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Kernel Trap Interview with Theo de Raadt

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the the-man-speaks dept.

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."

4 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Financing? by AltGrendel · · Score: 3, Interesting
    ...I swear I will never get over how incredibly much money a University acting as a middle man between DARPA and us can bleed the flow of financing.

    Any idea who he's refering to?

    --
    The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination

    - Douglas Adams

  2. Re:Theo by MerlynEmrys67 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Here is the problem with Theo. He is smart and opinionated. Having these two things in common make him a very difficult person to get along with if you are either Smart, but hold a different opinion because you come from a different set of assumptions - but especially if you are NOT smart and opinionated.

    I have had discussions with Theo about trying to get my current employer (at the time) to open up documentation so OpenBSD could write drivers for our hardware. Lets just say I failed (Sorry Theo - I really tried, to the point that my annual raise was affected by it). However I found Theo to be very supportive and personally agreeable to me - I assume he realized I was trying to help and doing the best I could.

    I can imagine people that are fighting against things he is trying to do could see him in a negative light - but again... I see the same kinds of things said about all of the great ones.

    --
    I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
  3. We don't buy hardware that OpenBSD doesn't support by linuxbaby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Though we only use OpenBSD on a few of our servers (we have about 150 servers) - we NEVER buy hardware that OpenBSD doesn't support, because to us that's a good test of whether this hardware is going to last or not.

    If a hardware company is so proprietary or secretive or locked-down that OpenBSD can't (or chooses not to) support it, I don't believe that company will last in the long run.

  4. Re:NDAs are a big problem? by J.R.+Random · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The very fact that an NDA is used means that the manufacture knows that the writer of the driver needs facts that can not be determined by looking at the source of the driver itself. Typically this involves the use of various magic constants that must be loaded into device registers at appropriate times. The manufacturer knows what the magic constants mean. Hopefully the writer of the driver does too. But nobody else does, and the author of the device driver can't tell them. So if there's a bug (maybe because the magic constant wasn't quite the right one to use in certain circumstances) there's no way for another person to fix it. Likewise if there's a desire to expand the functionality of the driver there is again no way for a third party to know what the magic constants should be.