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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

#361

Post by logfromblammo »

davidgerard wrote: post #197
jlgaddis wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not Theo. He clearly says things like "that's not up for discussion", "I'm not going into details", etc. If anyone ever truly deserved the title BDFL...

I think if you ever use OpenSSH for anything whatsoever, you can put up with a grumpy Theo.

Especially since he is almost always technically correct--the best kind of correct.

What OpenBSD foundation really needs is a tactful and charismatic person to act as firewall and pf between Theo and the people with overflowing bank accounts, who are more accustomed to dealing with obsequious salesdroids than a person who is not only ten times smarter than their entire golf group put together, but also so aware of it that he cannot hide how much of a waste of time it is for him to suck up to any one of them, no matter how much he could use the cash.

Do you think Apple would have gone anywhere if Wozniak was the one talking to all the investors?

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

#362

Post by transitionality »

dredmorbius wrote: post #62
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,…

I've been called an insult to idiots or similar by Theo de Ratt. Once. I use OpenSSH every fucking day. I'll take the insults. And apologize to the idiots. And pitch in when I can.

This is a good attitude. All of us have failings. Most of us fail at being geniuses. Theo fails at being diplomatic.

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

#363

Post by wglb »

fencepost wrote: post #282
wglb wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useful info. Fortunately for me, I never had a CSR interaction with them. I used them until they augured in. wgl@mcs.com

I don't recall if I stayed to the bitter end, but I started making provisions for a move after I ended up arguing with Karl over whether inbound mail was being corrupted, maybe around the time of a conversion to (from?) maildir. I think I started when it really was only Karl, was Dawn his first hire? Hmm, I probably still have the t-shirt as well. ajm@mcs.com (or .net)

Ah, yes, you are right--it was .net.

And that was my shortest email ever--11 characters complete.

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

#364

Post by wpietri »

justin66 wrote: post #177
wpietri wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like publishing accounts? Maybe even including salaries for the highly paid people? Because every US nonprofit is required by law to do that. You can browse it all on line: http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/990finder/

That is a nice tool, thanks. Someone else posted something similar recently and it wanted to charge $250 for membership or something like that. The web is bringing a lot of good transparency to nonprofits but there's still a lot of repugnant wastefulness and avarice that often isn't captured well by a 990 form. (publishing salaries is pretty huge, though) I stand by my point that the more a person learns about the av…

I get your point, but I think you're generally wrong. My criterion around that for donating is not, "Is this place perfect?" but "Is this place materially more screwed up than any other organization?"

I'm sure there are some people with unrealistic standards that would not donate at all. And I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that take advantage of a lack of transparency to do dubious things. But the solution to that is more transparency. And more analysis of the transparent information, so that people can easily contextualize it.

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

#365

Post by xradionut »

rjsw wrote: post #353
rnemo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than one OpenBSD hacker used loongson

If you want to support MIPS for embedded applications then loongson is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to run stuff right now.

How's availability outside of China? I'm not finding many of these systems in the US.

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

#366

Post by luckydude »

hythloday wrote: post #135
nailer wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From Theo de Raadt, on-thread: On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved.

We used to maintain SGI boxes for this same reason but we've pulled back. The main benefit we got from older RISC stuff was that they bitched about unaligned loads. If you are going to support any of those models you need at least one box like that in your cluster. SPARC was faster than MIPS so we kept SPARC.

I think Theo could probably thin down the cluster and still be good but maybe I'm wrong and he'll show up with examples that require all of that hardware. That would be interesting because in our case we've sorted out the problems and rarely see things blow up on the RISC boxen.

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

#368

Post by msbarnett »

pjmlp wrote: post #329
ygra wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder, though. There are plenty of fairly large commercial offerings based on those systems. The corporations using them (e.g. Sony, Apple) could probably easily afford a million in donations.

That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back.

> That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back.

Does any Open Source license require monetary donations from companies using the code?

Sony and Apple and a lot of other companies using BSD licensed software DO give back -- in the form of code and employing developers to work the projects.

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

#369

Post by markroseman »

enneff wrote: post #317
toyg wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Theo's bad attitude is more the stuff of rumor rather than fact. More than a decade ago, when I first heard about Theo's abrasiveness, I went through nearly every mailing list post he'd ever made looking for the dirt (I was a teenager with time to kill). The end result? A dozen or so flames directed toward people who, in my eyes, seemed to have it coming. It's a shame people don't talk as much about his tireless dedi…

I was doing CS at U of C same time he was. While I have a lot of respect for him in many areas, and found him entertaining to hang out with at times, there is just no way to overstate how abrasive and how much of an opinionated arrogant asshole he can be. (Something I don't think he'd disagree with.)

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

#370

Post by pjmlp »

msbarnett wrote: post #368
pjmlp wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back.

> That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back. Does any Open Source license require monetary donations from companies using the code? Sony and Apple and a lot of other companies using BSD licensed software DO give back -- in the form of code and employing developers to work the projects.

A few trees don't make a forest.
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