I think they've earned that right, and this attitude may be necessary to scare away the kind of developers who might (with perfectly good intentions) end up making the job of the OpenBSD developers a lot harder.
OpenBSD is amazing software. By far the best OS I've ever used in my life. If the cost of that is a bad attitude, so be it. Whatever they're doing, it's working.
> OpenBSD is amazing software. By far the best OS I've ever used in my life. If the cost of that is a bad attitude, so be it.
I like to judge a developer's attitude by reading the manpage that he or she kindly wrote for me. OpenBSD manpages are comprehensive and still concise. So the devs respect my time. I really appreciate that. (Actually, I want to throw money at them just for providing such excellent Unix documentation.)
Yes, they tend to be brusque when you mail them about some issue and obviously didn't RTFM before. They are right: You show them that you don't respect their time. Why should they be nice to you?
There's a social policy that one must adhere to when interacting with groups within certain "geekdom" domains. I learned it while idling on IRC EFNet in #Linux, #LinuxHelp in the early 2000's. To an outsider it comes off as harsh and dismissive but It really does weed out the random noobs/script kiddies who refuse to read a man page or put any effort into solving a problem themselves. I learned how to exhaust all possible search options before posting and how to formulate a question properly, by providing clear and concise examples of the problem resulting in less followup questions and quick solutions to my issues.
