Theo de Raadt

1968– · Leader of the OpenBSD project

Topics: open source, software engineering, programming, unix

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

  — Theo de Raadt

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

  — Theo de Raadt

• Low code quality keeps haunting our entire industry. That, and sloppy programmers who don't understand the frameworks they work within. They're like plumbers high on glue.

  — Theo de Raadt

• 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.

  — Theo de Raadt

• 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.

  — Theo de Raadt

• 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.'

  — Theo de Raadt

• 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.

  — Theo de Raadt

• 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.

  — Theo de Raadt

• 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.

  — Theo de Raadt