[dc396]

If DJB is "hated", it isn't because he's a lone author (Linus Torvalds was once a lone author and I don't think he was hated). It's because he can be an asshole. To quote George Bernard Shaw, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

[strenholme]

DJB is a lot of things, and I have great respect for him, even though I feel he didn’t responsibly maintain Qmail/DJBdns/Publicfile. He made MaraDNS more secure because I carefully read his documentation—I got the idea to have a random source port to give MaraDNS more security from him, which means MaraDNS was unscathed when DNS spoofing was independently discovered in 2007.

The point DJB made was this: It was possible for a skilled C programmer to make a server with few security holes. Even though that’s not as relevant now, with Rust having most of the speed of C and security built in, it did make the Internet a safer place for many years. I remember using Qmail and DJBdns to make the servers at the small company I worked for at the time more secure.