Theo de Raadt Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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'.

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
Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.

Theo de Raadt
... you are being the usual slimy hypocritical asshole... You may have had value ten years ago, but people will see that you don't anymore.

Theo de Raadt
I think it is astounding that people could argue for "you just must trust someone else to fix it" instead of "you could fix it yourself, or hire someone to fix it." There is a contractor base out there that can solve these problems as well as or better than the major vendors could. But I think the major vendors are still having more luck at getting the ear of the press.

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
[...] beer results in ideas, which results in new code.

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
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.

Theo de Raadt
It's the little things that make Freedom become Not Freedom.

Theo de Raadt
The only way to make it clear to him that he should not come here to our lists in the future, is to teach him a hard lesson, and that is done by continually re-adding cc's back to him — because the mails talk about him — even when his friends come our mailing lists and delete the his address from the cc list. Like this message, which adds him back in. Richard, you are a lying cheating hypocrite.

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

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
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?

Theo de Raadt