_zrlg

It's more about the public understanding being less wrong than about me being right, I just got heated because not enough people are sticking up for the facts and principally that a reporter, whose job that is, fueled this. I've tried to post something more substantive and dispassionate in a followup and will leave it at that.

That is misrepresentation, it was never not held to high standards. There were bugs, one serious while much fever was made over less critical corner cases i.e. the pfsense release that has been pilloried by Salter by way of Jason doesn't use jails. There are others like jumbo frames that are not common on internet outside of certain high end carriers.. less common but valid bug, good for new contributors. Most were personal preference: the pseudo driver framework, malloc style etc. There were fixes by multiple people in progress, including two well respected developers at Netgate. The communications were not handled in good faith by the rewrite party by their own admissions, so a rational discussion to fix or to disable the code ahead of 13.0 release in the stable branches was not able to be had with Netgate or by any of dozens of other mature FreeBSD developers. Instead drama was created. I am quite certain the right call would have been made without all of the bad blood spilled had this been conducted respectfully by all parties from the outset. So while new tooling and re-commitment to review process is nice, the processes FreeBSD had in place were already in action and it is sad to not see core assert this.

There is also a layer 8 and 9 vulnerability. One guy now tightly controls a protocol in several free *nix kernels and has interesting reactions whenever anything happens without his blessing. He was able to cause a disproportionate reaction by talking to a journalist. This probably doesn't matter if you are encrypting your home PC traffic but it does to people who work in the Internet industry. Say whatever you want about the particular technology and particular individuals, it boils down to whether you think the desire for control of implementation is a weird situation or not.

I'm really not sure what the point of this message is. From a PR perspective it is an own goal. It was obvious from earlier statements that self-critique was underway. The right time to send another communication is once some improvement has been made.

What is unfortunate is that the project has not publicly defended itself, which is what core should have addressed -- that the situation has been broadly and unfairly misreported. The history of wireguard is bizarre, Donnefeld is hellbent on total control of both the protocol and implementations. He blew the same gasket on NetBSD developers for implementing his protocol http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-net/2020/08/22/msg007842.h.... The real story here, that the Ars reporter missed because he allowed himself to be compromised by Donnefeld, is how this single person is accumulating and aiming a cult following as he chooses and what are the security and business implications of this in the future. This is a simple tunneling protocol. I don't expect WG to end well. At the very least, you are subject to public zero days and shakedowns if you don't do exactly what Donnefeld wants. A new black hat open source business model of monetization by mob rule and "scooping" low intellect reporters instead of license and implementation.