Interview with Christos Zoulas

From NetBSD Wiki

This Interview was taken on the 22nd of September 2006 by Zafer Aydogan.

Enjoy it.

ZA: Hello Christos ! Thank you for taking your time to do this interview with me.

How old are you and how did you get in touch with NetBSD and when was this ?

CZ: I am 42 years old and I got in touch with NetBSD sometime in 1993.

I had written some patches and the compat_svr4 initial code, and Theo offered me a developer position.

ZA: Where you do live and what is your current profession ?
CZ: I live in New York City and I am currently the CTO of Two Sigma Investments, LLC.

ZA: Are you married and do you have kids ?
CZ: I am married, but no kids yet.

ZA: You live in New York City, but Christos Zoulas sounds greek.

Are you greek ? When did you move to the United States and why ?

CZ: Yes, I am greek; I moved to the US when I was 16 to study Electrical Engineering.

ZA: Are you paid to work on NetBSD fulltime or is it a side project/hobby for you?
CZ: It is a hobby for me.

ZA: Tell us more about PTYFS and its significance.
CZ: It is not very significant, old ttys worked ok and most of the security issues where handled by /dev/ptm{,x}.

Ptyfs offers these additional features:

• you can dynamically create as many as you want.
• the devices get created automatically, you don't pollute the namespace.
• allows other emulations that need ptyfs to work.
• the implementation of ptm{,x} is cleaner.

ZA: Looking back to the last 3 years, how do you evaluate NetBSD's popularity?
ZA: Do you see NetBSD's status declined or getting more popular among users and developers?
CZ: I think that it is either stable or perhaps declining. We need to

make NetBSD more attractive so that we can get more developers, but

for that we need more momentum to fix the biggest problems and create

advantages that act as differentiators when people are choosing which

OS to run. We are fighting the same fight the other OS's are:

• Hardware vendors who do not release specs
• Commercial software vendors who use closed API's or proprietary packages to access documents or view information on the web
• Increasing hardware complexity.
• Our own legacy code.

ZA: NetBSD's goal is to port the OS to as many platforms as it can.

But when I check the supported platforms, I see that over 70% are

discontinued products that can't be deployed and are honestly not used

in business anymore. Why is NetBSD still supporting such platforms and

is this behaviour not hindering NetBSD in evolving faster at all ?

CZ: Some of these platforms are becoming EOL'ed because people

are not using them anymore. Yes, maintaining multiple platforms is

difficult, but over the years we have created tools and moved machine

dependent code to machine independent, so maintenance is not

impossible. It is still time-consuming though and for that we are

eliminating platforms people are not using anymore.

ZA: I see that NetBSD is good for Retro-Computing, but why

isn't NetBSD focusing only on platforms that are available and used in

business ?

CZ: NetBSD is a volunteer organization, and some NetBSD developers are interested

in maintaining the older platforms. Others though are focusing more on

current (and future) hardware.

ZA: A lot of users are complaining the lack of documentation in the

NetBSD Project especially for newer evolutions like SA, LKM and LWP.

Why does NetBSD has always problems with outdated and incomplete and

insufficient documents ?

CZ: Well, SA/LWP is the most complicated area and the least documented.

There are papers about the SA implementation but they don't really

match what is coded now. We are slowly making some progress fixing

the issues now. For LKM it is irrelevant, because we just need to

throw away our current LKM code and start fresh with one that uses

a kernel linker. To answer the general question though: Because

developers are both poor documenters and they don't like to spend

documenting things. We need to enforce better documentation or find

technical writers willing to help.

ZA: Isn't this one of the major problems, why NetBSD can't gain new developers ?
CZ: There is an impact from the lack of documentation, but I don't think

that it is the most important reason. There are other areas for

developers to work that are well documented, and have examples.

ZA: Your favourite movie ?
CZ: I can name a few, but nothing really stands on top as my favorite.

ZA: Your favourite food ?
CZ: Giouvetsi [orzo and veal with tomato sauce]

ZA Your favourite shell ?
CZ: I don't like any of them. I use tcsh as an interactive shell, get annoyed

by some aspects of it, use sh variants for shell scripts and get annoyed

about the portability issues.

ZA: Do you have hobbies beside NetBSD, like sports or music ?
CZ: Water skiing, sailing, fishing.

ZA: Thank you very much for this interesting Interview.

zafer 22:22, 22 September 2006 (CEST)