Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

marc.info

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 415 posts

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

#311

Post by wila »

jlgaddis wrote: post #130

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…

His $20 reply is an answer to the "why don't you sell more merchandise" question. Where he tries to explain that the merchandise model has a lot of hidden costs.

As you read the whole thread, I suppose you've also seen this quote?

Nicolai, and others,

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all of those stepping up to the call for contributions. Every little bit helps.

See: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138974990608900&w=2

Anyways, talk is cheap. Donate helps which as a lot of others here I just did. Thanks Theo!

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

#312

Post by aortega »

tptacek wrote: post #90
calpaterson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why is moving an unacceptable answer It seems likely that they don't trust anyone else to have physical access to the machines for security reasons. Their threat model probably includes national governments.

A somewhat related note about branding. My first "real" job was in the mid-90's; I was the first technical hire at a small Chicago ISP (EnterAct) that grew into a relatively large ISP (when I left, we were default-free peered to several tier-1 providers and had more POPs than I can name). It was great, and the team that started it --- two Big-5 accounting firm programmers --- was inspiring, particularly when it came…

> And at some point in the last 10 years, didn't OpenBSD's distro servers get owned up?

Yes, a cvs bug I believe. No kernel will protect you from bad user-mode code that really wants to execute everybody's shell script.

> Among security research insiders, OpenBSD's reputation became a little bit farcical.

I spent lots of time looking through the OpenBSD Kernel, togheter with FreeBSD and Linux kernel. It was my job for years, looking for vulns and writing exploits for them.

I still admire the OpenBSD Kernel for their simplicity and tidiness.

No comparision to FreeBSD kernel-side. FreeBSD kernel often have commits of several hundreds of KBs of mostly unaudited code. They still don't enable stack-protection today in 2014. It's a joke. My windows phone had stack protection in 2003.

No comparision to Linux either, the Linux kernel is so huge, so full of code that even if it's way more audited than FreeBSD, there are still vulns lurking everywhere and exploits for linux kernel came out almost monthly. Probably it's the reason it have so many security features, more than OpenBSD nowadays.

Windows, their kernel is a work of art. Microsoft only have to fire the guy that says "hey I got a great idea lets parse some random protocol inside the kernel"

But I disgress. OpenBSD is still very good. Very safe in the default install. It will protect your firefox from being owned by a NSA-sized enemy that really want to hack you? no. But the problem is in the browser, not in the kernel. Don't use a big browser. It's not in the default install :)

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

#313

Post by jethro_tell »

vinceguidry wrote: post #310
jethro_tell wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's where disenfranchising non dev types is a real problem. Theo talks about pulling devs to make shirts and stickers and how that's a waste of time, but there are people out there that aren't kernel hackers that love to contribute to something bigger than themselves. No one's good at everything and the OpenBSD persona of being for and including only experts has made them a very lopsided organization with load…

I'm not saying you're wrong. But we have to get realistic here, OpenBSD is not going to turn into Canonical, not overnight, maybe not ever. I'm sure we would all love for it to suddenly sprout a bedside manner, but it probably won't, and you or me sitting around saying it needs one isn't helpful. What we can rely on it being is technologically awesome. What else can you say that about? If you try to change the cultur…

No, I don't want that. But there is a big divide between those two things and having a little help with the business/relations wouldn't make them canonical. On the other hand there have been years (like 2012 and or 2011) where there were less than $30-40k donations to the OpenBSD project/foundation. remove electricity and there's just enough money for nothing. If you want a plausible OS you'll need a couple bucks; it's not an iPhone app. So instead of turning into canonical, maybe get some help to raise a few hundred thousand so you can run the boxes and have people behind the keyboards.

As for technically awesome, we are talking about a 'modern' OS that has poor support for multiple cores (servers will only have one core -theo), runs poorly inside a hypervisor and doesen't work as a hypervisor. An OS that does't support any of the newer types of file systems like zfs or btrfs. These things aren't strictly necessary, but that's kinda where things are headed in the server industry.

The code for the OpenBSD kernel is really clean and simple. It is well audited, but has half the security features of something like linux. This is a great approach if you don't stray to far from the kernel, but if it's not a firewall it might need a browser, java and or flash.

I think I am being realistic. It doesn't seem crazy that they could go on a fundraising binge, and get/hire some busines/PR/fundraising help that allows them to really meet their goals in the future. I'm not talking canonical money but you know 3-400k to power the servers and pay a couple people. That's a long term solution. We can all donate, and buy our disks but we'll be back here in a year.

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

#314

Post by eruditely »

SwellJoe wrote: post #241

If the price of OpenSSH is keeping all of OpenBSD running, I'll send OpenBSD some money. I've never used OpenBSD except to tinker with it, and likely never will. But, I use OpenSSH hundreds of times a day (both in automated jobs and in the terminal). It is utterly necessary to me; likely necessary for all of us, really. So, while a company would have shed the extra weight and focused on its core product that users lo…

Value of openssh cannot be understated. it is one of the most important pieces of software ever. Even if Theo's attitudes are distasteful.

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

#315

Post by justin66 »

protomyth wrote: post #237
justin66 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I get the feeling the people Theo yelled at are the same people Linus would yell at. Given Theo's behavior when RMS was trolling the misc list, Theo seemed quite calm.

There's a lot of fuzzy thinking in this thread. The idea that the emails which somehow come to our attention because they appear on internet blogs or something due to their OMG WTF value are representative of their author's normal, everyday output has as much merit as assuming, for example, that that photo of rackmounted OpenBSD computers on the openbsd.com page represents the entirety of the project's electricity usage.

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

#317

Post by enneff »

toyg wrote: post #124
sliverstorm wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

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 dedication to an important but relatively small open source project. He really is one of the true open source heroes.

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

#318

Post by ygra »

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/

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.

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

#319

Post by AdamN »

zshhasoptions wrote: post #268
chongli wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

'Upgrade' and a sourceforge link don't usually go together :-/

I'm a zsh user but am surprised that you guys are still using sourceforge instead of github.

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

#320

Post by microtonal »

bashinator wrote: post #264
efuquen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But many of those old hardware platforms can be emulated. So if their reason of existence is only triggering edge cases, there are other ways to do so.
Post reply on HN