[tptacek]

I'm not sure we need to litigate this, because it's not like John Viega and David McGrew contributed the production versions of AES-GCM that everyone uses.

More importantly: whatever you think of Bernstein's packaging, an area of expertise he clearly shares with just a small subset of cryptographers is the design of cryptographic primitives optimized for consumer compute hardware. There's a reason his primitives tend to outperform the ones they supplant: until relatively recently, Bernstein was the cryptographer who took this challenge most seriously.

Finally: whatever you might think of things like qhasm, it's just a fact that the only mainstream crypto library a majority of crypto engineers are comfortable having generalist developers use is designed (in part) by Bernstein. When you use libsodium, you're (usually) using programming interfaces and constructions he designed.

[bitexploder]

It is also worth mentioning it is all public domain.

He has gone to great lengths to ensure the algorithms are all side channel resistant. The breadth of his concern and the care behind the decision making is really impressive and most users of his software only really understand the tip/visible portions of it all.

I will forebear the idiosyncrasies, gladly, to get all the benefits compared to the current stew of crypto primitives I see getting misused almost constantly.