Interview: Ask Theo de Raadt What You Will

Theo de Raadt was a founding member of NetBSD, and is the founder and leader of the OpenSSH and OpenBSD projects. He is currently working on OpenBSD 5.5 which would be the projects 35th release on CDROM. Even though he'd rather be hiking in the mountains or climbing rocks in his free time, Theo has agreed to answer any question you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.

Comments

Re:Why are you such an asshole?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's your opinion which is not widely shared by OpenBSD users. those of us who like to get things done w/o the opinionated whining and design by committee crap found in nearly every other open source project.

shut up and code.

Re:Where does OpenBSD outperform Linux?

[jones_supa]

All BSDs are more robust than Linux as they follow a much more conservative development process. Linux is in a constant bleeding edge R&D mode (which of course also means that you get cool new features quickly).

Re:NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

Or rather
What effect has the revelations from Snowden on the presence of active monitoring of communication in the US had on creating user demand for more secure systems?

Re:Why are you such an asshole?

[Wootery]

In this context, asshole does not mean morally objectionable.

Theo is generally thought to be an asshole in that he's tremendously disagreeable and difficult to work with, but that's not to say he's actually evil and worth boycotting.

fsck-beta might well believe, as I'm sure many of us do, that Theo is an asshole (see early history of OpenBSD) who has done some very good work.

Need replies to call them interviews!

[Useless]

There have been a whole lot of these question threads without any replies in the past few months (6 other threads in the past 3 months, all unanswered). Do these people actually know they are being interviewed, or are these just empty topics posted to bolster lagging page views/ad impressions?