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Theo de Raadt gets 2004 FSF Award
Caligari writes "Richard Stallman, presents this year's award to Theo de Raadt.
"For recognition as founder and project leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects. Theo de Raadt's work has also led to significant contributions to GNU/Linux and other BSD distributions. Of particular note is Theo's work on OpenSSH. Theo's leadership of OpenBSD, his selfless commitment to Free Software and his advancement of network security, were cited by this year's award committee.""
That's pretty cool of Stallman really. Showing respect and recognition to the importance of BSD, despite their mutual differences in ideology about what constitutes truly free software.
From the beginning, Linus has held the posistion of "eh, whatever" with regards to software freedom. He'll take advantage of it, but he's been very clear on where exactly software freedom is in his list of priorties (which is: below convience).
In contrast Theo has re-written whole parts of his operating system (pf and OpenSSH) for the sake of being able to give away an entirely free-for-any-use operating system.
While Linus has made an invaluble contribution to Open Source, Theo has proven time and time again to be a strong and active advocate for Free Software (with a capital 'F').
"Your admirers in the street
Got to hoot and stamp their feet
in the heat from your physique" -King Crimson
Back then, there was no anonymous cvs access to the sources. You had to be a part of NetBSD inner circle to get access to the development sources.
All that was free was the released version. There was some amount of political control of information.
Reread the exchange between Theo and the other members of NetBSD-core. One persistent complaint from Theo is that he could no longer easily work on the sparc port, because he did not have access to not yet released code.
Let's put aside any re-definition of freedom by the FSF, OSI and whatever group of the month is running this show.
No, this is not free development. Theo was not free to see what was going on in NetBSD in a technical sense. He had lost control. And the people in netbsd-core used that power to try and get Theo to promise he would change his behavior.
Whatever you might think of Theo's attitude (yes, he can be a complete fucker sometimes), that's not freedom, by any sense of the world.
Now, look at the world today. All BSDs have open cvs trees. I think that would have happened, eventually, but I'm 100% certain Theo's decision to make sure OpenBSD CVS tree would be totally open to public scrutiny at all times has a HUGE role to play in that change.
Ok... I want to make a point here....
At one point I looked at the data and concluded that BSD was dying. I think that some people really think this and are not really trolling. The confusion comes in part due to a couple simple mistakes.
It is true that Netcraft has in the past indicated that *BSD is losing market share to Linux in at least the web server markets. However, these numbers are percentage based (regarding domains hosted) and probably don't represent an absolute decline. In fact, I suspect that the absolute number domain running on web servers running *BSD is probably currently growing but doing so slower than the market. This would fit with the observation that proprietary UNIX doesn;t seem to be in much of an absolute decline (with a few punctuations in the equalibrium) and that all such flavors are losing marketshare (percentage-wise) much faster than *BSD.
Secondly, because we are not seeing a mass exodus of the core developers from *BSD to Linux, I don't think one can ever say these are dying. Just as Microsoft can't kill Linux, Linux can't really kill *BSD. The only thing that can kill *BSD is, well, *BSD. More likely, we will see the licensing advantages that Linux offers disappear as proprietary UNIX and later Windows falls. At this point, Linux will still have some competative advantages, but we may see *BSD grow more rapidly once proprietary competition is eliminated.
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