Just to make the call to action a little more direct, the donation link is here: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html
Off topic, bluekitten it seems you've been hellbanned and your message show as dead. Looking at your comment history, I can't imagine what triggered it, so if you see this it might be a good idea to send an email to pg.
OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
201–210 of 415 posts
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously? What's not to understand? He said they had reasons that prevent them from moving and didn't want to discuss it further. Why push it? Isn't he in a better position to decide what's unacceptable than you are?
If I'm donating I would like to know exactly where the money is going, and what options have already been explored. OpenBSD should have referenced, full documentation about these things if they want to maximize donations. Apparently, there isn't very much documentation/open accounting, and they aren't willing to discuss options to reduce the bill. That doesn't inspire confidence.
And suppose OpenBSD wanted to know exactly wtf you were planning on doing with OpenSSH after you downloaded it... what servers are you planning to connect to, what keys are you planning on using? You know, if you're going to use OpenSSH they want to know exactly what for. Just leaching off the project doesn't inspire confidence.
OpenBSD releases quality software that all of us use EVERY SINGLE DAY as far as I'm concerned Theo can take the money and buy a yacht with it as long as they keep doing what they are doing.
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#20322 seems an appropiate amount. Or whatever your portnumber is for your SSH-server.
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment doesn't make more sense from reading it more often. Saying "because I don't understand how the BSDs work or their development processes, I think they should stop existing to prevent them from having to stop existing" is still nonsensical, no matter how you slice it.
It's nonsensical because you misunderstand it. He is saying he thinks two or more of them ought to combine efforts in order to prevent all of them from failing.
Two of them "combining efforts" is removing one. That is no different than one of them "failing". That is the point. Contrary to armchair OS designer belief, you can't just say "hey guys, stop working on your project and go work on someone else's because I don't know what I am talking about and think this will somehow help something". Go tell linus to start working on mercurial because you think he should. What is the result of that conversation going to be?
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm donating I would like to know exactly where the money is going, and what options have already been explored. OpenBSD should have referenced, full documentation about these things if they want to maximize donations. Apparently, there isn't very much documentation/open accounting, and they aren't willing to discuss options to reduce the bill. That doesn't inspire confidence.
These costs are not much versus the costs of hiring developers.
Not sure how much they are hiring developers. They said the number they need annually is more inline with $150,000. I'm not sure if that's in addition to current donations or total but you wouldn't be hiring many devs with $150k - $20k for power- wherever Theo needs.
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Competition is a good thing, so we should consolidate and have less competition That makes very little sense.
You have it wrong; > Competition is a good thing, so we should unite bit-parts that are in danger of being stomped out to ensure the dominant player still has competition in the future.
"Unite bit-parts" is stomping them out, that's the point. Even if you just magically convinced all the openbsd developers to stop developing openbsd and go start working on an OS they don't like instead, that would just be getting rid of openbsd to try to prevent losing openbsd. That makes absolutely no sense.
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know OpenBSD's reputation is primarily security, but I use it for a different reason. It's simple, stable, and doesn't break. Back when I was in high school and I had a lot of free time and all that, the various incarnations of Linux were a delight. Even after that, I still went with it out of inertia and spent many evenings tweaking Gentoo. I eventually just goddamn gave up. I got sick of every upgrade breaking so…
And OpenBSD has the best-written man pages in all of Unix. When I got thrown in the deep end with Solaris, many years ago, I'd read the Solaris man page for the options, but first I'd read the OpenBSD man page to work out what the hell the command was for and why.
Yes, that's an important point. The Linux manpages are a joke, they're half useless almost all the time.
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#208> The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the > development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons > prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might > offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go > that way. I don't understand this comment. If the choice came down to moving versus shutting down entirely, why is moving an unacceptable answer?
This discussion comes up every time only because some people seem to think OS development is like racking new x86 servers running RHEL. Many of the machines do not have LOM. They have hardware failures instead. They hang because they get trashed building OpenBSD and ports pretty much 24/7. There is debugging and serial cables going on. Someone needs to push that NMI button and check the LEDs flicker like they should.…
While what you say is correct, Theo's stance on this is still a bit unreasonable. A review should be done to see which systems can be moved or supported by the means of remote power off strips and IP console servers. They should be perfectly willing to move that gear if someone offers them the space. All the Sun SPARC, Alpha and Intel most likely falls into this category. Only systems that someone needs to be physically there to access should be left onsite.
I have donated to OpenBSD a number of times because I believe the project is of great value. In all cases where I used a release (for firewalls mostly) I purchased a CD set.
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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.
It would be nice if we could all work in an environment where we could be abrasive as we want and still get paid. But this is life and not many people have that opportunity.
If Theo want's to put up a fight about blobs and proprietary hardware, he should do that. Talking down to people who genuinely agree about his goals and are trying to help is really self destructive.
Re: OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
It will find a new home that's not dying.
Are you perfectly sure that it will represent the same quality then?
If I had a choice between, say, donating $10 to OpenBSD of which only $2 goes towards OpenSSH development and letting Google take over OpenSSH, I'd take my chances with the latter. I don't see why Linux or OS X users should subsidize OpenBSD.