Theo de Raadt Quotes

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.

Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent Multics in a browser. (paraphrasing Herny Spencer's famous quote)

The kernel is a harsh mistress.

It's terrible, everyone is using it, and they don't realize how bad it is. And the Linux people will just stick with it and add to it rather than stepping back and saying, 'This is garbage and we should fix 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.

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.

So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.

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

Buttons are for idiots.

I actually am fairly uncomfortable about it, even if our firm stipulation was that they cannot tell us what to do. We are simply doing what we do anyways — securing software — and they have no say in the matter. I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built.

c++ is a pile of crap

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?

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

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.

Quite frankly, SSE's alignment requirement is the most utterly retarded idea since eating your own shit.