What does Linus Torvalds think about BSD? It
’
s not too pleasant.
Linus Torvalds – the creator of the Linux kernel and its current maintainer – is by all accounts a brilliant human being. He can also be incredibly crass and rude. Case in point is a post he made to the Linux Kernel mailing list (LKML) yesterday, where he offered his opinion on security research and specifically the OpenBSD operating system (which is security centric).
It’s soo rude that it’s ‘funny’ – that is if you’re not an OpenBSD developer or have a particular affection for monkeys.
Torvalds wrote:
Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can’t stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.
The gist of Torvalds’ longer argument is that there are more interesting bugs out there than just security bugs. On that topic I heartily agree with the God of Linux. While I am also a contributor to the security bug hype often focusing stories that I write on those issues, as a user I know full well that it’s often the ‘regular’ bugs that are the issues that actually affect me the most.