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OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

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Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#121

Post by jlgaddis »

whyme wrote: post #100
sdkmvx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenBSD supports a number of odd and unusual platforms and does builds on them. See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html . Older hardware can both use a significant amount of electricity and require much more hand-holding than is possible. Virtualization and emulation are not acceptable substitutes because they claim that doing builds on e.g. VAX is one of the best ways to ensure that the code works on VAX as opposed to…

I don't see why they're proposing a all or none situation when they could choose to move and in doing so, limit the number of platforms they support. If anyone complains about a specific platform being dropped, well have them pay for the overhead associated with it.

Theo says it's because if they drop $platform, they'll lose the devs that like working on $platform who quite possibly work on @other_platforms as well.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#122

Post by ufo »

nailer wrote: post #79
sdkmvx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenBSD supports a number of odd and unusual platforms and does builds on them. See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html . Older hardware can both use a significant amount of electricity and require much more hand-holding than is possible. Virtualization and emulation are not acceptable substitutes because they claim that doing builds on e.g. VAX is one of the best ways to ensure that the code works on VAX as opposed to…

OpenBSD's main value is high security standards. - Is there a significant amount of people with high security standards and an interest in SGI workstation hardware? - What about people who have high security standards and Sharp Zaurus hardware? If these groups aren't as important, as say, ARM and x86 users, perhaps it could be worth dropping some of these platforms?

The important part of sdkmvx's comment is that those SGI workstations help find bugs that also affect x86 users. The more diverse ecosystem makes it easier to reliably detect and reproduce tricky race conditions, endianess bugs or memory management mistakes.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#123

Post by justin66 »

parennoob wrote: post #88
PaulRobinson wrote: post #50

So let's deal with the elephant in the room: the OpenBSD project is run by complete and utter jerks. Not just Theo, but he has set the bar quite low when it comes to friendliness and tolerance of questions from younger/less experienced contributors. Linus' rants on the Linux kernel lists are almost cookie cutter copies of Theo's. There is "opinionated software" and then there is Theo being an intolerable, obnoxious,…

" Linus' rants on the Linux kernel lists are almost cookie cutter copies of Theo's." Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference. I can't be bothered to look for it right now, but there was an email on lkml where an inexperienced contributor basically asked "should i just give up?" and Linus chipped in with quite a friendly manner and mentioned how impor…

> Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference.

Plenty of us have had positive interactions with Theo.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#124

Post by toyg »

sliverstorm wrote: post #65
4ad wrote: post #3

Useful (non-slashdot) links: Initial ask for help: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138730448307723&w=2 How much it costs: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2 Why old hardware platforms matter: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2 Why not kickstarter: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973837906139&w=2 And most importantly, the donation link: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/…

I really love how we keep getting advice. Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale? It's funny to hear this sort of thing from someone trying to accrue $20k in donations. Yes, many people will give bad advice. No, you don't really get to complain about it when you are asking them for large sums of money.

I guess you don't know Theo de Raadt ;)

The guy is infamous for being one of the most aggressive, sarcastic and trollish OSS developers out there. He's been like that for 20+ years, he's not going to change just because they are 20 grand short.

Part of the success OpenBSD has enjoyed is in fact due to this uncompromising attitude: Theo pushed hard against security-by-obscurity, binary blobs, undocumented proprietary hardware and poor development practices. With openSSH, they pretty much set the bar for security-related programs the wotld over.

At the same time, Theo's personality routinely drives away a lot of very capable developers and users, which limited the overall popularity OpenBSD could ever reach.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#125

Post by cLeEOGPw »

blhack wrote: post #68

They accept bitcoins, here is their donation page, and they're the people that maintain openSSH, the software that I'd bet ALL of us use every day: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

Thanks for link, donated some.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#126

Post by bch »

mjolk wrote: post #105
chrissnell wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a longtime OpenBSD fan and advocate, this has always fascinated me. I loved SGIs back in the day but they are slow as shit today and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal. These platforms survive in OpenBSD land because somebody still cares enough about them to enjoy hacking on them. There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them proba…

>There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think. If it's worse for the rest of the ecosystem, there's a point.

Is that clear? It's not as if when SGIs are taken away, developers efforts will seamlessly efficiently shift to amd64. I like to think that "oddities" like SGI are data-points to test against, and help keep abstraction alive by disallowing traps like pretending that everything is an x86.

I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???).

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#127

Post by placeybordeaux »

ForHackernews wrote: post #69
Xdes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Bitcoin expands its adoption this will become less of an issue.

Maybe. Doing anything with bitcoin today is a giant pain in the ass. Which is easier? a) Typing in a credit card number + billing address. b) - Signing up for an account at a Bitcoin exchange. - Transferring money to them (by doing a?) - Waiting for them to exchange it. - Transferring it to the recipients' wallet (this one step is kinda-easy, I'll grant) - Hoping the price of bitcoin holds stable-ish so that my bitco…

I personally just hold a certian amount of bitcoins and buy some more when I spend them. I used bitcoins to send openBSD some money, and was able to do that while boarding the subway.

I personally am willing to risk 10 - 20% value to help establish a reasonable stability in BTC/USD exchanges. Once the exchange becomes more stable and nerdy people hold some amount of bitcoins the above problem is fixed, it's just that right now regulation and volitility are still a problem.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#128

Post by wbl »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #50

So let's deal with the elephant in the room: the OpenBSD project is run by complete and utter jerks. Not just Theo, but he has set the bar quite low when it comes to friendliness and tolerance of questions from younger/less experienced contributors. Linus' rants on the Linux kernel lists are almost cookie cutter copies of Theo's. There is "opinionated software" and then there is Theo being an intolerable, obnoxious,…

The code quality and the fact that maintainer is blunt about problems are not unrelated.

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#129

Post by mjolk »

bch wrote: post #126
mjolk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think. If it's worse for the rest of the ecosystem, there's a point.

Is that clear? It's not as if when SGIs are taken away, developers efforts will seamlessly efficiently shift to amd64. I like to think that "oddities" like SGI are data-points to test against, and help keep abstraction alive by disallowing traps like pretending that everything is an x86. I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???)…

If they would rather refuse free hosting and will "not allow the conversation to that way" then it means they want to keep support for some physical hardware that's hard to find in existing datacenters.

This is like saying "I don't care if my arcade goes out of business, I'm going to keep the power hungry cabinets alive even though they only get used once every 3 years."

Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

#130

Post by jlgaddis »

I read through some of this thread last night and was about to throw them a few bucks. I don't really consider myself an OpenBSD user although I do have a router here that runs it for pf. Other than that, I haven't touched it in probably a decade.

I'm glad I read through the whole thread because by the time I got to the end of it I had changed my mind. In one e-mail to the list, Theo basically said (in effect) that a donation of $20 wasn't even worth it. (Granted, $20 isn't much in the grand scheme of things but I feel that it reasonable covers my use of OpenBSD.)

There are many people who think that Theo is the worst thing for the Project (because he's such an asshole). OTOH, however, there are many who think that the Project wouldn't exist if it weren't for Theo.

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