Theo de Raadt gives it all to OpenBSD

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Author: JT Smith

By Julie Bresnick

Open Source people
Admittedly, I was apprehensive about interviewing Theo de Raadt.
Right
after
Marius Aamodt Eriksen
shared with me his respect for de Raadt’s programming
prowess I
looked de Raadt (“wrought”) up on the Web and contacted him. As OpenBSD
project leader, de Raadt was not hard to track down, and I was anxious
to
write about programmers involved with non-Linux projects.

A bit more research revealed posts by individuals who suggested that he was a
“difficult.” I figured I’d feel him out on email and sent him a few
lists of questions to which he replied with speed and efficiency. He signed
off on the correspondences with questions like “what’s next?” and “is there
more?” Questions that serve to bait one who is traditionally accused of
inexhaustible inquisitiveness (of course there’s more!). I knew we’d
have to switch to the telephone.

He said it would be a late night so I shouldn’t call before 1 p.m. I
waited till 1:30 his time (which is Mountain Standard Time because he
lives in Calgary) because I
wanted to make sure I got him well rested. The call went unanswered, and I
imagined his rumored disposition driving him to punish me for waking him by not
responding to my email reminder. Turns out, his stereo was simply too
loud to hear the phone ring. Comforting, especially because I have always
felt a certain affinity for people who appreciate music at deafening
decibels.

Considering the habit among hackers of working into the wee hours
without even noticing, I figured his premeditation was due to some deadline or
maybe, given that his New Year’s resolution had something to do with
beer, a celebration of some sort. It turned out he just works that way,
especially when he wants to hang out with fellow coders in far away places.

He definitely likes to hang out with his project teammates on IRC. He is proud of his team because they work
together, because they trust him and he likes them. He said, “you might even say
the OpenBSD team is like a family,” and then gave a great laugh, mocking
himself for being cliched. Seems de Raadt, who was asked in December of 1994,
by the then remaining core members to resign from his official affiliation
with NetBSD, went through some sort of transformation with OpenBSD which is
probably one of the reasons he feels so close to it. He says he was
never a people person at all. But now he is. He is motivated to a large
degree by the desire to take care of his team. Last year, he gave as many as nine
talks on OpenBSD in front of large assembled audiences.

His ideal day, too, consists of several social visits. “Hack for an
hour, then bike to a Vietnamese restaurant and hang with a friend for an hour
or so, return and hack for an hour. Then bike for a coffee with another
friend for an hour. Return and hack for an hour. Then bike somewhere else
for a beer for two hours with a friend. Then return and hack. I like variety.”

This current state wouldn’t be quite so notable were it not
contrasted with the terms under which he was booted from the NetBSD project, an
experience that might have left him increasingly resentful. In this post, a core member praises de Raadt for the wealth of code he contributed
and then suggests that his “rude and abusive” behavior toward other
programmers was inappropriate and “damaging to the project.” de Raadt remembers it
as a “political explosion” and says that over the subsequent seven months he
tried to make amends, that it was a difficult time for him, having been
expelled from his community. So he started a new one, in October of
’95, with developers who agreed with him on certain nuances of developing
BSD code. In our interview, he bore no ill will towards those he worked
with at NetBSD (though he agrees there might be friction between those at the
upper levels of each of the BSD projects) and said that he is satisfied and
grateful that he is still able to do what he is able to do. There is
nothing else like working on BSD, he says, and he wouldn’t really want to do anything
else.

Hacking is all he wants to do: hack, mountain bike, and climb
mountains, in that order. Characteristically efficient de Raadt looks at the world
first in terms of hotspots for programming secure code and second as
places with good mountains. He talks about invitations he’s received to speak
at conferences, matching them with areas near mountains to climb and
suggests dates ideal for doing so. But it’s not like the talks function simply
as tickets to the climb, it is clear that he cares most about the project.
So much so in fact that, despite the money-making potential of his skills,
he opts to work full time on OpenBSD, subsisting solely on his share of
donations, which he divides among developers, and from the sale of
OpenBSD T-shirts, posters, and CDs, that, combined with the donations, keep him
and the project going. One of his goals is to find a way for the rest of
the developers to work on it full time as well, by cultivating positions
inside corporations, applying for grants and other means that become
increasingly accessible as the project grows and its product becomes more popular.
To
this end he is not only dedicated but confident because he knows his
colleagues are equally enamored and that their dedication is reflected
in the quality of the code. “Even the United States Department of Justice
Department has OpenBSD in use.”

But de Raadt has never lived in the United States and never would
because, he says, U.S. cryptography regulations would prevent them from developing the
code their way. He’s been all over the world though. Of Dutch decent, he
lived with his family in eight different areas of South Africa by the time he
was 9, when he and his family relocated to Canada. As de Raadt remembers it,
his father, who is a civil engineer, moved so much to work on different
projects and when the political situation in South Africa grew too precarious,
development of the infrastructure died down. They got the heck out, moved to Calgary, Alberta, then on to Whitehorse, Yukon, and then Theo got off the de Raadt bus and moved back to Calgary to attend university there. Sounds like he’s there to stay which I
question, considering he claims to hate winter but he says it is the single best
place to be in the summertime — that’s when he mountain bikes almost every
day.

He started at the University of
Calgary
as an electrical engineering major. That lasted until he
found the VAX 11/78 in the computer science department. “I had discovered
4.2BSD and life was never the same again. Finally I had discovered a system
that could run code, and when it crashed, the machine didn’t go down. This
was the single most important moment.” He was soon too busy finding bugs in
the kernel and programming socket code of 4.2 BSD to go to classes in his
major. He graduated in 1993 with a computer science degree. After
graduation he stayed in Calgary and went to work for Willow Glen
Singapore,
porting OpenBSD to a Motorola VME platform. That was his last job
before
dedicating himself to OpenBSD entirely.

When I spoke with him he started off sort of staccato, short quick
answers, as if he was a contestant at a game show and I was the host.
But as it progressed he became garrulous like a stone that starts slowly at
the very top of the hill but the gains momentum and plateaus at rapid speed.
Talkative and earnest, there were few pauses, no silences spent
searching for diplomacy. He makes it clear that he does not do anything
half-assed, which means he knows himself well. And the intensity with which he
approaches projects is probably what led to the disruption at NetBSD.
After all, like one guy gossiping on the Web about de Raadt and his
history stated, “excess and eccentricity go hand in hand with genius.”

About Theo de Raadt

First big hack: “Probably a Vic-20 game I wrote. I think I was 15.
There
were these falling things in it, and you had to shoot them, of course.
Anyways, I ran out of memory on the 3.5KB machine. So, what was I to
do? I
managed to store some additional chunks of data in the high bit of the
color RAM …”

First programming language: Assembly.

Where he would you like to be in 10 years: Doing the same things.

What do you think is the future of technology: “I actually don’t think
about that much. Instead, I think there are
ways to be rather more grounded, and just try to improve our own little
corner. See, I think that many people in the ‘industry’ are really
into
‘new, great, wonderful’ sorts of things, but around here we’re very
much
just cleaning things up so that it works ‘better,’ before it does
‘more.’ “

Where to go to learn about history of OpenBSD: “I think that Pete
Wayner’s
book Free for all discusses it better than anything else. I wish
more
people read it.”

New Year’s resolution: “Hmmmm…To go to parties that don’t run out of
beer.”

Favorite beer: McNalley’s Traditional & GrassHopper, and also Guiness
at
times.

Favorite mountain bike ride: “Moosepackers loop. It’s kind of flat and
winding, with a hell of a hill at the end. Kind of swampy at places.
After
about 25 minutes you hit the real Moose Mountain gravel road where you
climb
for about 30 minutes until you just can’t take anymore, but then you
hit the
hiking parking lot and head down for about two kilometers. Insanity
lies
ahead. Tight switchpacking turns during a flying descent leads to
flatter
and swampier country below. At the end of the ride, two things are
clear:
You are soaked, and you are covered with mud head to
toe.”

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