Theo de Raadt

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Theo de Raadt
Theo de Raadt, hiking
Theo de Raadt, hiking
Born May 19, 1968
Pretoria, South Africa
Residence Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Nationality Canadian
Field computer scientist, free software developer
Institution FSA Corporation
Alma mater University of Calgary
Known for NetBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, his personality, advocacy
Notable prizes Award for the Advancement of Free Software

Theo de Raadt, (IPA pronunciation: [θio dε rɔt]), (born May 19, 1968 in Pretoria, South Africa, is a software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects. Before this, he was a founding member of the NetBSD project.

De Raadt was known for his dispute with the NetBSD core team which led to the formation of OpenBSD.[1]

Contents

[edit] Childhood

Theo de Raadt is the eldest of four children, with two sisters and a brother. Concern over the mandatory two-year armed forces conscription in South Africa led the family to emigrate to Canada in November 1977. In 1981 the largest recession in Canada since the Great Depression sent the family to the Yukon. Prior to the move Theo got his first computer, a Commodore VIC-20. It is with this computer he first began to program[2].

In 1992 he obtained a B.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary.

[edit] NetBSD

The NetBSD project was founded in 1993 by Chris Demetriou, Adam Glass, Charles Hannum, and de Raadt, who collectively felt frustration at the speed and quality of Jolix, the then standard Berkeley software distribution, and believed that a more open development model would be of greater benefit to development of an operating system. Jolix, also known as 386BSD was derived from the original University of California Berkeley's 4.3BSD release, while the new NetBSD project would merge relevant code from the Networking/2 and 386BSD releases. The new project would centre its focus on clean, portable, correct code with the goal being to produce a unified, multi-platform, production-quality, BSD-based operating system.

Because of the importance of networks such as the Internet in the distributed, collaborative nature of its development, de Raadt suggested the name "NetBSD", which the three other founders agreed upon.

The first NetBSD source code repository was established on March 21, 1993 and the initial release, NetBSD 0.8, was made in April, 1993. This was derived from 386BSD 0.1 plus the version 0.2.2 unofficial patchkit, with several programs from the Net/2 release missing from 386BSD re-integrated, and various other improvements. In August the same year, NetBSD 0.9 was released, which contained many enhancements and bug fixes. This was still a PC-platform-only release, although by this time work was underway to add support for other architectures.

NetBSD 1.0 was released in October, 1994. This was the first multi-platform release, supporting the PC, HP 9000 Series 300, Amiga, 68k Macintosh, Sun-4c series and PC532. Also in this release, the legally-encumbered Net/2-derived source code was replaced with equivalent code from 4.4BSD-lite, in accordance with the USL v BSDi lawsuit settlement. De Raadt played a vital role in the creation of the sparc port, as together with Chuck Cranor, he implemented much of the initial code.

[edit] OpenBSD

In December 1994, de Raadt was asked to resign his position as a senior developer and member of the NetBSD core team, and his access to the source code repository was revoked. The reason for this is not wholly clear, although there are claims that it was due to personality clashes within the NetBSD project and on its mailing lists.[3] De Raadt has been criticized for having a sometimes abrasive personality: in his book, Free For All, Peter Wayner claims that de Raadt "began to rub some people the wrong way" before the split from NetBSD;[4] while Linus Torvalds has described him as "difficult;"[5] and an interviewer admits to being "apprehensive" before meeting him.[6] Many have different feelings: the same interviewer describes de Raadt's "transformation" on founding OpenBSD and his "desire to take care of his team," some find his straightforwardness refreshing, and few deny he is a talented coder[7] and security "guru."[8]

In October 1995, de Raadt founded OpenBSD, a new project forked from NetBSD 1.0. The initial release, OpenBSD 1.2, was made in July 1996, followed in October of the same year by OpenBSD 2.0.[9] Since then, the project has followed a schedule of a release every six months, each of which is maintained and supported for one year. The latest release, OpenBSD 4.0, appeared[10] on November 1, 2006.

[edit] DARPA funding cancellation

After de Raadt stated his disapproval of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq in an April, 2003 interview[11] with Toronto's Globe and Mail, a multi-million-dollar US Department of Defense grant to the University of Pennsylvania's POSSE project was cancelled, effectively ending the project. Funding from the grant had been used in the development of OpenSSH and OpenBSD, as well as many other projects and was to be used to pay for the hackathon planned for May 8, 2003. Despite money from the grant already having been used to secure accommodations for sixty developers for a week, the money was reclaimed by the government at a loss and the hotel was told not to allow the developers to pay the reclaimed money to resecure the rooms.[12] This resulted in criticism among some that the US military held an anti-free speech attitude. The grant termination was, however, not as bad a blow as some portrayed it. The project's supporters rallied to help and the hackathon went on almost as planned. The funding was cut mere months before the end of the grant, further fueling the speculations regarding the situation surrounding the grant's termination.

[edit] Free driver advocacy

De Raadt is also well known for his advocacy of Free Software drivers. He has long been critical of developers of Linux and other free platforms for their tolerance of non-free drivers and acceptance of non-disclosure agreements.

In particular, de Raadt has worked to convince wireless hardware vendors to allow their product firmware to be redistributable freely. These efforts have been largely successful, particularly in negotiations with Taiwanese companies, leading to many new wireless drivers. Today, Theo encourages wireless users to "buy Taiwanese", due to lack of willingness from US companies like Intel and Broadcom to release firmware free from licensing restrictions.

For this de Raadt was awarded the Free Software Foundation's 2004 Award for the Advancement of Free Software.

In early April 2007, de Raadt was involved in a controversy involving the surreptitious use of GPL code from the Linux bcm43xx driver in the BSD bcw driver.[13]

[edit] References and notes

  1. ^ Glass, Adam. Message to netbsd-users: Theo De Raadt(sic), December 23, 1994. Visited January 8, 2006.
  2. ^ The Age article: "Staying on the cutting edge". October 8, 2004. Accessed April 5, 2006.
  3. ^ Glass, Adam. Message to netbsd-users: Theo De Raadt(sic), December 23, 1994. Visited January 8, 2006.
  4. ^ Wayner, Peter. Free For All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High Tech Titans, 18.3 Flames, Fights, and the Birth of OpenBSD, 2000. Visited January 6, 2006.
  5. ^ Forbes. Is Linux For Losers? June 16, 2005. Visited January 8, 2006.
  6. ^ NewsForge. Theo de Raadt gives it all to OpenBSD, January 30, 2001. Visited January 8, 2006.
  7. ^ In this message the NetBSD core team acknowledge de Raadt's "positive contributions" to the project despite their problems with him.
  8. ^ Tux Journal. A good morning with: Theo de Raadt, June 2, 2005. Visited April 21, 2006
  9. ^ de Raadt, Theo. Mail to openbsd-announce: The OpenBSD 2.0 release, October 18, 1996. Visited December 10, 2005.
  10. ^ Brauer, Henning. Mail to openbsd-announce: [1]. Visited November 1, 2006.
  11. ^ Globe and Mail article: "U.S. military helps fund Calgary hacker". April 6, 2003. Accessed October 30, 2006.
  12. ^ LWN.net article: "DARPA Cancels OpenBSD Funding". April 24, 2003. Accessed April 5, 2006.
  13. ^ http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/85224/

[edit] External links

Portal:Free software
 Free software Portal
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Persondata
NAME de Raadt, Theo
ALTERNATIVE NAMES deraadt
SHORT DESCRIPTION Founder and lead developer of the OpenBSD operating system
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1968
PLACE OF BIRTH Pretoria, South Africa
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
v • d • e
Key figures of free software history

Rick Adams - Eric Allman - Brian Behlendorf - Keith Bostic - Alan Cox - Miguel de Icaza - Theo de Raadt - Jim Gettys - John Gilmore - Jon "maddog" Hall - Jordan Hubbard - Lynne and William Jolitz - Rasmus Lerdorf - Lawrence Lessig - Robert Love - Marshall Kirk McKusick - Eben Moglen - Tim O'Reilly - Keith Packard - Brian Paul - Bruce Perens - Eric S. Raymond - Bob Scheifler - Richard Stallman - Linus Torvalds - Andrew Tridgell - Guido van Rossum - Larry Wall

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