Linux for Losers?

In an interesting article on Forbes.com, Theo de Raadt, goes on provide some very scathing remarks about how Linux is not up to the standards of OpenBSD, not ironically, his distribution of the BSD Unix.

“It’s terrible,” De Raadt says. “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.’”

OpenBSD is one of three flavors of BSD Unix, but one that is touted as being a secure OS. BSD is the underlying core of the Solaris and OS X operating systems.

It is safe to say that OpenBSD and Linux follow very different development paths. OpenBSD has a known set of core developers that work on the OS, while Linux has a known set of “maintainers” that manage code/patch submissions from countless hackers around the world.

De Raadt, comes off as a whiny geek in this article pretty much saying that OpenBSD is so much superior to Linux. Linux has enjoyed a lot of corporate support and De Raadt is quick to mention that OpenBSD hasn’t garnered any such support, either technology wise or monetarily.

It almost seems that he is jealous of the success that Linux enjoys. Linus Torvalds would simply seem De Raadt “difficult”, but I could come up with a few more adjectives.

In my opinion, with the amount of people that are actively developing/testing/using Linux, each of it’s components will reach a level of maturity and stability that might even make De Raadt proud, in time.

Cheers

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