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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.
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
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/
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.
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.
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?