Theo De Raadt.

A cut and paste job follows.

De Raadt, 37, is a blunt-spoken, even obnoxious programmer who works out of his basement in Calgary. He is the chief author of one of the most airtight, hacker-proof operating systems ever created: OpenBSD. Bolstered by advanced cryptography and data-traffic filtering, OpenBSD runs systems at Intel, Oracle and Adobe, secures a gas pipeline in Kurdistan and runs servers at the University of Minnesota. As good as it is, OpenBSD costs nothing; an IT manager can download a free copy from the Web and put it on a server or network gateway.

De Raadt is thus something of a budding cult hero in the open-source-software movement, a not-yet-famous Canadian version of Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open Linux system that sparked the free-code revolution. Yet he derides the Linux movement and says his software blows the doors off that inferior code. "Look at Linux closely and it's heading to be the next Microsoft,"he avers. "It's low-quality software. Their stuff isn't any better."

Like Torvalds, De Raadt doesn't get any royalty from those who use what he created. "People who use it don't advertise it. It's just really silent," he says. He doesn't know--or much care--how many users OpenBSD has, though millions of copies have been downloaded. "All I care about is making high-quality code. If I had to work at a regular job, it would drive me nuts."

So instead of doing the venture capital startup thing--"I don't need to get rich; I don't care"--he lives on C$30,000 dollars a year from the sale of $45 discs, donations from users and the sale of T shirts featuring a mascot (Puffy the Blowfish) and slogans ("So long, and thanks for all the passwords," says one). Often he shares some of the money with others who hack (create) code.

De Raadt moved to Canada from South Africa with his parents when he was 9. He got a computer science degree from the University of Calgary and worked briefly as a developer until joining three friends in 1993 to create a system they called NetBSD (for "Berkeley Software Distribution," a 20-year-old variant of Unix).

But a year later De Raadt got kicked out of the group for rudeness. (His motto:"Shut up and hack.") Things came to a head after he clashed with a programmer. "He was a complete loser. I told him to stop talking and do stuff." The guy later apologized by e-mail, but De Raadt, rather than drop it, replied with a blistering, obscene diatribe so devastating it was forwarded to hundreds of techies for their entertainment. It came to be seen as a founding document for OpenBSD; today, when you Google "theo deraadt," his unkind e-mail shows up near the top of the list.

Undaunted, he started a rival project in 1995, dubbing it OpenBSD. The first release was ready a few months later, updating the old Berkeley Unix system, which also led to variants that run computers made by Sun Microsystems and Apple. A decade later, he says, more people care about his project than NetBSD.