Theo de Raadt Quotes

What's so exciting is to be able to just take something and polish it so much that hopefully in the future people will start borrowing things from it.

Our solutions provide something that is 100% right, all the time. That is the idea. The cobbled together gunk never does [...] It's unfortunate the application-level people are all caught up in cobble, cobble, cobble and just never learn how to evolve.

Buttons are for idiots.

35 commits an hour? That's pathetic!

Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.

Don't tell anybody I said that.

Hystory of revisions (may be related to the date when they were said): http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/mg/Attic/theo.c

This is a software monopoly but at least it was written by people who care about security, so it's not like Microsoft's monopoly.

The world doesn't live off jam and fancy perfumes - it lives off bread and meat and potatoes. Nothing changes. All the big fancy stuff is sloppy stuff that crashes. I don't need dancing baloney - I need stuff that works. That's not as pretty, and just as hard.

I think it is astounding that people could argue for "you just must trust someone else to fix it" instead of "you could fix it yourself, or hire someone to fix it." There is a contractor base out there that can solve these problems as well as or better than the major vendors could. But I think the major vendors are still having more luck at getting the ear of the press.

[...] beer results in ideas, which results in new code.

Well, we do not do this so that other players can make profit. We've actually been doing this for a long time and I do not know of anyone who specifically makes money off OpenBSD. They may, at best, save some money by not having to re-engineer the same software that we have already written. It is not exactly that we are letting them make a profit, but that we are doing a proper job and saving someone else from having to do the same job in a corporate setting. In our eyes, that is perhaps a waste of planet-wide engineer talents, rewriting the same thing over and over. Why can’t we just get it right once?

It's the little things that make Freedom become Not Freedom.

But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.

Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix.