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Theo de Raadt Discusses OpenBSD and Beyond
emil writes to tell us that NewsForge (Slashdot Sister Site) is running an interview with OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt. In the interview Theo explores the upcoming release of OpenBSD 3.9, continuing financial difficulties, and some of the tension between the OpenBSD team and other businesses that some feel are taking advantage of the free software without giving anything back. In related news the Jem Report has an interesting writeup that expounds on widespread difficulties that could be faced if the OpenBSD project continues its downward spiral because of their parallel development of OpenSSH.
I'm pretty sure he's heard of it. While they do appreciate source code contributions, what they're really asking now for is money.
...that some feel are taking advantage of the free software without giving anything back.
Damn. I wonder if there was anything they could have done about that?
No there wasn't, BSD as in Berkeley Software Distribution, as in University of California Berkeley, as in "Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.", as in paid for by California taxpayers including corporations and individuals who should not be denied access to what they paid for.
BTW, you shouldn't confuse BSD with a very talented but potentially mismanaged team that has a tendency to piss off lucrative sources of income.
from what i read was that he didnt like the binary drivers...fair enough that is his belief. some people did do a reverse engineer job and were asked to stop. it is germany on the other hand, not the US, they probably have a bit saner laws regarding that (depending on the method of course) maybe they did it out of respect and not fear. who knows. it could be a number of reasons. however, theo wasnt exactly an asshole on that concept, he is suprised they would stop (again we dont know why they stopped) he wished they didnt, he takes issue that they did stop. his opinion mismatched with someone elses. oh well it happens but its not like you said, he didnt slag linux. oh and he does do a lot of advocacy...wireless drivers for instance.... man I never thought I would defend theo
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Where to start?...
BSD is an operating system. It consists of a kernel (like linux), a userland (like GNU), and a bunch of applications which are largely source-compatible with Linux.
The BSDs share the fundamental gcc/gas/ld toolchain with GNU, but pretty much everything else (particularly the C library and make) they have their own version of. It is *possible* to run the BSD system on Linux (though not very easy), and actually very easy to run the entire GNU system on BSD. But they are different projects.
OpenBSD was the result of a squabble between Theo and the NetBSD team. This was a felicitous squabble for the rest of us, because OpenBSD is a great operating system.
All's true that is mistrusted
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
If you're a Linux user and you like your madwifi driver, you can thank the OBSD ath driver. Also if you ever want a RALink driver, OpenBSD is the only OS that has one right now and it seems almost certain any ports will be based off it. Anonymous CVS? Theo came up with it after NetBSD kicked him off the commit list. Randomized mmap, stack protection ... there's a lot of development being taken from openbsd. We've all got an interest here.
All's true that is mistrusted
Not really applicable.
9 0/threaded. This is just one fresh example (this week).
They started with a fork of the NetBSD codebase and maintained compatibility for a long while. Many drivers in the Net/OpenBSD tree used to be ifdef-ed for specific OS related parts. In fact one of the reason for OpenBSD to survive for so long especially on obscure architectures has been the fact that it used to rely heavily on Net for low level hardware specific code (disclaimer - I do not know if this is still the case as I have not looked at their source since 3.3).
As a result GPL-ing is not an option. Your codebase is heavily dependant on somebody's else's codebase which is BSD.
As far as the financial difficulties, all business and businesslike entities using GPL rely on support, custom code and consulting for their day to day living expenses. You do not get that money if you have this attitude:
http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/428749/30/
Another essential factor is that if you write software in the real world you have to go out of your ivory tower on a daily basis and check what your competitors doing. OpenBSD tends to believe its own PR about their security prowess and does not follow Linux, FreeBSD and other OS development as much as it should. One example for this is how it missed the appearance of hardware RNG in AMD hardware for several years. They simply did not know it is there (I actually pointed it to Theo myself a year ago). I bet that they have missed other stuff in a similar fashion as well.
Frankly, the days when Open Source OS projects were PFY jobs and flaming each other out of existence on mailing lists was business as usual are long gone.
Time to grow up or face the dark stairway down down and down towards oblivion.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
They don't like the GPL and are currently removing GPL only licensed code from the base install. The GPL is not an option for OpenBSD.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It's not that the Foo Corp is using OpenSSH w/o paying Theo or the OpenBSD/OpenSSH crowd. No one (including Theo) has a problem with that.
It's that some companies *cough*Sun*cough* make all kinds of noises about being "open" and "supporting open source" and market the crap out of it purely because it's the latest buzzword, when in reality they just don't give a shit.
That's what gets to Theo... and others.
It's pronounced "theo de wrought", he's dutch.
A while back -- pre-SCO -- OpenBSD did a "license audit". I don't have the list in front of me but a sizable number of reasonably well-known open source projects had questionable licences. Theo really did ask nicely and got most of them changed.
TCP Wrappers IIRC was one of them, pppd another (again IIRC).
Like Theo or hate him, he's done more for the Open Source community than just piss people off.
I say onto Theo: Tough Cookies! You made your bed, you sleep in it!
BSD vs GPL is not relevant. Theo's bed was made by driving away potential sources of income like DARPA.
Sun bought and open sourced both StarOffice and Netbeans, they've open sourced Solaris and the UltraSPARC processor core.
I'm sure there are plenty other projects, but Sun have donated what must amount to many millions of dollars of code to the community.
Sure they use other open source projects (in line with their licenses) and while they presumably aren't throwing money at Theo it seems unfair to brand them as anti-opensource when they've done a lot of good.
In any case: development and maintenance costs don't magically stop when there is no tax-funding of the project. If people want it to survive, they do need to continue sponsoring it.
Furthermore, what makes Theo think that people want to run OpenSSH? At this point, it's as entrenched as Windows--nobody has a choice.
Actually, it isn't. You can also use LSH or Dropbear, and for SSH clients there are even more alternatives (PuTTY is available for Linux, for example).
This article almost makes me consider using one of them...
> Also if you ever want a RALink driver, OpenBSD is the only OS that has one right now and it seems almost certain any ports will be based off it.
I thought RALink supported Linux themselves, otherwise, what's this?
However, I do notice that when I actually test on my Mac OS X machine here:And it seems that besides there being more of them, the freebsd matches are more "real"-- if i look at the actual matches the FreeBSD ones consist to a great extent of matches in actual basic binaries and libraries, whereas the OpenBSD matches that aren't actually matching OpenSSH binaries seem to mostly be compatibility code in crossplatform UNIX apps-- "#ifdef openbsd" blocks in X11 headers for example (right before the #ifdef amiga ones), which clearly are not an indicator of OpenBSD crosspollination in OS X.
And then trying again, in the source for Apple's libc:
And even here again most of the occurances of OpenBSD maybe shouldn't count to the total, since they are, well, in some big directories named "FreeBSD/". It looks like a lot of those 63 matches were patches that were ported upstream to FreeBSD, then sucked into Darwin from there.
So these were just the first two things I thought to check, and in both cases FreeBSD strings show up more often than OpenBSD by a very significant majority. I can totally believe that Apple is making much more direct use of OpenBSD code than I was aware of, but if you do not mind me asking, exactly *where* in OS X am I supposed to be finding this effect you claim of "grep... you will find more occurrences of OpenBSD than NetBSD and FreeBSD"? Because so far I'm not seeing it at all.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Theo mentions in the interview how it would not be advantageous to become a non-profit organization. I'm not sure where he and his developers operate, so I can't speak to the specific laws of his country.
But, incorporating (for-profit or otherwise) is not difficult and needn't be expensive, either. Were he to do so, he could adopt articles of incorporation and bylaws which would clearly state the divisions of the company. He could create an "OpenBSD" division and, similarly, an "OpenSSH" division.
Maintaining some documentation that would be open to review by interested parties would likely go a long way toward placating companies who would like to contribute financially, but are loath to do so because they have no assurance their funds won't be going directly to OpenBSD development. There should be a way for interested parties to earmark their funds for one or both projects, and have some assurance that their funds will be used properly.
Theo refuses time and again to accomodate such requests, and therefore he is forever grousing about how so many companies refuse to provide financial support in exchange for OpenSSH, which supposedly significantly enhances these companies' bottom line.
I really believe that if he were to take a bit of time off from coding to contact a CPA or attorney (heck, he could probably get it pro bono if he turned off the vitriol for a little while), formulated a sound business plan and filed articles of incorporation, and then presented his case to these companies he is so fond of complaining about, he just might see some funds come his way.
I think, though, that he would rather complain than actually get something done about it.
I don't think so, NetBSD just doesn't agree with the FSF's definition of free software - FreeBSD on the other hand seeks out binary blobs and NDA covered source code for the ease that comes with it, while quite violently protesting OpenBSD's attempts to get documentation to make open source code. DragonFly is more pragmatic, it will use the binaries and such if no other option is available, but will assist in attempts to get open documentation for things after they are done with their fundamental base restructuring, or that's what Matt Dillion said once.
OpenBSD is the only one of the four that refuses to make use of the ndis, or "project evil", binary network driver support layer.