"I started working on OpenBSD, and many earlier projects, because I have always felt that vendor systems were not designed for quality"
About this Quote
De Raadt’s line is a polite sentence that carries an impolite accusation: the mainstream software industry optimizes for something other than quality, and everyone involved knows it. “Vendor systems” isn’t just a technical category; it’s a cultural one. It evokes closed roadmaps, marketing-driven release cycles, and priorities shaped by customers with purchasing power rather than users with security needs. By framing his motivation as long-held (“I have always felt”), he’s not offering a hot take. He’s staking out a worldview: the defects aren’t accidental, they’re structural.
The specific intent is to justify why OpenBSD exists as a stubborn alternative rather than a hobbyist fork. It’s a founding myth in one sentence: if the dominant ecosystems won’t treat quality as the primary product, you build a system where quality is the product. The subtext is that “quality” means more than performance or polish; for OpenBSD it’s historically meant correctness, auditable code, and security as a discipline. De Raadt’s reputation for uncompromising standards sits just behind the words, implying that “designed for quality” is an active verb: you choose it, enforce it, and accept the social friction that comes with it.
Context matters: OpenBSD emerged from the BSD lineage at a time when operating systems were consolidating around commercial interests and “ship it now, patch it later” became normal. The quote works because it reframes open-source not as a cheaper substitute, but as a moral and engineering counter-program to the vendor logic.
The specific intent is to justify why OpenBSD exists as a stubborn alternative rather than a hobbyist fork. It’s a founding myth in one sentence: if the dominant ecosystems won’t treat quality as the primary product, you build a system where quality is the product. The subtext is that “quality” means more than performance or polish; for OpenBSD it’s historically meant correctness, auditable code, and security as a discipline. De Raadt’s reputation for uncompromising standards sits just behind the words, implying that “designed for quality” is an active verb: you choose it, enforce it, and accept the social friction that comes with it.
Context matters: OpenBSD emerged from the BSD lineage at a time when operating systems were consolidating around commercial interests and “ship it now, patch it later” became normal. The quote works because it reframes open-source not as a cheaper substitute, but as a moral and engineering counter-program to the vendor logic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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