OpenBSD Journal

Interview: Theo de Raadt on Industry and Free Software

Contributed by grey on from the wow lots of submissions dept.

Thanks to Avtar Gill and several others for writing in to let us know about the following interview:

Matt Hildebrand informed the misc@openbsd.org mailing list that he conducted an interview with Theo. Matt asked him questions regarding free and commercial software, software patents and how security plays a part in OpenBSD development.

The complete interview may be found here:
http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/5-7-5/30084.html

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Venture37 (217.22.88.123) venture37 # hotmail com on www.geeklan.co.uk

    "OpenBSD is my job and OpenBSD is my hobby, and I’m very serious about it." Rock on! :)

    Comments

    1. By thomasw.xhrl (24.80.39.250) on

      this is my favourite interview of theo; perhaps because of the detailed, well-thought out responses. theo's honest statement of his motivation for developing OpenBSD was the highlight for me.

  2. By rene (203.45.43.241) on

    Finally! A detailed interview with thoughtful questions and some interesting OpenBSD history. That stuff about the code auditing is really cool, I can't imagine that other os' have gone to the same lengths!

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Bastard (12.33.194.187) on

      yes, finally, an interviewER who does his homework before the interview.

  3. By cell_x (68.12.154.246) on

    good one too

    http://www.forbes.com/home_europe/free_forbes/2005/0704/071.html

    Comments

    1. By Nate (65.94.102.218) on

      Already been reported.

  4. By dgs (213.114.204.25) dick_svensson@hotmail.com on

    Good answers as always... but I think they should start to variate the questions a bit more.

  5. By Nathen Hinson (67.79.3.162) nathen.hinson@thebriangroup.com on

    I think all of this recent press coverage, Forbes, Epoch Times, KernelTrap, Canadian Television, high-profile users, is tremendous. Mr. DeRaadt in the Epoch Times article stated that one of the reasons that vendors get the lion's share of the attention is because they demand it. Linux as a whole got enormous amounts of press, admittedly by attacking the software company everyone loves to hate, but the perception that Linux was of higher quality persisted beyond the rhetoric. I must admit that there is something very attractive about the "best kept secret" aspect of OpenBSD, but it does not serve users of software very well.

    Computing in general is a very complicated business, and that goes doubly for software. Individuals not involved heavily in computing tend to make up their minds about things from what they hear from friends, neighbors and news outlets. Especially with something as mysterious as computing, unless something is so completely useless that an individual is forced to learn more about so as it either fix it or dump it, they will tend to stay with what they have heard/know is a good solution to a problem.

    The more attention given to OpenBSD, the more its messages of quality, security and consistency will penetrate into broader segments of the population, and everyone's computing experience will be the better for it.

    So, here, here for press coverage of OpenBSD.

  6. By baldusi (201.235.1.135) on

    I mean, with 32bit's you need at most 2G connections in case you can't guess the number to oveflow and/or you can't handle it directly. But with 64bits you need such a huge amount that even at a rate of a billon per second you'd still need over 300 years to overflow it. I know it's not sane to use 64bits in every case and not always it's a problem of making N interactions. But for a cerain type it should mitigate the problem.

    Comments

    1. By tedu (64.173.147.27) on

      they can make it worse in some cases, maybe better in others. if you need 4 billion connections to overflow an int and each connection allocates some memory, it's impossible to hit 4 billion with a 32 bit address space. 64 bit addresses do make it possible.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (143.166.255.17) on

      This doesnt make any sense whatsover. Think before you write. 64 bit is clearly as vulnerable as 32.

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