OpenBSD Journal

Interview with Theo on TuxJournal

Contributed by mk/reverse on from the penguin-attention dept.

Thanks to Han Boetes and others for writing us about this:

More interest from the Linux-crowd for OpenBSD. Unlike the deep technical stuff from kerneltrap, this interview is more aimed at beginners. Seems like a pretty decent interview where Theo explains the basic concepts and ideas behind OpenBSD. Have a look at it over here.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (216.86.64.11) on

    Post the First!

  2. By Anonymous Coward (217.157.132.75) on

    A very bacis interview with no real substance. The interviewer seems unprepared and fail to make Theo say anything interesting.

    Nice try though.

    Comments
    1. By SH (82.182.103.172) on

      It's an interview made by an interviewer unfamiliar with OpenBSD with an intended audience unfamiliar with OpenBSD. It's not intended for those attending an OpenBSD Hackaton.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on

        But pretty much every question could have been answered by reading the webpage. There's no point in doing an interview where all the questions are basic fluff, and you give simple one line answers and point the interviewer to your webpage.

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (134.58.253.131) on

          That just shows that the interviewer wasn't properly prepared... Research first, interview later!

          Comments
          1. By Anonymous Coward (84.195.169.243) on

            If all interviews/articles about OpenBSD should consist of stuff not known to the outside or things that can't be found on their webpage, we would only get deep technical or conceptual articles not fit for a large part of possible users.

            As posted by someone else before, this article is not meant for gurus or the like, but more a basic introduction to OpenBSD.

            Sure, all the information can be found on the webpage, but the same counts for just about all articles that aren't technical. If basic articles/interviews are such a bad thing, why wasn't the media coverage with the TV spots a couple of days ago assessed the same way?

            Media coverage is media coverage, whatever the technical content is.

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward (69.197.92.181) on

              You are missing the point. Do you see Linus being interview explaining the basics of what linux is? Or Bill Gates explaining the basics of windows? You don't need an interview to introduce openbsd to new people, you can just write an article explaining the basics of what openbsd is. You don't have to waste the time of the guy in charge of the project for a basic intro. It would have been better to write an article about openbsd for new people, and do a real interview with Theo for those of us who can read webpages.

            2. By tedu (64.170.194.22) on

              the people who watch the evening news and the people who supposedly read tuxjournal are not the same target audience. if linux users haven't heard of openbsd, the article could have consisted of "openbsd is cool. read the faq here. [link]." they probably would have received more informative content that way.

        2. By Anonymous Coward (68.63.157.203) on

          Considering the intended audience (Linux users not familiar with OpenBSD) it was necessary to present a simple introductory interview, even if most of the questions could have been answered on the OpenBSD home page.

          The people reading the article might visit the OpenBSD home page after they read the article. However before they read the article, they might not have even known that OpenBSD existed.

          As they say in PR circles, any publicity is good.

    2. By Han (82.73.147.65) han@mijncomputer.nl on

      Yeah. Take a look overhere. We're not the only ones to notice. Actually I noticed straight away, but I choose to formulate it in a political correct way.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (64.9.205.95) on

      I am surprised the interviewing_bot did not ask for favourite colour, psychological alignment and blood group.

  3. By Anonymous Coward (81.172.173.155) on

    I wonder the reason why he has never ever even tried GNU/Linux. Seems a bit strange to me..

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (142.166.106.18) on

      For me at least, it takes many hours before I can fairly access if I like the way 'ix OS handles things relative to other 'ix operating systems. With the joy of discovery some years in the past, even I am far past the point where I consider things 'fun'. I can certainly understand why he wouldn't bother to try it -- he probably wants to spend his off-time pursing other interests, just as he said.

    2. By thomasw.xhrl (24.80.39.250) on

      hmm, doesn't seem that odd to me that Theo would never have used it, for by the time slackware came out -- in 1993 iirc? -- Theo would've been already heavily immersed in the bsd realm. and from 1995 onwards, when you develop obsd, it would seem strange if it wasn't the os you utilize for your work and enjoyment. can't think of anything he'd need from linux which he couldn't get from his own project, except perhaps to dual boot it for documentation writing or to use it as a bootloader eg on his zaurus. but that really isn't using linux as his os per se. good cheer, thomasw.

      Comments
      1. By Marc Espie (62.212.102.210) espie@openbsd.org on

        I recall having a linux install around up until... a few months after I installed OpenBSD on my then laptop.

        Once I figured out how to configure the sound, and once I had a port of quake, I found out I never ever rebooted under linux...

        It's been that way ever since: I never installed linux again on any of the machines I've owned...

        I've been coincidentally using linux accounts here and there when I didn't have my boxes around, and I'm managing people who do run linux, mostly because I believe people should run what they want, not what they're forced to.

        But I no longer need linux... haven't needed it for over five years.

        Comments
        1. By thomasw.xhrl (24.80.39.250) on

          quake, indeed, such a manly game! i assume you mean the first and finest of that series, marc? such a great game:) i'd sure like to get an updated version of quakeworld like fuhquake running....my buddy salan has done some work on it i think. time to learn some c. yes, it is interesting what you write about audio; once you start listening to music with icecast, cdio or some other console player like mp3blaster, it all starts to come together:)

    3. By Anonymous Coward (208.38.59.80) on

      Probably cause Theo doesn't need to.

    4. By Nate (65.94.103.119) on

      When you make an operating system to be everything you want, there's no need to look elsewhere.

    5. By Han (82.73.147.65) han@mijncomputer.nl on

      That called `a political answer.' :-)

    6. By Chris (24.76.170.207) on

      I imagine in the journey from SunOS to 4.4BSD to coding on NetBSD and OpenBSD there was never a reason to try out Linux. If I was writing major portions of an OS I can't imagine I'd want to try out using another one [that didn't do much in the way that I like to do things] just for kicks. *Most* people out in the world don't find it fun to screw around with installing different operating systems.

    7. By Miod Vallat (80.65.224.82) miod@ on

      Call me a loony, but I have here more than 60 machines where Linux will not run at all, yet a form of *BSD will.

      Guess I am not very interested of trying Linux (especially with the new ``it's not up to us to do quality assurance work on the kernel, but to the distro vendors'' 2.6 model) on the other 60.

    8. By Anonymous Coward (193.136.60.39) on

      maybe we never booted lunix, but, of course, we already read some of lunix source code, I bet!

      any openbsd developer can say that never read lunix source code, at least. So imo they can say something about lunix quality. However, we already now the answer, so they don't need to tell anything :D

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (193.136.60.39) on

        s/can say/cannot say

      2. By Michael (163.252.218.94) on

        writing 'lunix' is pretty annoying.

        It is more than believable that an OpenBSD developer would have never seen the Linux source code. For one, they wouldn't be able to use any of the code that they've seen due to licensing issues. For another, the OpenBSD team seems to be doing just fine on their own.
        --Michael

        Comments
        1. By Anonymous Coward (212.113.164.100) on

          ahah, annoying? why?
          if you say that they never read lunix ou slowlaris or any other OS code you don't now what are you talking about, sorry.

          Comments
          1. By Michael (163.252.218.94) on

            I didn't say they didn't read it, I said it was believable (very possible) that they wouldn't have already read through it. It's not a situation where I'd say "Of course they read it", like it's ridiculous to think otherwise.

            Why is writing 'lunix' annoying? I don't know, maybe it's only annoying to me. Seems a bit juvenile.

            --Michael

            Comments
            1. By Anonymous Coward (212.113.164.100) on

              "Why is writing 'lunix' annoying? I don't know, maybe it's only annoying to me. Seems a bit juvenile."

              yah, right. That makes me feel young :)
              really, to me sounds a bit geek, dood, enjoy your life

        2. By Han (82.73.147.65) han@mijncomputer.nl on

          The GPL explicitly encourages learning by reading, even if you don't want to use the code. For example when I was with FOSDEM last year I spoke with Henning who told me he had spend a lot time reading Linux SMP code to learn how it was done. So the OpenBSD SMP code is directly inspired by the Linux SMP code.

          Comments
          1. By tedu (64.173.147.27) on

            "So the OpenBSD SMP code is directly inspired by the Linux SMP code." that statement is so far removed reality it defies explanation.

          2. By henning (216.187.75.132) on

            i never said that i read linux smp code, nor is it true.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (203.33.165.97) on

    It goes to show that Theo was born with the social skills of a common house brick. Maybe that's why he is such a good coder.

  5. By Anonymous (66.44.2.125) on

    For the last 5 years I've used OpenBSD as a router and Debian as a desktop. I like OpenBSD so much but hardware support was never its strength. That is, until recently.

    That's why I just switched to OBSD on my laptop when 3.7 was released. Quite satisfied now. :-) So much more refreshing to have a more reliable system.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (131.202.168.108) on

      I used Debian for a couple of years before I moved to OpenBSD. I can't say that reliability was ever a problem. My biggest beef was the quality of documentation (an issue where all Linux distributions I've tried need to improve), the notoriously dated ports, and (at the time) the crappy firewall. Overall though, I liked Debian.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (68.160.223.180) on

        Not that the Linux ip filter has improved much, since iptables still needs a script to run multiple rules, instead of one nice big pf.cf

        Comments
        1. By mulc (208.244.119.55) cmulcahy@avesi.com on

          Not true. iptables-save 'dumps current ruleset into human readable/editable format' iptables-restore 'loads ruleset from file' A complex rule-set that would invoke 'iptables' several thousand times within a shell script could take minutes on firewall-grade ( slow ) hardware. iptables-restore can load such a rule-set instantaneously.

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