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Linux For Losers According To De Raadt
elohim writes "Theo has some scathing comments about Linux in his new interview with Forbes Magazine. From the article: '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."'"
Anyway, interesting in regard to yesterday's debate on "Whimsical Comments In Code: Vital Human Right Or Proof Of Idiocy?" is:
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Doing this on the older Sun hardware they claim to support is incredibly painful. Until Theo changes this one way or the other (preferably towards providing security patches in the same form as releases) I have to consider them a developer-only product, not a use-in-the-real-world one.
Oh yeah, and there's the wipe-and-reinstall mentality for each release too.
Ah, bitter dregs.
The title I submitted this with was "de Raadt Blasts Lunix in Forbes Interview"... Blame Zonk for the "Lunix For Losers" title.
"It's terrible," De Raadt says. "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.'"
The bottom line is that it works better than commercial software. Anyone can look at the source code and see the comments, which are blunt about what needs fixing and how crappy the hardware is. Even commercial Linux rocks next to popular alternatives. For ease of installation, use, relative protection from mal and spyware, you can't beat a distribution like Mepis. Winners can step up to pure Debian, "losers" can fall all the way down to Caldera Open Linux and still do better than what 90% of the world uses.
There's also a difference in motivation. "Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix," De Raadt says. The irony, however, is that while noisy Linux fanatics make a great deal out of their hatred for Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), De Raadt says their beloved program is starting to look a lot like what Microsoft puts out. "They have the same rapid development cycle, which leads to crap," he says.
That's what Micrososoft would have everyone believe, and so Microsoft is worth hating. People use Linux for freedom and the superior performance it brings. Study after study show this. Why people like Dan Lyons don't get it is beyond me, except that he might be a Fanboy.
Let's look back at other nasty junk he's written:
Dan Lyons, you are a shill. I dare you to make the entire tapes of your interview with Theo available. Anything less is second hand BS and the kind of thing the web makes obsolete.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Yes, Forbes and Dan Lyons should be taken with a grain of salt when it comes to Linux. Dan Lyons is the columnist who finds fault in every piece of technology he reviews regardless of manufacturer. He never has anything positive to say, and it doesn't take much talent to be a cynic. In a more general sense, Forbes takes the editorial stance that OSS is equivalent to communism. Forbes fails to realize that OSS wasn't started as a capitalistic endeavor, and therefore sees it as a threat to technology and business models.
Easy: Linux supports most of your hardware (as indicated by the working programs to use it), the BSDs do not.
Linux is not Windows
I think that points up one of the basic philosophical differences between the GPL crowd and the BSD crowd;
To me, the BSD position is more in line with natural selection; if you write better stuff, you win.
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I want all of the power and none of the responsibility.
"Like it or not the GPL requires that if a company uses and adds to Linux they have to give back."
Horse hockey!
I use and add to GPLed software that I don't "give back" to all the time. I also use and add to GPLed (and non-GPLed) software that I do give back to.
The only requirement is that if you SHIP modified GPLed software, you have to provide the modified source to those whoe recieve it. The amusing part is that you don't even have to provide that source to the original authors, only to those you ship to. So, if you write software that you only ship to, say, Fortune 500 companies, then you're well within your right to tell the people who originally wrote the code that they have to go talk to the people at those companies if they want to try to get access to your modifications.
The GPL only grants rights (with stipulations) on a volutary basis. It does not remove any of the rights that you already had under copyright law, and it cannot be forced on you if you don't wish to agree to it.
"I don't know. I've never used Linux"
First to support your hardware, eh? Well, you must have some spankin' new HW. UNIX (!= Linux) has been available for the i386 for a hell of a long time. Think NET2. Think BSDI. If it wasn't for the efforts of folks you are dissing with your "End of Discussion" claptrap, UNIX would still be encumbered, and your HW would be a boat anchor or a Winblows box.
Hehe. This guy is obviously a great coder. Too bad he's such a total dickhead.
This article really highlights Theo's personality problems, and may shed some light on why NetBSD summarily kicked him out on the street. Here's the first email he got from the core developers after he complained that they shut down his CVS access:
Over the past year and a half, we have received a considerable number of complaints about the fact that you seem to harass and abuse both users and developers of NetBSD. At various times, some of us have suggested (with varying levels of severity) that you cease this behaviour, but this has been ineffective. Indeed, you have given us scant reason to believe that your behaviour is ever going to change for the better.
Your abusive actions have seriously impaired the success of the NetBSD project in several ways. Your actions have driven away developers or potential developers, and have alienated many users. They have also squandered much of the good will that various people have directed at the project.
Finally, it is clear that for the project to be a success, we must promote a positive environment for both users and developers. If we continue to allow you, an official representative of the NetBSD project, to behave in this manner, we create the perception that we approve of your behaviour. That perception is damaging to the project and cannot be allowed to persist.
Because of these things, we believe that it would be in the best interest of the NetBSD project if you were to resign all official association with the project. We request that you resign from the NetBSD core team, resign as the maintainer of the NetBSD SPARC port, and post a message to the "netbsd-users", "current-users", and "port-sparc" mailing lists announcing your resignation. If you choose not to post such an announcement within one day (by 9:00AM, 12/21/94), we will be forced to inform the public about your removal from the organization ourselves.
We regret having to do this, because you have done a significant amount of very good work for the project. In spite of that, we can no longer condone your behaviour. We wish for this parting to be as painless as possible; we have disabled your accounts on the NetBSD development machines and have removed you from the "core" and "port-masters" mailing lists, but have left your subscriptions to other NetBSD mailing lists untouched. We have no objection to your further participation in NetBSD, as long as you participate in a mature manner and make clear the fact that you no longer officially represent the NetBSD Project.
Of course, now no one can kick him out of OpenBSD, so I guess he's found the one role that'll work for him. Luckily, it's irrelevant during the 364 days this year when some idiot at Forbes didn't decide to upchuck a completely assinine, one-sided bullshit flame from a proven asshole, and then call it a news story.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
grammAr
And someday, maybe openBSD won't be so slow.
which was quoted on another discussion of this article elsewhere on the Net:
"On December 20 [1994], 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. We believe that there is no place for that type of behaviour from representatives of the NetBSD Project, and that, overall, it has been damaging to the project.
This decision was difficult to make because Theo has a long history of positive contributions to the project. He was the principal caretaker of NetBSD's SPARC support, and has written too much code to mention.
We are certainly willing to accept (and would very much like to see) future contributions from Theo, but we believe that it is inappropriate for him to be an "official" representative of the project any longer."
I'd say that pretty well takes care of that. Theo is apparently an asshole. That he prostitutes himself to Daniel Lyons, a know anti-OSS/Linux FUD merchant, seems to make it clear that this rant is to be ignored by anybody with a brain, whether you like the BSDs or not.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
But, only one of the alternatives in section three says "any third party"--option B. Option C allows you to distribute the binary you recieved under that option and propagate it--and only noncommercially and only if you received it in binary form (and therefore couldn't modify the source).
If you use option A and provide the source code with your binaries, you are not exposed to the "any third party" clause.
But anyone you give the source and binary to can then give the source and binary to anyone else, for any fee they can get someone to pay. (The only restriction on fees is for obtaining a copy of the source once you have obtained a binary-only copy.)
Don't give Linus short shrift. In spite of his occasional barbs, he is by all accounts an excellent leader and motivator of people. Part of the reason that megacorps can get involved with Linux is that they know they and their devs can interact sanely with Linus.
And the BSD control-everything mentality, while good for building secure routers, doesn't do much to encourage the hobbyists and hackers that are the backbone of the OSS movement. Linus and Stallman both deserve a lot of credit for understanding that you need to build a team (massive, distributed, uncoordinated, internet-based) to build a platform, and laid the groundwork to do that. That's more than just a tolerable personality, it's an understanding of people.
Finally, how about some jeers for Daniel Lyons, who will do just about anything he can to rain on the Linux parade, including publishing a rant by a left-out OSS leader widely reputed to be something of a crank.
Here is the link to Theo's archive on the matter:
Theo's side of the story
and a shorter commentary:
seems reasonable to me
The truth suffers more from convictions than from lies.
I think OpenBSD is pretty neat, but honestly, it's pretty crappy too. Unless you feel like doing a lot of research and compiling on your own, OpenBSD is almost worthless as anything more than the OS for low-end servers running open-source daemon software. If you're really not doing much it can also serve as a decent administrative terminal for other *nix boxes, but OS X or even Windows running Putty is a better choice.
I'm not defending Linux here, I just think it's nonsense for Theo to pretend that just because his extremely limited OS can run free software on shit hardware most people would throw away and be virtually ownage-proof in a default configuration does NOT make it a good operating system for the vast majority of computer users.
I had exactly the same ephimamy as the parent's parent. I was given a choice in 1995 on what to run on a spare machine. I went to the Uni's computer lab with a box full of floppys and started downloading BSD, went home and started installing.
Well part of the installation worked. Once I got past some of the quirky installation issues BSD (I don't recall why but partitioning hard drives seemed to be a bitch), some hardware simply didn't work the most glaring was the video card and network card. VESA was supported but it was clearly lacking in performance and without a network card what is the point? I poked around on Yahoo on another machine (what is Google?) for more information and even tried a BSD irc channel. I was basically told in so many words "if you aren't a hardcore coder, you don't deserve our help". That is just "great" since my interest was getting the machine working not coding and their elitist attitude finally caused me to give up.
So back to the lab to download another piece of software called Linux (Slackware I believe!). The rest is history because it just worked. When it came to configuration questions, for instance X had to be configured by hand, I found people willing to give me hints. I worked through it and ended up with a functional machine video, NIC, and all.
To this day I point to this initial impression of BSD as the reason why I shy away from BSD as my first choice in machine deployment. The attitude of the BSD community has probably changed a lot in 10 years but I still can't shake the feeling I'm going to be slapped with elitism again if I run into a problem with a BSD installation.
As somebody who has worked at a place that had a windows source license I can say that the TCP stack did not come from FreeBSD. The TCP stack in Windows (at least NT/2K/XP) was written by a well known hardware company for Microsoft.
The code is pretty good quality but it doesn't function internally like any of the BSD TCP implementations. Some of the userland stuff may have been taken from BSD; but the actual kernel networking stuff is not from FreeBSD.
Where do slashdotters come up with this stuff....