That was an enthralling read, thank you.

Much appreciated. If you are interested, I have written profiles on a few other open source giants like Brendan Eich, Fabrice Bellard, and Richard Stallman on the same personal blog site.

>Within hours the Linux world was doing triage. Red Hat issued an urgent advisory. Debian rolled back.

FWIW, this issue did not affect Slackware. Slackware tries to use unpatched software plus it does not use systemd.

Good to know! :-)

> My argument in the piece is that the personality and the security model are the same thing: the traits that made him hard to work with are why the code holds.

Is Theo perfect? Nope.

How much can other maintainers learn from him? A whole lot. My impression is that he's better than all other maintainers I know about.

I understand if people use LLMs to help them write, but damn make the sentences yours. Please don't have the LLMs write the sentences for you. Use LLMs for outlining, brainstorming, critiquing, grammar, etc. But write your own sentences. This could have been a good article.

Interestingly, I found this one more palatable. Maybe because it avoided some of the other common LLM text pitfalls, like several few-word sentences in a row. Also I suppose it helps that I was interested in the story of Theo and was happy to keep reading.

same, i knew it was written w/some ai assistance, but it was definitely massaged well enough to keep me from closing the tab in disgust.

Longtime fan of OpenBSD since version 2.6 or so. I didn't realize Theo was born in South Africa. I think I assumed he was Dutch.