OpenBSD Journal

Kudos to OpenBSD from Alan Cox on writing better software

Contributed by grey on from the positive mentions dept.

Alan Cox is interviewed by Basheera Khan and mentions OpenBSD in a favourable light. Here is a quote:

"The OpenBSD Project started doing it with security in particular, and found it very effective. Every time somebody found a mistake, they'd take the entire software base for these systems [...] for every other occurrence of the same problem"

Additionally, you'll note that some of his other suggestions for improving software have been in practice with OpenBSD development for some time.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (68.202.41.228) on

    Cox also mentions the Theo quote found on Art's page: "Only failure makes us experts"
    That was pretty cool too.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (67.71.79.251) on

      Where'd you see the video, or did I miss it? Pls let me know... Also, I didn't see mention of that quote, was it re-worded?

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (67.71.79.251) on

        Doh! Found it... Duh.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (67.71.79.251) on

      Speaking of video, do you know of any with Theo? I'd like to see some presentation video/audio, etc. from Theo.

      Comments
      1. By mkb (213.158.11.100) on

        theo was asked to make some videos under caption ``theo going wild''...
        that was on misc@ when mr. reed said something about making free
        software tottaly unfree. (that was phoenix/firebird/etc... that time).

        but i suppose theo wouldn't release these videos ;-) it's his private
        bussiness.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (68.184.216.31) on

    I thought it odd that in the article Cox mentioned the advantages of modern languages with respect to garbage collection, etc. and he mentioned C and C++ but he didn't say what his current crop of favorite languages are. That would have interested me. The article spoke in generalities. Techies love specifics. Anyone know what the answer is?

    Comments
    1. By Chris Humphries (66.197.191.126) chris@unixfu.net on http://unixfu.net/

      I don't think it matters much. Yet, Ada has had all the stuff he is talking about for a long long time, before the internet boom. Ada is still very much alive, and just because it is not popular, it seems to be thought of as a dead language. It is not true at all. GNAT is probably the best Ada compiler, and is free, as is the debugger and an IDE for those that want to go that route. (GNAT is under a modified GPL license, which means that basically the GNAT source is GPL, yet resulting binaries compiled with GNAT do not have to be GPL so can be closed source, etc). Ada is meant to be portable and all Ada compilers have to pass a test to be labeled as an Ada compiler. This was done long ago, as other languages are still making steps for things Ada has done already and is still moving forward. I would suggest looking into Ada. Do not get put off by the syntax. Ada is more than a language, it is a complete solution for software engineering.

Credits

Copyright © - Daniel Hartmeier. All rights reserved. Articles and comments are copyright their respective authors, submission implies license to publish on this web site. Contents of the archive prior to as well as images and HTML templates were copied from the fabulous original deadly.org with Jose's and Jim's kind permission. This journal runs as CGI with httpd(8) on OpenBSD, the source code is BSD licensed. undeadly \Un*dead"ly\, a. Not subject to death; immortal. [Obs.]