Theo de Raadt says Pegasos Bad

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Batman wrote:
@jope
First, Theo is not a troll, he's the boss of the OpenBSD project. Read his website: http://www.theos.com/ :-D

Second, Theo is questioning only about Genesi's "customer care". Basically he's alerting everyone to not make his very experience with BBRV. Well, he has a somewhat flaming way of express himself, but when he talks, he talks with reason. Why don't ask him, via misc-openbsd mailing list, the same questions you asked me? I'm sure he will have some interesting answer.. ;-)

If there was an experience with BBRV... Hoo-boy, especially as all the visible efforts really did look positive on that front.

Basic rules of the game:
-If you want to work with OpenBSD, you can't blow smoke up Theo's ___.
-If you aren't blowing smoke, Theo is generally "the voice of reason," but he's human, and can sometimes get the wrong idea like anyone else.  (Who gave him the idea that Genesi was representing itself as a huge edifice, vs. a muddling startup possibly trying to do right?)
-If you don't have the courtesy to stand up and correct him before he enacts bad policy, he's probably not going to want to work with you anyway.  (The McEwen 'people who piss me off' excuse -- But if you don't have Theo's best interest in mind, you don't have the project's best interest in mind, and it's time to find another project.)
-If it comes down to an unrecoverable disagreement, you can always fork.  However, the 'value' of OpenBSD is in the auditing, so forks usually drop to the attractiveness of NetBSD_without_the_scalability.

If the Barbie were still going and had the same exact problems (including customer support, if applicable), I doubt relations there would've taken a nosedive so quickly, and as far as I know, Theo and friends don't have a problem with expensive 486 boards.  So what happened? ... (For those who can claim authority:  Don't tell me, tell misc@, if there's a chance it's worth salvaging.  But if you can't be 'Open' about it, they'll be happy to hand you plenty of rope.)

Third, OpenBSD's policy is always to support hardware makers that give full and free access to the documentation (Read: no NDA). Look backward in that mailing list for a thread about SPARC documentation for OpenBSD. :-D

Policy can/has been simplified to "Free as in build a suitcase nuke out of it."

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Being the first 'scene' platform into a major project's CVS was a great bragging right and could remain so... I'd suggest not losing it, or at least, not going down in memory as only wasting the project's time. :-)

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takemehomegrandma wrote:

I have a hard time understanding his issues here. As an OS programmer
he should not be unfamiliar with the fact that different firmware has
different characteristics, and certainly he must have seen changes
made in firmware before? What's the fuss about?

I'm going to assume Theo is really down on the hardware world right now, having just burnt bridges with Sun over excessive NDAing... IIRC, they used to be his favorite.

As for the unreachable documentation for the Gigabit Ethernet, which
is one of the main features of the Pegasos board, this could certainly
be frustrating, but hey, it's only one feature after all. Frustrating,
 yes, but it should not be a reason to get so upset on a personal
level to such a degree to write a public letter in this tone! And why
would a compiled binary file (for that feature only) be so bad?

1. OpenBSD.  You'd trust the security of your suitcase nuke to someone else's binary?

2. You can't "Linuxulate" a kernel module.  Someone offered OpenBSD binaries?

"More closed than PC", yeah right. Why so impatient?

It'd be nice to know what exactly in the firmware cheesed him off.

As for Genesi's finances, corporate structure, and the price of the
motherboard, heck, what does that has to do with anything? He is an OS
programmer!

Open source guys often get paid, or at least they try to.  Maybe he's trigger happy with startup_wanting_OS_for_free after losing the ARPA grant last year... Or maybe Rahn's gotten into some sort of 'difference of opinion?'

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Edit:  I should note that, even if I'm a bit grumpy at the predictability of it all... Well, gary_c said it.  Pegasos doesn't appear any deader than BSD, yet, but it's a wake-up call that was going to have to come sooner or later.

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CodeSmith wrote:

About the licensing issues with BSD, I for one am not at all surprised.  If Bill Buck didn't want to license the AmigaOS, why would he want to license some Unix variant?  I think he's generally averse to licensing anything.

You don't have to license BSD.  You just have to get it written in the first place.

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Hey, lookit, you kids made DaemonNews!



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Not by my hand, I'm just watching the fireworks.

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Noticing the rebuttal, I have to raise two questions:

1.  Anyone remember a "hacker" documentary centered around [Draper | some actor claiming to be Draper | someone not associated with Draper at all and I'm remembering it entirely wrong because I only watched it because it was the only thing on one 4AM], riding around at a desk in the back of a pickup?  

2.  Speaking of conspiracy theories, what's with the annoying Slashdot coincidence?

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JKD wrote:
I didn't see that so much as a rebuttal...more of a balancing up the other side of the story.

Look up 'rebuttal' in a dictionary? :-)


Anyhow, respect to Theo (who's welcome to hate whatever hardware he wants on technical grounds), respect to Dale (who wants to get paid), even some small respect to BBRV for going on the goose-chase (though, er, um... er... yeah)...

I can't say I know anything about ShopIP, the CrunchBox, or Draper's perspective/personality.  It seems like a straightforward enough product, but then, Pegasos did, too.  So... apologies to the man and his coworkers if I'm getting this wrong, but if memory serves (and I'm not sure it does, see the above), I have to wonder if his is a group prone to shouting "logic bomb!" in crowded theaters.

["Logic bomb" is a nasty concept, especially in private... If one's for real, it's hard to prove to outside parties; if it's not for real, same goes.  It's also an indefinite enough term that, lacking any semantic track record on part of the claimant, it could mean anything between an unchecked buffer ("Ooh, sneaky 'logic bomb,' we wouldn't have noticed anything until you injected your shellcode!"), an Apple-grade f*ckup, or Elbox/Office Space click-to-explode functionality.  Theo seems to trust their side of things, which smells nice, but it's unclear if he trusts them for positive reasons or just for lack of negatives.]

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Edit:  Oh, and of course, if I'd bothered to look, Slashdot's "Logic Bomb" is a run-of-the-mill user.  Though that, in turn, doesn't rule it out as being anyone's pet term, which is what I'm trying to figure out.