On Mar 24, 2006, at 11:17 PM, Theo de Raadt wrote:
I did not decide that OpenSSH should become a critical part of the
internet, or that it should become a virtual monopoly. We made it
free. Again, the community decided to make it Internet
infrastructure.
Now you want to tell us that because the Internet community made
decisions like these, that we should be held responsible. That we
have to follow YOUR procedures. That we have to answer to YOU.
What if we ignore your procedures? What if we say no? What will you
do then? Continue to verbally attack us? To what end? To show that
you are thankless dogs?
Mr. De Raadt,
Perhaps you had no intention for your software to have such an
influence over the internet. You did not create it in a vacuum
either, on dangerous ground as I may be in second guessing people's
motivations, I cannot imagine a developer releasing a quality piece
of software, not hoping for it to be used by a large group of people.
When you rise to such a position of influence, there comes the
inevitable fact that many people will have opinions on how you use
this influence, especially where it affects their daily lives.
Getting upset about this is as pointless as it is for a rockstar to
complain about the paparazzi.
It is true that a developers of a free product, even if their product
rose to the level of popularity that it can be considered critical
infrastructure, have no formal obligations towards their userbase at
all. It would be silly to claim, however, that they are not
responsible for the effects their decisions have on a larger
community. People of character like yourself understand this
responsibility. Where people's decisions have such tremendous impact,
declaring outside criticism invalid counters that.
This is not to say that I don't feel empathy for your despair in the
face of thousands of people that are probably overloading you with
'helpful suggestions' for your projects, but I think it is best to
utter such frustrations in the privacy of one's home and let the
people make their noise. Who knows, sometimes interesting sound rises
up from such noise.
Kind Regards,
Pim van Riezen
