*BSD News Article 72235


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From: ghudson@glacier.mit.edu (Greg Hudson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Subject: Re: followup from censored port-i386@Netbsd.ORG
Date: 27 Jun 1996 09:56:22 -0400
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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In-reply-to: tholo@gandalf.sigmasoft.com's message of 24 Jun 1996 20:00:50
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Here we go again.

Thorsten wrote:
> It is really nice when messages and articles get selectively
> cencored like this.  It inspires confidence in the people that
> provide the service.  And you can be sure of always hearing both
> sides of a story.

ONE MORE TIME: all of the articles in the discussion were censored,
because they were all off-topic, except for Theo's original claim that
he had fixed twenty bugs in OpenBSD (and a separate spinoff that
involved posts from Aron Roberts, Jason Downs, and Theo [regarding
anonymous CVS], none of which was flaming Theo).  There was no
"selective censorship."

List maintainers have every right to censor articles on their lists to
keep the discussion on-topic.  That's all that has been done, and it
hasn't been done in a selective manner.

> There is, of course, also the fact that making such security fixes
> public would also allow any and all would-be crackers access to the
> information.

Common practice when one discovers a security hole is to inform all
the vendors of it, privately, give them a reasonable chance to develop
a fix, and then inform an organizatioon like CERT.  This is in the
interest of improving Internet security in general.  No special
relationship between vendors is generally necessary to exchange such
information.  Why wasn't Theo willing to tell another operating system
vendor about these security holes, when asked specifically and
politely?  I'd guess that it was politics, but goodness, Theo is
immune to politics, isn't he?

Theo wrote:
>> I will NOT put up with the NetBSD core members and their friends
>> lying about the reasons for the formation of the OpenBSD project
>> any longer.

[I haven't seen Theo post evidence of a single lie coming from the
core team, incidentally, and I've been following this for a long
time.]

> My guess is that this was inevitable with how things has been
> getting more and more skewed.

Where things have been getting more and more skewed recently is that
people like you read Theo's false or mistaken accounts of things and
never read the corrections before piping up yourselves.

>>    "And to think I thought you were older than that... I guess Theo
>>    has done us all a favor... He's collecting all the assholes in one
>>    little pot... run along little man..."

> Hm, that is the first time I have been called an "asshole".  I guess
> me chosing to go with OpenBSD turned out to be the right thing,
> since _some_ of the people in the NetBSD group seems to have this
> kind of problems, be they personal or not.

This assertion contains a logical error: "all of the assholes are in
OpenBSD" is not the same claim as "everyone in OpenBSD is an asshole."

Is Herb wrong?  The person he was addressing was Jason Downs, who
likes to make his message heard by forging approval to moderated
newsgroups.  I think that counts as being an asshole, although that
wasn't Herb's particular reason for saying it at the time.

It's hard for me to feel sympathy for someone for a well-deserved
flame, although I do think Herb should avoid personal attacks.

> So far nothing has been done.  But it is starting to look like it is
> time for this to change.  Not saying anything has not seemed to do
> anything to improve relations between NetBSD and OpenBSD developers.

"Not saying anything" hasn't been tried.  What has been tried is Theo
and Jason spamming the NetBSD mailing lists with unrelated topic
matter.