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Romanian saves OpenBSD?

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Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#51

Post by eksith »

_ak wrote: post #28
calroc wrote: post #5

Is it weird that OpenBSD struggles to keep the juice on in the post-Snowden era?

Well, who would really want to fund their compile farm of obscure vintage hardware if all they're really interested in is OpenSSH? Even if OpenBSD went bust, somebody would pick up OpenSSH eventually, without all the Vaxen and SGI machines and what not.

You may have missed the discussion from last time in which Theo explains the benefit of having older hardware. The dissatisfaction with OpenBSD seems to eerily mirror the incredibly short-sighted criticism of NASA funding : "Why do we spend all this money to send junk into space?" Which conveniently side-steps the innumerable benefits it produces.

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2

  The answer to that is not news.
  
  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.
  
  Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the
  older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in
  the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem.  If you aren't in
  the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy.
  
  > The recent discussion of a need for a replacement
  > Vax for package-building illustrates that.
  
  The vaxes being asked for draw almost no power, but it supplies the
  same benefits as the other architectures.
  
  Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems.
  
  Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures.  We'd slowly lose the
  developers who like to work on those areas.  They also work in other
  areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them.

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#52

Post by mrweasel »

jrockway wrote: post #35
_ak wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, who would really want to fund their compile farm of obscure vintage hardware if all they're really interested in is OpenSSH? Even if OpenBSD went bust, somebody would pick up OpenSSH eventually, without all the Vaxen and SGI machines and what not.

Indeed. I run OpenBSD on an i386 router, and I honestly don't care about supporting the other platforms. If they want me to donate a Soekris device and pay for the power, I will. At my residential utility rate, one of those things uses $8 in electricity a year. Hell, the twice-yearly OpenBSD releases cost me $100, so I almost think I've done my part.

Most users won't care about anything but i386 and AMD64 as supported platforms. What they should care about though are the bugs that was found because OpenBSD also runs in VAX, Sparc or some weird MIPS platform.

Supporting the weird and older platforms help make OpenBSD better, they aren't support "just" because some developer think they're funny. In the future you might care about ARM support and porting OpenBSD will be easier because they didn't only support i386 and AMD64.

If everyone did as you do and buy all the releases I don't think they would have had a funding problem. I don't currently run OpenBSD, but I still donate €20/month because I would hate to see the project go away.

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#53

Post by mrich »

Fuxy wrote: post #43

I doubt he'd be willing to keep it up for more then a year but that still is a lot of help. Personally i think the way OpenBSD asked for help was kind of wrong. They just completely ignored the little each community member can pitch in and went for the big companies. That's how it seems at least from their announcement.

They want to find a longer-lasting arrangement with a company which would have two advantages:

1) Not necessary to beg the community each year, saves a lot of time for the real work on the project

2) The company could easily deduce the donation from their taxes, making this donation very cheap for them

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#54

Post by makomk »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #29
canadev wrote: post #17

What is the relationship between OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD? And why would one choose one of those over Linux? Edit: Here's a link I just found: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sys... And one more: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-bsd/compa...

The slightly over-simplified version goes like this: OpenBSD is for firewalls, specialized routers, traffic management, and other internet-facing security applications. FreeBSD is a reasonable general-purpose server BSD. It was among the first to have support for "really big" filesystems, but Linux has since caught up a bit. ZFS on FreeBSD is pretty rock-solid though. NetBSD is intended to run on everything. Even toa…

The desktop experience on Linux has actually got worse over the last few years though, at least for me, to the point that I'm seriously considering switching back to Windows. There's just too many regressions in fundamental things like audio support. I dread to think what the PulseAudio development methodology would bring to init-land, where bugs and crashes have a much bigger impact.

(Did you know that there's no such thing as an official stable release of PulseAudio anymore? The latest release, 4.0, includes stuff like a patch that's literally incomplete and breaks audio resampling in some circumstances. This is going to be reverted in 5.0, but that'll come with more major changes and no doubt more breakage from those major changes. Lennart Pottering works for Red Hat and maintains a set of patches for Fedora that fix some of the problems - I've even encountered one major issue that was only patched there by him and not fixed upstream at the time - but from what I've heard Fedora's still not much better.)

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#55

Post by cbhl »

Fuxy wrote: post #43

I doubt he'd be willing to keep it up for more then a year but that still is a lot of help. Personally i think the way OpenBSD asked for help was kind of wrong. They just completely ignored the little each community member can pitch in and went for the big companies. That's how it seems at least from their announcement.

Frankly, relying on each little community member results in the kinds of banners and full-page modals you see on the English-language Wikipedia every year.

I'm not entirely convinced that's a better alternative.

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#56

Post by blahbl4hblahtoo »

"the Microsofts, Apples, and Oracles of the world that happily vacuum up their code may not be the there in their time of need"...

What about the Linux distro's that didn't lift a finger but continue to ship OpenSSH? Its that kind of attitude that make working with the OS community hard. Someone will bad mouth your involvement even when you are doing the right thing in other area's.

Did anyone even approach those companies? How about Unbuntu or Redhat? Are they supposed to read people's fucking minds?

I'm glad that OpenBSD got it's bills paid...but this guy's blog post might as well read..."Hey, some European guy paid OpenBSD's bills. Alright! Oh yeah, Fuck Microsoft (or Apple) because they didn't help." What the fuck?

Just for the record...I gave. I wonder how much they raised besides the bitcoin rich guy's contribution.

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#57

Post by tobiasu »

Kuytu wrote: post #27

Does anyone have an idea how they are spending $20 000 on electricity?

I've written some stuff about that in the other thread you got linked to, but I would like to add something:

A single rack costs $1900/month in Calgary, and has insufficient power (15A) for dense packing.

So a commercial rack already costs more than OpenBSD needs in electricity, but OpenBSD has about 3 racks worth of gear.

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#59

Post by thaumaturgy »

makomk wrote: post #54
thaumaturgy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slightly over-simplified version goes like this: OpenBSD is for firewalls, specialized routers, traffic management, and other internet-facing security applications. FreeBSD is a reasonable general-purpose server BSD. It was among the first to have support for "really big" filesystems, but Linux has since caught up a bit. ZFS on FreeBSD is pretty rock-solid though. NetBSD is intended to run on everything. Even toa…

The desktop experience on Linux has actually got worse over the last few years though, at least for me, to the point that I'm seriously considering switching back to Windows. There's just too many regressions in fundamental things like audio support. I dread to think what the PulseAudio development methodology would bring to init-land, where bugs and crashes have a much bigger impact. (Did you know that there's no su…

Part of the reason I'm on Debian for my daily machine is because the Debian team really seems to make an effort to tread carefully around a lot of that. I'm on the testing branch even, with KDE, and for the most part things work well. The stable branch would probably be better.

I can't agree that the desktop experience has gotten worse in recent years. KDE 4 is a huge improvement, and other distributions and window managers are pretty OK too.

But ... yeah. I'm not a big fan of HeisenAudio, and I'm really not looking forward to what seems to be the inevitable switch to systemd. My first experience with systemd, a couple of years ago, was horrible, and I altogether abandoned the distribution I was on at the time and fled to Debian. When Debian switches, I'll try it out again for a little while and then maybe give the BSDs another try for desktop use.

Lennart is really not my favorite character in software, but mostly I think he's just a symptom of a growing trend in modern software development that's only starting to make real inroads into operating systems: as long as you can argue that the thing you're building is somehow technically better, and as long as you release frequent updates (and don't forget to blog about it!), then it's totally acceptable to break early, break often, and just when users think it's working for good, break it again.

Re: Romanian saves OpenBSD?

#60

Post by corin_ »

_xhok wrote: post #23

Have to agree about IRC. If your product is something hackers--especially "hobbyist" hackers--use, IRC is still a great way to get feedback. Back when I ran [redacted], IRC was basically the de facto way to request features and report bugs.

IRC is still great, however I disliked this line:

> This episode just goes to show that IRC even in the 2010's continues to be one of the most expressive, influential, and effective communications mediums on the Internet.

Because this story on its own really doesn't show that at all. "Group A needed money, told people about it, and a rich person gave them money" could just as well happen on HN, Twitter, etc.

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