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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I guess you don't know Theo de Raadt ;)

The guy is infamous for being one of the most aggressive, sarcastic and trollish OSS developers out there. He's been like that for 20+ years, he's not going to change just because they are 20 grand short.

Part of the success OpenBSD has enjoyed is in fact due to this uncompromising attitude: Theo pushed hard against security-by-obscurity, binary blobs, undocumented proprietary hardware and poor development practices. With openSSH, they pretty much set the bar for security-related programs the wotld over.

At the same time, Theo's personality routinely drives away a lot of very capable developers and users, which limited the overall popularity OpenBSD could ever reach.

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>At the same time, Theo's personality routinely drives away a lot of very capable developers and users, which limited the overall popularity OpenBSD could ever reach.

It would be nice if we could all work in an environment where we could be abrasive as we want and still get paid. But this is life and not many people have that opportunity.

If Theo want's to put up a fight about blobs and proprietary hardware, he should do that. Talking down to people who genuinely agree about his goals and are trying to help is really self destructive.

A couple relevant quotes from the justly famous talk "You and Your Research", by Richard Hamming:

"If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble."

"I am not saying you shouldn't make gestures of reform. I am saying that my study of able people is that they don't get themselves committed to that kind of warfare. They play it a little bit and drop it and get on with their work. "

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

> where we could be abrasive as we want and still get paid

If your code is wrong, I'll say it's wrong. I won't say you are an idiot, I won't make comments on your background and I won't judge you when I should be judging your arguments. I'll point what's wrong and why I think it's so and I'll welcome you if you prove me wrong and adjust my views accordingly.

Excessive abrasiveness is not a good trait for a community leader.

Theo's bad attitude is more the stuff of rumor rather than fact. More than a decade ago, when I first heard about Theo's abrasiveness, I went through nearly every mailing list post he'd ever made looking for the dirt (I was a teenager with time to kill). The end result? A dozen or so flames directed toward people who, in my eyes, seemed to have it coming.

It's a shame people don't talk as much about his tireless dedication to an important but relatively small open source project. He really is one of the true open source heroes.

I was doing CS at U of C same time he was. While I have a lot of respect for him in many areas, and found him entertaining to hang out with at times, there is just no way to overstate how abrasive and how much of an opinionated arrogant asshole he can be. (Something I don't think he'd disagree with.)

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