Re:Why do you not make the code available under a 'source co...
by geofft on Wednesday June 17, 2015 @01:10PM
(#9733496)
djb's software is pretty low-quality for very many metrics of "quality". Lots of it is not elegantly interoperable with existing UNIX systems, because he has his own idea of how UNIX systems should work. There's the entire qmail backscatter thing. There are pieces of crypto code written in a custom assembler. Curve25519 has its own reimplementation from Chrome's Adam Langley, and all of NaCl its own repackaging in the form of the libsodium project, because the official distributions are difficult to use. NaCl has been promising certain features in the "next release" for years (notably Ed25519 signatures), but no release has been seen. All the downloads are over plaintext HTTP with no cryptographic signatures: I've always interpreted this as implying that if you're not qualified to audit the entire tarball you downloaded, the software isn't for you.
None of this is to claim that he's a bad cryptographer, or even a bad software engineer. But pure code output is far from the only important metric for software. GitHub makes it easy to do release engineering well, or to let other people help you with that if it's not your forte. (libsodium, for instance, is on GitHub.)
None of this is to claim that he's a bad cryptographer, or even a bad software engineer. But pure code output is far from the only important metric for software. GitHub makes it easy to do release engineering well, or to let other people help you with that if it's not your forte. (libsodium, for instance, is on GitHub.)