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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)

#41

Post by znpy »

em-bee wrote: post #37
scythe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. t…

> there is even a debian variant using a BSD kernel.

it's dead as of july 2023: https://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ :

> The development of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has officially terminated as of July 2023 due to the lack of interest and volunteers. You may find the official announcement here[1]

here[1]: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2023/07/msg00176.html

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

#42

Post by bawolff »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #8
Gualdrapo wrote: post #5

"Torvalds, via e-mail, says De Raadt is “difficult” and declined to comment further." https://www.forbes.com/2005/06/16/linux-bsd-unix-cz_dl_0616t... Imagine being so hard you're labelled as "difficult" by no other but Linus Torvalds

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…

I never believe people when they say, we would have been famous if not for one piece of bad luck 35 years ago.

Yeah, i'm sure the lawsuit was crappy and set things back. But if you can't recover after 35 years, then its something deeper than what happened 35 years ago.

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

#43

Post by bawolff »

znpy wrote: post #32

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)_/¯

In fairness, minimizing surface area (doing nothing unless you need to) is security 101, so i hardly think that is a criticism.

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

#44

Post by bawolff »

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.

Probably people are responding less to the dumbness of the take and more the arrogance of the tone combined with the dumbness of the take. Everyone has dumb takes, not everyone is an asshole while giving their dumb takes.

Regardless i do agree with you though, not sure what the point of digging up ancient skeletons is.

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

#45

Post by em-bee »

DonHopkins wrote: post #31
SoftTalker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

i don't know that crispin rant sounds pretty reasonable to me. it's not insulting and the argument is coherent. he has a point.

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

#46

Post by xattt »

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…

> replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel"

Is a Proxmox kernel that much smaller than a typical Linux kernel?

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

#47

Post by tptacek »

xattt wrote: post #46
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…

> replaces an ultra-functional general-purpose kernel evolved over decades to support every conceivable application with a drastically smaller "kernel" Is a Proxmox kernel that much smaller than a typical Linux kernel?

I don't know. I don't use Proxmox.

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

#48

Post by throw0101a »

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.

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

"Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them which will hang him."

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_me_the_man_and_I_will_giv...

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

#50

Post by otterley »

tptacek wrote: post #27
SoftTalker wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And since then, OpenBSD has developed its own VM subsystem vmm(4), vmd(8), vmctl(8).

Sure, I mean, he was wrong, and I assume he knows he's wrong, and wouldn't say the same thing today. He's not dumb. Just this take is.

I’ll take someone who’s dumb over someone who is smart but rudely and confidently incorrect any day. Modesty, thoughtfulness, and kindness are too-undervalued virtues in our business.
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