Interview: Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD)

Jeremy Andrews: You've also made mention of "mini-hackathons". How do these work, and are any currently planned?

Theo de Raadt: A few years ago we held a mini-hackathon for pf specifically, after a cansecwest conference in Vancouver which a few developers were attending. The mini-hackathon was held in a cabin near the town of Sechelt, in the woods, up the Sunshine coast; it even took a ferry ride to get there. I think there were about 15 people, staying in giant hunting tents that our hunting developer Bob brought from Edmonton. The cabin had power, but no net! There was a DSL link just under 1k away, up a hill, but it was at the maximum distance. We cut with a machete and rolled fiber through the bramble between the two buildings, and then we had net and could do commits! We were afraid that the deer would break the fiber, but the next day we saw them avoiding it, very carefully stepping over it… §

I like interviews with Theo. And I like OpenBSD. I dont use it much now coz I have a laptop, and hence don't have the luxury of having 3-4 HDDs. I like to try out all the BSDs (even though OpenBSD and NetBSD are my favourites), and with one HDD you cant install them all. When I was in college, I had all the 3 BSDs on my machine there, and spent a lot of time learning OpenBSD. Its a very nice OS. With an amazing installer program (totally geeky!) and an amazing fdisk program and a very nice bunch of manpages.