Kernel Trap Interview with Theo de Raadt

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an insightful interview with Theo de Raadt, creator of OpenBSD. The wide-ranging interview focuses first on the past few years of OpenBSD development, then moves on to the recently released OpenBSD 3.9. De Raadt talks about how binary blobs threaten free software, and how OpenBSD developers work to reverse engineer them. He also talks about the future of OpenBSD, his views on Linux, and why developing truly free software is so important to him."

Comments

Re:Financing?

[kevin_conaway]

About 15% of the funding, awarded in mid-2000, had remained unspent, de Raadt said. According to de Raadt, two days before the funding was cut off, Jonathan Smith, the computer science professor in charge of the project at the University of Pennsylvania, phoned de Raadt. Smith told de Raadt that several people at the university and DARPA were uncomfortable with de Raadt's antiwar comments, which appeared in The Globe and Mail of Toronto in early April.

Source

Re:FCC Rules

[TigerNut]

Filters limit the frequencies that a system can broadcast or receive, but they also have an insertion loss penalty. This reduces the efficiency of the system significantly - if a given filter has 1 dB insertion loss (which would be pretty good, implying that the filter probably costs a decent amount of money) then it would impart a 20 percent reduction in power output. Therefore it would cost you 20 percent more current, at least, to get the same RF range. That would (a) decrease the battery life and (b) increase the heat load in your system.

Wireless system designers use filters already to limit out-of-band emissions, but the problem is that no practical filter has a 'brick-wall' response where the passband ends exactly at the edge of the allowed spectrum. In a typical 2.4 GHz wireless network system you could probably go outside the band by 10 MHz before the filter rolloff became significant. With that freedom, an enterprising wireless LAN operator could set up his own little playing area away from everyone else's interference - but he'd be tromping on some unsuspecting folks.

Re:FCC Rules

[Kadin2048]

I'm not sure if you're being intentionally thick or what. FCC regulations cover more than just how a device can be used, they affect every stage of its design, and the market that's controlled by the FCC is a pretty big one. You over in Europe may think that what the FCC does isn't relevant to you, but I can guarantee you if you turn over a few peripherals you have on your desktop, that you'll see "Tested to Comply with FCC Standards: For Home or Office Use."

Because hardware and device manufacturers don't want to have to make multiple versions of their product if they can avoid it, chances are they're going to make it compliant to the largest number of regulatory bodies that they possibly can. Hence why my mouse is manufactured in China but approved according to regulations in the U.S., Canada, Germany, the E.U. (separate from Germany), and a bunch of Asian ones I can't read. And that's without even counting the non-governmental certifications (UL, CE, etc.).

An FCC regulation that changes something fundamental about how electronic devices have to be made is almost sure to affect people everywhere in the world, just like the E.U. RoHS rules are going to change the stuff I buy here in the U.S., even if we as a country didn't give a damn about how much hazardous substances were in our electronics. (We do, we're just taking our time about it.)

So while the FCC doesn't have any direct authority outside of the U.S., it affects how lots of things which end up on the world market are made, and you'd have to be pretty naive to just ignore that.