4 ms·

I have read various times about this thing of Theo being angry at people and so on which I don't understand honestly. I know his replies are usually short and

by yumh 6y ago

I have read various times about this thing of Theo being angry at people and so on which I don't understand honestly. I know his replies are usually short and he doesn't like to hold hands to n00bs like us, but I never had the feeling he was angry or insulting people, it was quite the opposite: his mail are on spot, precise and, frankly, honest. Disclaimer: I've been using OpenBSD since 6.3 (~ 2 years ago), so quite recently, I don't know if he changed attitude at some point.

owenmarshall 6y ago
I lurk the OpenBSD mailing lists and while Theo can definitely be abrasive, I think that it's really that he won't suffer fools lightly. What seems to be the least tolerated are "ideas people". If you come in and suggest that it'd be lovely to port OpenBSD to this new SOC, or that someone should write new Bluetooth support, or what have you – that's when the teeth come out. But conversely, if you bring a patch the OpenBSD community seems to be very welcoming. They definitely value you putting in the work, not just talking about it.
- kyuudou 6y ago
  For those critical of his personality, imagine being constantly trolled by script kiddies and others with malicious (such as government actors) intent. You'd probably get a little grumpy, too. The fact that Theo and the OpenBSD crew have been so uncompromising ideologically is a large part of its attraction. The support for "antiquated" architectures has a lot to do with them being OPEN, e.g. SPARC. This crew is some of the first along with rms to really push not just open and free software but also the hardware it runs on for a variety of solid reasons.
  - kjs3 6y ago
    Well...OpenBSD runs on a lot of "antiquated" architectures because it started as a fork of NetBSD, which supports/supported even more architectures. Both Open and Net have pared down the definition of 'supported' and the number of archs they support over the years. The support for "antiquated" architectures has a lot to do with them being OPEN Not exactly...I recall Theo called it OPEN because he felt the NetBSD crew wasn't. NetBSD was around first, recall, and one of their core principles is wide portability, where OpenBSD took on the mantle of correctness and security and portability came along for the ride. Both side of the unpleasant history are documented; the truth is somewhere in the middle, of course. That said, both crews advocate building on multiple architectures as a solid best practice to turn up 'interesting' programming issues. For example, Theo has stated that SPARC/SPARC64 porting is particularly useful for finding unaligned memory accesses (Alpha didn't like them either). I'll leave out my own experience in dealing with the 'OpenBSD attitude' other than to say 'generally less than pleasant'. I still use OpenBSD daily, tho more for infrastructure (FW, DNS, DHCP, LDAP) than as a desktop.
dx87 6y ago
From what I've seen on the mailing lists, he seems a lot like Linus, where he's only rude if he thinks you should know better, or if you make an objectively stupid suggestion. I've regularly seen contributors being rude and insulting though. For example, I read a message from one contributor who said that safety features in modern languages are like a straitjacket, and are only useful to developers too stupid to write bug-free programs in C.

by yumh 6y ago

owenmarshall 6y ago

I lurk the OpenBSD mailing lists and while Theo can definitely be abrasive, I think that it's really that he won't suffer fools lightly. What seems to be the least tolerated are "ideas people". If you come in and suggest that it'd be lovely to port OpenBSD to this new SOC, or that someone should write new Bluetooth support, or what have you – that's when the teeth come out. But conversely, if you bring a patch the OpenBSD community seems to be very welcoming. They definitely value you putting in the work, not just talking about it.

kyuudou 6y ago
For those critical of his personality, imagine being constantly trolled by script kiddies and others with malicious (such as government actors) intent. You'd probably get a little grumpy, too. The fact that Theo and the OpenBSD crew have been so uncompromising ideologically is a large part of its attraction. The support for "antiquated" architectures has a lot to do with them being OPEN, e.g. SPARC. This crew is some of the first along with rms to really push not just open and free software but also the hardware it runs on for a variety of solid reasons.
- kjs3 6y ago
  Well...OpenBSD runs on a lot of "antiquated" architectures because it started as a fork of NetBSD, which supports/supported even more architectures. Both Open and Net have pared down the definition of 'supported' and the number of archs they support over the years. The support for "antiquated" architectures has a lot to do with them being OPEN Not exactly...I recall Theo called it OPEN because he felt the NetBSD crew wasn't. NetBSD was around first, recall, and one of their core principles is wide portability, where OpenBSD took on the mantle of correctness and security and portability came along for the ride. Both side of the unpleasant history are documented; the truth is somewhere in the middle, of course. That said, both crews advocate building on multiple architectures as a solid best practice to turn up 'interesting' programming issues. For example, Theo has stated that SPARC/SPARC64 porting is particularly useful for finding unaligned memory accesses (Alpha didn't like them either). I'll leave out my own experience in dealing with the 'OpenBSD attitude' other than to say 'generally less than pleasant'. I still use OpenBSD daily, tho more for infrastructure (FW, DNS, DHCP, LDAP) than as a desktop.

dx87 6y ago

From what I've seen on the mailing lists, he seems a lot like Linus, where he's only rude if he thinks you should know better, or if you make an objectively stupid suggestion. I've regularly seen contributors being rude and insulting though. For example, I read a message from one contributor who said that safety features in modern languages are like a straitjacket, and are only useful to developers too stupid to write bug-free programs in C.