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Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

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Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#31

Post by DonHopkins »

SoftTalker wrote: post #4
cptroot wrote: post #2

I would love to know how OP came across this email nearly 20 years after the fact

It's one of Theo's more famous dismissals/takedowns.

Some people keep classic flames alive to deploy in times of need. Theo's good, but he can't hold a candle to the late Marc Cripsin railing about emacs line-mode-visual. Grr.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/1tf1iy/imap_inventor...

>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs

>What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea to make line-move-visual be the default in emacs 23? I just found out about this charming "improvement" in the worst possible way. Investigation determined that a "routine" software update had just installed emacs 23 and gave me this "improvement".

>People wonder why everybody hasn't dumped proprietary desktop software. This is an example why. Emacs' line behavior has well over 30 years of history, and some bagbiter goes and changes it BY DEFAULT.

>Add all the cute new features you want. But leave the goddamn defaults alone.

>If you want to have your own playpen where you twiddle defaults to your hearts content, have at it. But don't pretend that you produce software for a production environment, and stop telling the Linux distributions that they should "upgrade" to your "improved" versions. People doing real work depend upon those distributions.

>It does no good to say "read the release notes" when the affected users don't get the release notes and don't even know that a new release happened. It is also unreasonable to expect users to subscribe to every obscure newsgroup, forum, and wiki to hear about changes that will turn their expectations upside down.

>Yes, I fixed my .emacs file. And I'm putting in the same change to all the .emacs files on all the dozens of other machines I use, even though they still have emacs 22, because otherwise this unpleasant surprise will repeat itself over and over again.

>Grr.

>From: Mark Crispin, To: comp.lang.emacs

>They made the wrong decision. Changes to default behavior are a bad idea. Changes to default behavior of the most basic functionality are an extremely bad idea.

>I don't care if M-X fart-noisily-with-spray changes its default scent from skunk to lemon. But I damn well do care about the most basic operations: all CTRL single letter and ESC single letter. After 33+ years of using emacs, I expect these to be reliable and not suddenly change.

>I wasted hours trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with my file, or my terminal emulator window, or my system. The fact that the problem went away on a different system added further confusion. It was only when I did ESC CTRL/N and saw that it moved me the wrong number of lines, but only on one system, that I realized that emacs changed. And that's when I did ESC X describe-key CTRL/N and read about line-mode-visual, although it did not mention that this was now the default.

>Surprise. Grr.

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#32

Post by znpy »

I think de Raadt and OpenBSD are hugely overrated and some takes are as dumb as the one in the post.

OpenBSD is only secure because because it does pretty much nothing and does it very slowly (its firewall just recently broke the 4gbps firewalling capabilty, for example) but somehow a cult has formed around it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#33

Post by naturalmovement »

tptacek wrote: post #13

One of his dumber takes. Virtualization replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel" (KVM and the userland hypervisor). It's a drastic attack surface reduction, and the empirical data bears that out: kernel LPEs aren't even newsworthy (there's whole repos full of unnamed, unremarked-upon LPEs), and KVM escapes are…

If someone purposely dug up emails you wrote 19 years ago, I'm sure they'd find some of your "dumber takes" as well.

I'm not sure what the purpose of revisiting this is beyond provoking a flamewar on a slow Sunday.

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#34

Post by tptacek »

naturalmovement wrote: post #33
tptacek wrote: post #13

One of his dumber takes. Virtualization replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel" (KVM and the userland hypervisor). It's a drastic attack surface reduction, and the empirical data bears that out: kernel LPEs aren't even newsworthy (there's whole repos full of unnamed, unremarked-upon LPEs), and KVM escapes are…

If someone purposely dug up emails you wrote 19 years ago, I'm sure they'd find some of your "dumber takes" as well. I'm not sure what the purpose of revisiting this is beyond provoking a flamewar on a slow Sunday.

I mean, I agree there. We all have dumb takes! I hear roughly once a month about my old "I don't think Dual EC is a backdoor, it's too dumb and obvious for anyone to actually use it" take.

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#35

Post by znpy »

mmh0000 wrote: post #30
sidkshatriya wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link: "De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal." There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened. However, I think Linux has always has an…

Ha! That’s some rose-colored-glasses view of BSD history. The lawsuit didn’t help. But the BSD developers shot themselves in the foot when they refused to support x86, referring to it as a “toy”. It wasn't until Linux came along and started eating up all of BSD's user base that they freaked out and decided x86 support might be a good idea. But by then it was too late.

I go back to take a look at the BSDs every now and then and frankly it really looks like that mindset has stayed, somehow.

Generally speaking the BSDs seems really fork-a-phobic and it kinda shows given how little dynamism is there in the development those systems.

Even the Solaris derivatives have a faster tempo.

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#36

Post by [deleted] »

scythe wrote: post #21
sidkshatriya wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link: "De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal." There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened. However, I think Linux has always has an…

It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and…

[deleted]

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#37

Post by em-bee »

scythe wrote: post #21
sidkshatriya wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link: "De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal." There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened. However, I think Linux has always has an…

It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and…

i think what the chaos did was enable more individual contributors. you didn't have to join the BSD team to get a core OS tool accepted into the system. anyone could just mix and match the tools and apps they liked. it's not that BSD prevented that but that they just didn't invite it. you can create your own spin of a distribution and if it gets enough users and contributors it gets accepted as an official version. there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel. try making a official BSD spin using GNU coreutils.

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#38

Post by Paianni »

scythe wrote: post #21
sidkshatriya wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link: "De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal." There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened. However, I think Linux has always has an…

It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and…

GNOME prioritises Linux now but it shipped with Solaris from 2003 onwards and Sun contributed accessibility features around that time.

Re: Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)

#40

Post by znpy »

scythe wrote: post #21
sidkshatriya wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing the forbes link. From the link: "De Raadt says BSD could have become the world's most popular open source operating system, except that a lawsuit over BSD scared away developers, who went off to work on Linux and stayed there even after BSD was deemed legal." There is some truth to that. And who knows where BSDs might have been if the lawsuit never happened. However, I think Linux has always has an…

It's hard to blame OpenBSD's management when there are three other BSDs. You didn't have to work with Theo de Raadt to work on BSD. But while the lawsuit may have been the catalyst, the game was really over when GNOME took off. BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans. At that point pretty much everyone making interesting desktop stuff went to Linux and…

> BSD was sort of an equal target under KDE, but GNOME prioritized Linux pretty hard and had a lot of fans.

oh boy its' much worse than that: KDE/GNOME were already largely precarious before that.

The whole Xorg thing was really dependant on gpu drivers and the story between linux gpu drivers and *bsd gpu drivers was so much different. Having the BSDs be fairly different didn't really help (eg: only FreeBSD had official nvidia drivers, albeit proprietary).

Gnome did take a lot of backlash and Gnome essentially became a meme at some point ("what's the use case for that?")

Gnome did take a strong dependency on systemd (both gnome and systemd are developed by Red Hat, btw).

And Gnome also did push a lot for wayland (that wasn't implemented on the various BSDs for a long time).

I haven't checked in a while, but I think Gnome is wayland-only nowadays ?

Ultimately, the real issue with KDE/GNOME and the BSDs is that the BSDs are largely irrelevant and essentially only relevant for some specific use-cases where desktop usage is not involved.

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