Theo de Raadt gets 2004 FSF Award 233
Caligari writes "Richard Stallman, presents this year's award to Theo de Raadt.
"For recognition as founder and project leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects. Theo de Raadt's work has also led to significant contributions to GNU/Linux and other BSD distributions. Of particular note is Theo's work on OpenSSH. Theo's leadership of OpenBSD, his selfless commitment to Free Software and his advancement of network security, were cited by this year's award committee.""
Re:GNU/Linux and other BSD distributions? (Score:1, Informative)
notice the word "ALSO"? So his work has ALSO contributed to GNU/Linux and other BSD distributions BESIDES the BSD distribution OpenBSD.
try to read next time!
Re:Linus Torvalds? (Score:5, Informative)
Is there a reason he didnt get this award?
I don't know whether this is still the policy, but from memory they originally aimed for this award to go to people who hadn't already received other awards for their work on free software. Linus has so wouldn't be eligible.
Re:Watch out! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:BSD and FSF? (Score:5, Informative)
(The following uses GPL for LGPL... and BSD for BSD, X...)
2004 Theo de Raadt (BSD)
2003 Alan Cox (GPL license)
2002 Lawrence Lessig (ALL)
2001 Guido van Rossum (Python license / BSDish license)
2000 Brian Paul (X license/BSDish )
1999 Miguel de Icaza (LGPL/GPLish)
1998 Larry Wall (Artistic/ closer to BSD than GPL but...)
Re:He killed telnet! (Score:2, Informative)
For those wondering "why not linus" (Score:5, Informative)
Learn more about OpenBSD technology (Score:5, Informative)
There will be a number of talks this week in Dublin, Ireland from Theo de Raadt, Henning Brauer and Ryan McBride which are open to the public and completely free of charge!
Re:Where's Linus? (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, it is the past year winners + Linus + RMS + Knuth + Larry Lessig. Looks like an august company and no slight meant, certainly to Linus. Being in the same league as Knuth is pretty good, I would say, even for Linus.
[Just FYI, even after all these years, Knuth pays money if you find a bug in his TeX program, or in his Art of Programming books].
Re:For those wondering "why not linus" (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know how they decide that Theo or Guido or whoever is eligible (I'm sure they've received awards, though possibly of much less significance).
Re:Linus Torvalds? (Score:5, Informative)
Despite their differing views on what constitutes Free Software, though, both men are largely motivated by ideology. Consider Theo's reaction to the ipf debacle, his response to the XFree86 license change, and his appeal to the community to help fight the good fight against wlan cards that require non-freely redistributable binary firmware to function. This man is every bit as committed to software freedom as RMS is.
Linus, on the other hand, has stated publically on many occasions that he sees nothing wrong with proprietary software, and uses BitKeeper (a proprietary version control solution) to manage the Linux kernel tree (rather than say, CVS or Subversion) because, in his words, "it's better".
Without passing judgement, it is very clear that Linus values convenience above principle. This is part of the reason so many Slashbots like him: he is, in their minds, "refreshingly" a-political.
Whatever their differences, RMS and Theo are both idealistic. They are primarily motivated by their desire for Freedom, not because they want to produce the best system ever (although that may be true as well).
To me, RMS giving TdR this award is absolutely appropriate, and while I didn't expect it, I'm very pleased. I would be very surprised if Linus were named, and to be honest, I would be a little disappointed.
Not that I have anything against Linus, mind you -- he's a brilliant guy -- but at the core, he's an engineer, and so awarding him for his commitment to the ideology of Free Software would go rather against the grain, imho.
Re:There is somebody missing here: (Score:2, Informative)
OpenSSH, hardly. In README in OpenSSH 3.9 source code:
OpenSSH is a derivative of the original and free ssh 1.2.12 release
by Tatu Ylonen. Aaron Campbell, Bob Beck, Markus Friedl, Niels
Provos, Theo de Raadt and Dug Song removed many bugs, re-added newer
features and created OpenSSH. Markus Friedl contributed the support
for SSH protocol versions 1.5 and 2.0.
Re:My eyes! (Score:2, Informative)
FTFA:
"FSF President and founder, Richard Stallman, presents this year's award to Theo de Raadt."
Does this make it any worse?
Re:BSD and FSF? (Score:4, Informative)
BTW, care to explain how MS locks me in by using BSD code that I can go and pick up just about anywhere else.
That's more or less illustrating the point that you and most sane people don't really understand the difference between the freedoms of BSD and GPL
To answer your question though, here is an example:
In the mid 90s When it was time to put in a network layer into MS windows, MS decided to take some BSD code. They then took standard protocols like Kerberos, DNS, DHCP etc and tweaked them to work MS style so that people would be locked in to using the MS versions only. It was an intentional interoperability problem to make things work MS-to-MS but not MS-to-nonMS. It was part of the MS policy of embrace extend and extinguish, a policy that is elaborated in their leaked "halloween" document.
You can't get hold of the propietary, extended code for windows networking to fix the operatability problem without NDA etc. You can only guess the BSD code up to the moment of forking. After the fork point, the code has been tweaked and closed and used to build a system that tries to lock you in forever after. That's the kind of danger the GPL protects you against.
The restriction of GPL protects the coders in the long run.
The freedom of BSD can restrict the coders in the long run.
Re:Prime-time recognition for outstanding develope (Score:3, Informative)
These are the latest data I could find about BSD market share - and they say it's gaining it.
Nearly 2 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD [netcraft.com]
"FreeBSD secured a strong foothold with the hosting and internet services communities at the genesis of the web and has anything but gone away. Indeed it is the only other operating system [besides Windows and Linux] that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey."
A more recent article doesn't talk about market share, but is quite enough for everybody to see how "Netcraft confirms it"..
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004) [netcraft.com]
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
I think this pretty much says it all..
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Requiem for the FUD [slashdot.org]