OpenBSD developer “Jason L. Wright” has refuted rumors propagated by OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt that he had somehow inserted backdoors into the open source operating system on behalf of the FBI.  De Raadt forwarded a private email from Gregory Perry, CEO GoVirtual Education, which accused Wright of planting backdoors into the OpenBSD source code which is visible to anyone who cares to audit it (essentially in broad daylight).

Wright states that he was not given any warning from Theo de Raadt or a chance to explain himself before the rumors were published on the Internet.  Wright also states that Perry didn’t even work for the relevant organizations at the time Wright contributed source code, and that the source code he contributed had little to do with the parts of OpenBSD he is accused to have compromised with.

At this point everything is he said she said, but it seems that Theo de Raadt and Gregory Perry hasn’t acted very responsibly.  They made some very serious allegations that can ruin people’s reputations and careers with hardly anything to back it up with and they even accused some technology writers of publishing tutorials to promote OpenBSD on the behest and payroll of the FBI, which were also denied by the named participants.  Wright is demanding an apology and daring anyone to audit every piece of source code submitted by him to find any backdoors.  It would seem to me that someone should be looking for a good libel lawyer, or put up some actual evidence, or just apologize.

Other lessons from this fiasco is that it shows that the “many eyes” theory of Open Source isn’t so many and that the reality is that there are very few people who actually look at the source code much less be qualified to understand it.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]