Yeah, right.

Don't believe everything you read on Slashdot.

I have nothing against DragonFly BSD. Matt Dillon has a lot of great ideas, and the skills to implement them. DragonFly allows him to do that outside of the constraints of the relatively conservative FreeBSD project. That's a Good Thing, both for Matt and for the BSD community.

Hiten Pandya does have a src commit bit. I should know; I'm his mentor. I got him that bit specifically because I wanted him to be able to merge stuff back from DragonFly.

I have never broken into anybody's network and “nearly deleted everything”, and if I had, I wouldn't have done it from a location that could be traced back to me. In any case, I was not in Norway at the time when this is alleged to have taken place; I was in Fairfax, VA working with Tom Rhodes, amongst others, on a now-defunct FreeBSD-based US DoD network security project.

I have never accused David Rhodus of posting anything in Tim Hawkins's name. I did however suggest at one point that Tim Hawkins was influenced by or acting in concert with David Rhodus. Maybe I was wrong, but you have to admit that their backgrounds and methods are very similar.

Maybe HawkinsOS is a great OS. I don't know; I've never tried it. I doubt that I ever will. I even doubt that it will ever be released, and I very much doubt that Tim Hawkins has the skills and resources to provide the level of service and support that would make it worth the price he's charging.

Maybe FireFlyBSD is a great OS. I don't know; I've never tried it. I doubt that I ever will. I have reason to believe that much of the information on Crescent Anchor's website is materially and intentionally misleading and that David Rhodus is misrepresenting his skills and credentials.

As mentioned in the mailing list thread I referenced above, the web sites for both HawkinsOS and FireFlyBSD violate the license terms of significant portions of the software they advertise (including software written by yours truly) in that they do not credit the original authors as required by the so-called advertising clause of the original BSD license.

By the way, the FreeBSD Foundation is not in the business of selling FreeBSD or any other kind of software. It is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to collecting funds which can be channeled into FreeBSD development. I am not affiliated with the foundation, nor have I ever been the recipient of any such funds.

Addendum

Six years later, I'm cleaning up my web site and stumble across this page, which I'd almost forgotten. Rereading the /. thread that started it all, I find the whole affair both funny and sad. This page still gets a surprising amount of “real” hits, so I decided to update it. I've made slight modifications to the original text of this page, mostly to clarify some of the facts, but I haven't made any changes to reflect the current situation.

So, what has changed since 2003? Surprisingly little:

Hiten Pandya no longer has a FreeBSD commit bit, mostly because he never did much with it, and partly because when he did, he broke the committer guidelines (although I'm sure it was thoughtlessness rather than malice).
HawkinsOS and FireFlyBSD never materialised, and I strongly suspect that their claims of thousands of licenses sold were pure fabrication. Both websites are defunct, and the domains have been picked up by sharks.
Contrary to some of the claims from the original /. thread, DragonFly BSD never surpassed or even approached FreeBSD in terms of SMP performance. In fact, DragonFly BSD doesn't scale at all across multiple CPUs, and its developers and users are well aware of it. Of course, Matt Dillon has an excellent explanation for this.
I am still not affiliated with the FreeBSD Foundation, nor have I ever received (or, to my recollection, requested) funding from it.