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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."'"
I'd be angry too. About how the Forbes article portrayed me as a raving lunatic out for blood, after giving what was probably a thoughtful interview.
All the article consisted of was trotting Theo out for choice quotes about how Linux sucks, and a tiny bit of BSD history. Only 2 out of the 16 paragraphs even started to cover *why* Theo thinks the way he does. The rest is tabloid-style trash-talk and what seems to be an ADD-inspired history lesson. There's nothing approaching a coherent argument.
I'm giving Theo the benefit of the doubt on this one- he probably gave a fleshed-out argument then Forbes eviscerated it. Even if that's not the case, they should have written a better article. This is awfully shitty journalism.
Dan's Resume
Is this the seafaring, raping, murdering pirate ?
Or the copyright infringement pirate ?
Or the license infringement pirate ?
You do realize that none of the above apply, right ?
If you contribute to a BSD under a BSD-style license then yes... others can use your code in their closed-source products.
Don't like it ? Don't release under that license.
As for the GPL.. crikey - which one ? which version ? There's too many of them out there already. You mean GPL 2.0, I take it - which doesn't stop a company from "pirating" your code by using it only internally on a webservice and just spitting out the results of the code. That's one of those things GPL 3.0 is supposed to address, I guess ? whatever
Without the GPL I would be about the same place it is now. Like it or not the GPL requires that if a company uses and adds to Linux they have to give back. The BSDs would all be used and abused but wouldn't get the company support that Linux has. Look at how Microsoft ripped the TCP stack from BSD. Did BSD get any benifit from that? Other than bragging "Windows uses our network stack!!" Well not really something to brag about.
It may not make you or anyone happy but it does force the improvement of Linux as a whole.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Yeah. That and there is some very well reasoned arguments over on undeadly that Theo was taken out of context. Which given everything else I've ever read from him on the subject makes perfect sense.
Also the person here seems to have left out this link.
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2005/0704/071.html
Having said that I've been using Debian since 1997 and I'm in the process of switching over to OpenBSD. To a large degree this is because the "secure by default" mindset fits with where I want to be and want I want to do more than any Linux distro can or to be honest should. But to a large degree the attitude on behalf of Linux users is a *big* part of the reason I'm leaving.
It will be interesting to see what Theo has to say about the accuracy of this article. I'd suggest you watch undeadly to see what happens.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
If Linux just "happens to run", how come it knocks out OpenBSD when it comes to performance? I very much doubt that Linux would win tests like these if "many parts" of its code were low quality and badly designed.
Granted, the test linked to above is soon two years old, and De Raadt refers to style of coding or general code quality rather than raw performance -- which other prominent people also have commented (in a perhaps more balanced way), but the fact that Linux runs is not merely a coincidence, as De Raadt seems to insinuate.