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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

#261

Post by jff »

gtaylor wrote: post #42
orbitur wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

> 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. It is a lot of work for a small team to itemize and publish every expense, but some rough breakdown of monthly expenses that my donation would be going towards would really help.

If they know they need $20k, they must have arrived at that number somehow. Publishing that estimation would be a good start.

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

#262

Post by m0shen »

chongli wrote: post #251
scott_s wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[scott_s@local ~] history | wc -l 500 [scott_s@local ~] history | grep ssh | wc -l 191 Donated.

The shell history really ought to have some sort of de-dupe feature. Too many lines of history get taken up by duplicate entries!

Use HISTCONTROL=erasedups in your .bashrc

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#index-H...

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

#263

Post by andrewem »

jethro_tell wrote: post #209
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…

>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 shoul…

A couple relevant quotes from the justly famous talk "You and Your Research", by Richard Hamming:

"If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble."

"I am not saying you shouldn't make gestures of reform. I am saying that my study of able people is that they don't get themselves committed to that kind of warfare. They play it a little bit and drop it and get on with their work. "

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

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

#264

Post by bashinator »

efuquen wrote: post #224
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…

Why should everyone else pay the 20K to subsidize ancient hardware support? If there really is a subset of people who really really depend on this, then they should be forking up the cash to pay for something that could be had for free elsewhere if support was restricted to 95% of the platforms in use by the vast majority of people. If there is an argument that maintaining this will somehow improve security overall a…

That is the argument. Obscure kernel and driver bugs are frequently only made apparent as edge cases on said ancient weird hardware, but the fixes benefit all platforms from a code-correctness point-of-view.

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

#265

Post by rgbrenner »

alberth wrote: post #211
jxf wrote: post #10

Just to make the call to action a little more direct, the donation link is here: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

There seems to be a trend that most *BSDs are having donation problems and missed 2013 budgets. For example [1], [2] I encourage all to donate to our BSD friends. We all benefit from their work. [1] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org [2] http://www.netbsd.org/donations/

The FBSD goal for 2011 was 400k (raised 460k). 2012 was for 500k goal. 2013 is 1M goal.

They've raised almost 750k the last time that page was updated..

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

#267

Post by pjjw »

switch007 wrote: post #230
scott_s wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[scott_s@local ~] history | wc -l 500 [scott_s@local ~] history | grep ssh | wc -l 191 Donated.

Great point. OpenSSH is rock solid and it and underpins many, many other projects and businesses. I don't think it's going too far to say that companies making heavy use of (i.e. profit from) OpenSSH are obligated to donate.

many do by employing the openssh maintainers to do that. it's the best way to contribute to openssh without contributing to theo.

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

#268

Post by zshhasoptions »

chongli wrote: post #251
scott_s wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[scott_s@local ~] history | wc -l 500 [scott_s@local ~] history | grep ssh | wc -l 191 Donated.

The shell history really ought to have some sort of de-dupe feature. Too many lines of history get taken up by duplicate entries!

try adding setopt HIST_SAVE_NO_DUPS to your .zshrc

you could also have a look at HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS and HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS (more options at http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Options.html )

If you still use bash, now is a good time to upgrade to zsh

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

#269

Post by nknighthb »

davidgerard wrote: post #200
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,…

If you EVER use OpenSSH for ANYTHING, you can cough up $20 for grumpy Theo. (I've interacted with Mr deRaadt once. He was perfectly lovely and helpful.)

> If you EVER use OpenSSH for ANYTHING, you can cough up $20 for grumpy Theo.

Theo provides negative value. There are no circumstances (least of all extortion) that would make me give him money or aid of any sort.

> (I've interacted with Mr deRaadt once. He was perfectly lovely and helpful.)

Most of us will never know. His public attitude has ensured that.

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

#270

Post by voltagex_ »

weland wrote: post #207
davidgerard wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder where the best place to report manpage bugs to is - for things like the builtin commands that may not have a single upstream. Does Ubuntu pull in a manpage update from Fedora? What about the other way around?
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