I do think that calling inittab "evil" is a bit much. It's inconvenient in some situations, but it works just fine.
The daemontools package uses inittab to start up svscanboot, so it seems DJB doesn't consider it too evil.
Janine makes some valid points about about DJB: he doesn't mind sharing his arrogant opinions with the world, he puts his software in strange locations, etc. All true. However noone here seems to complain that AOLserver, PostgreSQL, Oracle and OpenACS are all similarly strange. If you compare different flavors of unix, they do not adhear to exact standards on the way the os starts up and how they start services, the result is that every software that is installed using standard locations and practices have to use different locations and practices depending on the unix flavor.
The Postgres team seems to believe that they can make incompatable changes without changing the Major version, forcing developers to go back and constantly revise their software to conform.
OpenACS tcl code doesn't conform to any standard either, even though a tcl style manual existed before ArsDigita wrote the 3.x series.
The lack of man pages for the daemontools package could be frustrating. However the README file contains a link to the online documentation.
As arrogant as DJB may be, he is definitely selfless in sharing his software. He doesn't promote it, sell it, or make any money off of it. But he still makes it available to everyone, he maintains and improves it. He even offered $500 for anyone who could find a security related bug caused by his qmail software. To date the money is unclaimed.
He is also fighting the U.S. Commerce Department on a legal issue where he established that 'source code is speech' and the Department's export regulations amounted to censorship. He won in the District Court, but the Government is appealing. He case is being handled by the Free Software Foundation.
