and how OpenBSD is supported. An interesting read describing the fearless leader of the "Secure By Default" BSD.

3 of 7 comments (clear)

  1. Size of development groups by bugg · · Score: 2
    TdR: I think there's a constant overestimation of how big the Linux development community actually is. I don't think they have thousands of developers working on the hard problems, just on the simple problems and the GUI things. But in the actual operating system, I would be surprised if they have more than 200 people, the kernel, the libraries, the basic utilities. On the other hand, we have about 40 persons who work on just those parts all the time.

    It's interesting to see how there's a lot of speculation aroud Linux, with not a lot of basis in fact. For instance, could anyone tell me how many people actively contribute to the parts that Mr. DeRaadt mentioned? His guess is as good as any.

    More interesting are the fairly outlandish estimations. Look at the Linux Counter 162,506 users registered, and a guess of sixteen million Linux users total. Where are they all hiding? Only 1% have registered? What makes you say that?

    It's the same in a lot of the open source world; speculation gets you nowhere. Let's look at what we can quantitvely measure, such as downloads and registered users, and end the guessing games.

    Numbers of developers are meaningless: all that matters is the total quality of the development process.

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    -bugg
  2. Nice article by pope+nihil · · Score: 2

    Maybe this will dispel a few of the myths about Theo and the OpenBSD project. It's nice to see a pleasant view of OpenBSD and even BSD in general in the media. Doesn't seem to happen often enough.

  3. A group of BSD machines on the counter. by mr · · Score: 2

    Yes, there is alot of 'speculation' about the OpenSource market. And some facts would be nice. The closest thing to a 'fact' might be the Gardner group or similar such tracking firm's numbers.

    Alas, the 'counter project' doesn't track the version of linux used. www.redhatisnotlinux.org did track the version. And, a grep -i bsd| wc -l shows 135 BSD users....with slackware having higher numbers of users VS RedHat. How many people here think there are more slackware users than redhat?

    Somewhere out in cyberspace is a page that tracks the total number of linux distros, and a troll who claims netcraft has OS numbers for 'paying customers'. And, I'm usre someone has a %age breakdown for each linux distro. Yet, no URL's to ANY of this information.

    I guesstimate that between 0.2% and 5% of all Linux users have registered with the Linux Counter. So the total number of Linux users is probablybetween 3,250,160 and 81,254,000 people.

    Yea, 81 MILLION users. Right.

    How about 'linux is #2 os' statement of the other day. What, the DOCUMENTED sales numbers of Apple are meaningless? Where did these numbers come from? If you believe the linux counter people, its no WONDER they are #2, with 81 million users.

    So, other than Linux counter...does anyone have any meaningful numbers or URL's to meaningful numbers?

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