July 12, 2026
Virtual insanity, email edition
Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)
Tech legend torches a popular idea, and the comments instantly turn into a cage match
TLDR: Theo de Raadt’s resurfaced 2007 email mocked virtual machines as a dangerous fad in spectacularly rude terms. Commenters are split between admiring the legendary roast and calling it a badly aged opinion from a brilliant but famously abrasive figure.
A nearly 20-year-old email from OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt is making the rounds again, and wow, the man did not believe in virtual machines. His message basically said: if programmers already struggle to make normal software safe, why on earth would anyone trust them to build a whole extra layer underneath it? In classic Theo fashion, he didn’t just disagree — he went full flamethrower, calling the idea something you’d only believe if you’d been “smoking something really mind altering.”
But the real show is in the crowd reaction. One camp is eating up the old-school chaos, treating the email like a vintage internet diss track. One commenter joked they desperately want to know how someone even found this 2007 gem in the first place. Another dug up a Forbes piece noting that even Linus Torvalds called de Raadt “difficult” — which commenters spun into a badge of honor, like being called intense by the king of intense programmers.
Then the pushback arrived. Some said this was one of de Raadt’s worst takes, arguing that virtual machines actually make systems safer by shrinking the amount of code exposed to attack. Others took a more personal angle, bluntly saying that being brilliant doesn’t excuse being cruel. So the verdict from the internet? Half “iconic rant,” half “absolutely not, grandpa.”
Key Points
- •The article is an archived October 2007 message from the openbsd-misc mailing list authored by Theo de Raadt.
- •De Raadt was responding to a statement that virtualization appears to provide significant security benefits.
- •He argued that x86 virtualization adds another nearly full kernel and therefore introduces new bugs.
- •He described the x86 architecture as weak in page protection and unsuitable as a secure base for virtualization.
- •He claimed virtualization software should not be assumed secure when operating systems and applications already contain security holes.