Success Quote by Theo de Raadt

De Raadt’s line has the bracing clarity of someone who’s spent years watching idealistic engineers collide with corporate gravity. It’s not a moral condemnation so much as an operating assumption: if you misread what “vendor” means, you’ll design your systems, your policies, and your expectations on sand. The sentence is almost aggressively plain, a small act of inoculation against the marketing language that tries to reframe profit as partnership, “solutions,” or community.

The intent is pragmatic and defensive. De Raadt, best known for the OpenBSD project and a long-running suspicion of proprietary black boxes, is warning that vendors are structurally incentivized to optimize for revenue, not for your safety, autonomy, or long-term stability. The subtext: trust is not a strategy; leverage is. If a security feature doesn’t sell, it won’t ship. If a subscription model extracts more, it will replace a perpetual license. If lock-in reduces churn, interoperability becomes a talking point rather than a roadmap.

Context matters because de Raadt comes from a culture where reliability and auditability aren’t lifestyle preferences; they’re survival traits. In open-source worlds, “vendor” often arrives with strings: NDAs, opaque code, roadmap bait-and-switches, and security posture as PR. The quote works because it refuses sentimentality. It compresses a whole history of broken promises into one blunt baseline, pushing readers to negotiate, verify, and build exit ramps before the invoice arrives.