Organizer: 'Hackathon' Will Go On

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Organizer: 'Hackathon' Will Go On  By Joanna Glasner

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58602,00.html
02:00 AM Apr. 24, 2003 PT
A Canadian programmer says he will go ahead with plans to hold a "hackathon"
for participants in an open-source project, despite a decision by the U.S.
military's civilian research arm to yank funding for the event.
Theo de Raadt, project leader for OpenBSD, an effort to develop a Unix
operating system with a security emphasis, said he intends to seek donations
or pay himself, to rent space for the gathering, in which coders detect and
create fixes for security holes.
"The hackathon will go on," de Raadt said. "There's no way I'll be taking 60
people's personal flights and wasting them."
The event, expected to draw close to 60 programmers from several countries,
was scheduled to begin May 8 in Calgary, Alberta, where de Raadt lives.
But plans for the gathering were put on hold last week after de Raadt's
research colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania received a notice from
the agency funding the project to stop work.
"No reason was given to Penn for this action," said Phyllis Holtzman, a
university spokeswoman. After receiving the notice, Holtzman said, the
university researchers in charge of the project told colleagues to stop
working on it. 
The university had been carrying out research on OpenBSD as part of a $2.1
million grant it received in 2001 from the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, a brand of the Department of Defense. De Raadt had been
hired by the university as a contractor on the project.
According to Holtzman, the university first received notice from the Air
Force Research Laboratory, the organization sponsoring the grant through
DARPA, broadly stating that work on the project should stop.
On Monday, Holtzman said, researchers received another notice from DARPA
itself, saying that the stop work notification would only apply to the
hackathon, which it referred to as a "security fest." The chief University
of Pennsylvania researchers involved in the project could not be reached for
comment regarding the notices.
De Raadt, an organizer of the hackathon, suspects there was a political
motive behind the abrupt suspension of funding. Earlier this month, in an
interview with The Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper, De Raadt said he was
"uncomfortable" with having the Department of Defense fund his work in the
OpenBSD project. 
"I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile
doesn't get built," de Raadt told the newspaper. A few days after doing the
interview, de Raadt said he spoke with Jonathan Smith, lead researcher on
the project at the University of Pennsylvania, who he said expressed concern
about the statements made in the newspaper.
A DARPA spokeswoman did not respond to questions regarding a possible
political motive behind the cancellation of funding.
In previous statements, including one published in The Daily Pennsylvanian,
the University of Pennsylvania newspaper, a DARPA spokeswoman said the
funding cancellation was "due to world events and the evolving threat posed
by increasingly capable nation-states," and was not a response to the
thoughts of an individual.
De Raadt said he believes his statements did play a role in the decision to
stop funding. 
"So many people are not answering questions. The best we know is this fits
into a pattern of behavior," he said, adding that the agency has not
objected to providing funding for previous hackathons.
Since mid-2001, de Raadt said, the DARPA grant has paid for three prior
hackathons, at a cost of about $20,000 each. 

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