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

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2

by openbsddesktop • 13 years ago

825 407 13 years ago

marc.info

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html and http://openbsd.org/want.html

openbsddesktop3• 13 years ago

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html and http://openbsd.org/want.html

4ad2• 13 years ago

Useful (non-slashdot) links:

Initial ask for help: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138730448307723&w=2

How much it costs: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2

Why old hardware platforms matter: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2

Why not kickstarter: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973837906139&w=2

And most importantly, the donation link: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

Spooky23• 13 years ago

I wish they had done an appeal before the end of 2013. I usually do my donations then, when I "close the books" for the year.

rrjamie• 13 years ago

From their donation page, donations are not tax-deductible (for individuals at least; businesses may be able to expense them).

Nevertheless, I donated $50 just for the excellent work they do on OpenSSH.

4ad2• 13 years ago

They did:

Date: 2013-12-17 18:20:48

It just took a month to have this thread on HN (there were others).

j_s• 13 years ago

  > 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses [annually?]

fennecfoxen• 13 years ago

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.

and there's no way that overcoming those logistical reasons would be cheaper than $20,000? at all? okay, well then, I guess that limits your options doesn't it.

sliverstorm13• 13 years ago

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.

doktrin2• 13 years ago

It's kind of off-putting, to be honest. This quintessential open-source abrasiveness is fine and dandy until you start asking for cold hard cash.

toyg3• 13 years ago

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 hardware and poor development practices. With openSSH, they pretty much set the bar for security-related programs the wotld over.

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.

lsc• 13 years ago

No, you don't really get to complain about it when you are asking them for large sums of money.

Attitudes like this are a big part of why I am far happier to run a for-profit business at near-breakeven than I am running a not-for-profit or cooperative enterprise.

$20K is... rather less than what my RHEL bill would be if I was using RHEL and not CentOS.

I mean, I'm a pretty small shop, and $20K is a lot of money for me (thus I'm using CentOS and not RHEL.) - but by the standards of a whole operating system? twenty grand is small potatoes. Hell, /my/ power bill is rather more than $20K a year.

f2f• 13 years ago

I think they should hold a bake sale.

pyvpx• 13 years ago

all I want to say on this (to me, tiresome) topic is: if you or your company (especially if that is one and the same!!!!1) have ever used OpenSSH you should at the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM buy a damn CD. you really ought to donate a solid hundred in your local currency but if you can't, skip a couple pints this month and buy a CD.

if you use CARP or OpenBGPd and have never bought a CD, you need to buy two ;p

fidotron2• 13 years ago

As I commented when this appeared here the other day as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7059581

The fact this was submitted here and disappeared is kind of indicative of their problems.

canistr• 13 years ago

Fascinating given the attention that FreeBSD was given (and was able to raise) when posted on HN about their own funding problems.

jeremymcanally• 13 years ago

Many people find Theo de Raadt intolerable, which unfortunately may be affecting some of their Friendly Network Effect™ and, by extension, their fundraising ability (pure speculation, of course).

Supporting them is important given their work on other projects, but it seems like outright dismissing alternatives to someone cutting them a check (e.g., moving the servers, etc.) is also probably limiting the help they're going to receive.

jxf• 13 years ago

Just to make the call to action a little more direct, the donation link is here:

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

annasaru• 13 years ago

Done. Reading this is sad.

gommm2• 13 years ago

Thanks, just donated, I use openssh every day so it just makes sense.

romland• 13 years ago

Wow. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I had no idea OpenSSH fell under the OpenBSD umbrella! It certainly makes very good sense for me to donate now!

pwenzel• 13 years ago

Just donated to support the project as well.

scott_s• 13 years ago

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

Donated.

virtualwhys• 13 years ago

Donated, thanks for openssh the reminder.

stock_toaster• 13 years ago

Same here. Donated as well.

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

Maybe they should rename to OpenSSH Foundation then ...

ibdknox• 13 years ago

If the maintainers of that page are around here, I suggest putting some visualization of how close you are to the goal on there. It's amazing how much of a psychological motivator a bar filling up is.

jlgaddis8• 13 years ago

Somebody from the Foundation said on misc that they were going to do that.

ajaymehta• 13 years ago

This is a great point. I work on tools that would be perfect for this: Crowdtilt[0] and our open-source tool Crowdhoster[1]. This situation specifically reminds me of a Crowdtilt campaign that launched here on HN after the Internet Archive burned down[2], so I would be very happy to help.

[0] https://www.crowdtilt.com/

[1] http://www.crowdhoster.com/

[2] https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/please-help-the-internet...

JSno• 13 years ago

Asian donation is negligible?

tobiasu5• 13 years ago

I don't think so. The foundation probably doesn't have anyone anywhere in Asia with a bank account that can receive Paypal donations. The idea is to save transaction costs, not limit donations to certain parts of the world.

untitledwiz• 13 years ago

Just donated as well.

dataminer• 13 years ago

Thanks done, OpenSSH is an indispensable tool.

gommm2• 13 years ago

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.

nulagrithom• 13 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6939835

alberth• 13 years ago

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/

rgbrenner• 13 years ago

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..

ygra• 13 years ago

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.

lectrick• 13 years ago

Is there any way I can order them some LED lighting gear?

ninjin• 13 years ago

Since PayPal won't accept donations from where I live (Japan), here is an alternative way of donating through the Calgary Computer Shop:

https://https.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/order

Having just donated I would like to say that the man pages are wonderful. I like them so much that I have a oman alias and made a quick (and dirty) script to fetch them.

https://github.com/ninjin/ppod/tree/master/hck/openbsd_manpa...

Try them out when coding C or when writing portable shell-scripts, they are a blessing. There is also the official web interface:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi

kriro2• 13 years ago

Huge +1 to the quality of OBSD man pages being awesome

mukundmr• 13 years ago

Thanks. Made a donation.

simias3• 13 years ago

As a long time FreeBSD user I wish the BSDs would find a way to "unite" in a way, try to put redundant infrastructures in common.

Right now I feel like linux is slowly eating all the market share, if it continues that way the BSDs will regress back to the lines of Hurd and Plan9.

Competition is always a good thing, even in the OSS world.

npsimons• 13 years ago

As a Linux user who hasn't dabbled in the BSDs for a long time, I can't but agree about having them around. My first reaction to this headline was to find a donate link, and I don't even have anything running OpenBSD, here or at work. I'm not sure uniting would be a good idea, however; having separate projects focused on separate needs seems to be a good thing to me.

microtonal3• 13 years ago

Competition is always a good thing, even in the OSS world.

Linux is just a kernel. The problem is that outside the kernel there is perhaps already too much competition. E.g. there is glibc, eglibc, bionic, dietlibc, etc. There is SysV init, systemd, Upstart, OpenRC, etc. Then we have GNOME, KDE, Unity, Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE.

For practically any component in a Linux system, except the kernel itself, there is already a lot of competition. The BSDs add four more, albeit incompatible (with Linux and each other), user lands.

I think the FLOSS world would profit from less fragmentation and more focus on making the good projects better. Of course, polishing existing work is not as much fun as writing your own ;).

asdasf8• 13 years ago

Competition is a good thing, so we should consolidate and have less competition

That makes very little sense.

simias3• 13 years ago

Then re-read my comment within the context of this discussion, which is OpenBSD being on the verge of bankruptcy.

If I believed all the BSD forks had a chance to live long and prosper on their own I wouldn't be saying that, but right now it seems to me that none of them have any real long time chance to remain generic OS on par with Linux (except possibly FreeBSD but it's not even certain anymore). Linux just moves too fast these days.

sliverstorm13• 13 years ago

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.

protomyth4• 13 years ago

First, a lot of code migrates around, look at any of the release notes for any BSD and watch how much is from another BSD project. These are not silos.

Don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD and use it for somethings, but they don't really take security very seriously. Theo just gave this lecture with examples http://tech.yandex.com/events/ruBSD/2013/talks/103/

hhw6• 13 years ago

I disagree that BSD market share is eroding. It may not be gaining as many desktop users, but it's still popular on the server side, especially on file servers due to support for ZFS, is used as the base for other operating systems like MacOS X, Juniper's JunOS, and even Playstation 4's OS. Netflix adopting FreeBSD also means a very large portion of bits being shuffled around the Internet are off FreeBSD servers.

fidotron2• 13 years ago

It certainly would seem like merging build farms or continuous integration systems for the ports should be doable. The setup for such a thing wouldn't be free, but it would benefit all the BSDs if they could agree to it, and make this business of supporting esoteric hardware a little less of a sticking point.

The thing is they had their schisms for a reason, and inability to work together is kind of baked in, even if much of the code does in practice cross pollinate further downstream.

The other question is if it's possible to get the benefits of the strange old hardware support without the old school power consumption. I think many relative youngsters would be surprised by how thirsty some of those classic UNIX boxes were, and the hardware must be close to dead now. At some point the only remaining working SPARCstation will be used to build OpenBSD.

cpprototypes• 13 years ago

A little bit off topic, but this reminds me again of how much the web needs an easy payment system (as easy as in-app purchases in mobile). EFF, wikipedia, I often see notices or news of things they're doing and think to myself that I should donate. But I'm usually in the middle of something and stopping everything to take out my wallet, get the CC, fill out a form, etc. is just too disruptive. So I try to remind myself to do it later, but then forget.

Xdes2• 13 years ago

As Bitcoin expands its adoption this will become less of an issue.

ForHackernews• 13 years ago

Maybe. Doing anything with bitcoin today is a giant pain in the ass. Which is easier?

a) Typing in a credit card number + billing address.

- Signing up for an account at a Bitcoin exchange.

- Transferring money to them (by doing a?)

- Waiting for them to exchange it.

- Transferring it to the recipients' wallet (this one step is kinda-easy, I'll grant)

- Hoping the price of bitcoin holds stable-ish so that my bitcoins are still worth something when the recipient converts them back.

drdeadringer• 13 years ago

The tagline for such a payment system should be "Let's not have another heartfelt message from Jimmy Wales".

vog2• 13 years ago

Indeed, they should consider looking more at Europe, especially France and Germany. Their donation page seems to focus too much on US, Canada and seems to assume the rest of the world is happy with PayPal.

Other organization provide all information for SEPA bank transfers on their donation page (e.g. http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Donate/SEPA), while the OpenBSD donation page just provides an email address that you should contact if you want to donate via a simple, plain bank transfer. That's kind of discouraging.

tobiasu5• 13 years ago

Theo has a german bank account right here: http://www.openbsd.org/bank-donation.html

justin668• 13 years ago

I think it makes a lot of sense that a project with OpenBSD's priorities does not publish its own bank information on the web.

microtonal3• 13 years ago

Flattr was intended to provide easy microdonations:

http://flattr.com/

Unfortunately, when I was using it, there weren't many interesting FLOSS projects to contribute to. Perhaps things have gotten better.

kybernetikos• 13 years ago

I really like gittip https://www.gittip.com/

livejamie• 13 years ago

Square Cash is pretty sweet, just send an email

incision• 13 years ago

EFF and Wikipedia both have prominent options to donate via Paypal. Wikipedia offers an Amazon option as well.

Either of those are two clicks (choice and confirmation) plus authentication which is identical to my in-app experience.

The biggest difference isn't about the process, but at what level a user has bought in to it - a payment shim from a particular provider or an ecosystem (Google / Apple).

I wonder how folks would react if Chrome / Safari started popping up a button to allow a seamless donation through Wallet/iTunes whenever a page presented a PayPal link or a CC form?

Karunamon2• 13 years ago

You should probably add "not run by an intolerable company" when speccing out a universal payment system. There are a number of people who absolutely refuse to touch paypal due to bad experiences or the bad experiences of someone else.

Amazon less so, but in my experience, almost nobody takes them.

b3n• 13 years ago

They let you donate with Bitcoin, which for me is about two mouse clicks.

raydev• 13 years ago

I feel like it's useful to point that OpenBSD won't say exactly why the bill is so high, and apparently they don't have open accounting. That bothers me a bit.

Link to relevant reddit comment thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1vakm9/openbsd_develo...

brohee2• 13 years ago

What kind of "why" do you expect? There is a pretty large collection of computers, network equipment, UPS and HVAC stuff. You want a machine per machine watt usage?

8 year old image of one of the racks, is only grew since... http://www.openbsd.org/images/newrack.jpg

aiiane• 13 years ago

It's a due diligence kind of thing. If you're asking people to make significant monetary contributions, it makes sense to provide a clear picture of what you're using that money on.

sliverstorm13• 13 years ago

They could at least say, We use X watts to power Y machines

If they don't know at least numbers like that, there are some bigger issues.

olouv• 13 years ago

That bothers me too, what if they are mining bitcoins with the energy/funds? That wouldn't seem too far-fetched for unaudited tech-savy people.

chrissnell4• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, but that is just absurd. Some of the servers in question are coming up on 20 years of age. We didn't have the power-conserving hardware back then that we have now. Those old SPARCstations put out heat like a hair dryer. That stuff uses a lot of power and remember that ever watt of power you put into a server needs to be cooled. So, basically double the electricity costs for any given piece of gear. This rack is not cheap to run or cool, and definitely not in a home basement without access to highly efficient (and huge) datacenter-class cooling and power infrastructure. There are reasons that this gear needs to stay at Theo's place. If you don't like his reasons, you don't have to donate. He didn't email you and ask for a donation; you read the story here.

jdludlow• 13 years ago

  > 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?

HeyLaughingBoy• 13 years ago

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?

simias3• 13 years ago

Probably, but then again if he wants my money he better explain why he needs it and how he's going to spend it, doesn't he?

That being said since OpenBSD is all about security maybe that's the reason they don't want to move the servers to some place where they won't be able to monitor physical access to the machines. That's pure speculation though.

gtaylor4• 13 years ago

If he's asking for money from me, I would like to know why it's not an option. The root of the issue being raised is power/space, so I'd definitely want to know why I'm forking up for something the project could potentially get for free.

It's not a big deal, and I don't expect him to go into detail. He just won't get a cent from me without elaborating, and that's OK. I'm not mad, and I understand he has mis-givings. I just don't think that answer is acceptable enough for me to donate, but that's my subjective opinion (and not everyone else's).

orbitur2• 13 years ago

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.

gtaylor4• 13 years ago

Especially if the fate of OpenBSD as it stands is hanging in the balance. Depending on who is offering, this may be because of the uncertainty of whatever arrangement is being proposed. For example, if a smaller company or an individual offers to foot the bill, what happens if the company/individual later has a budget crunch of their own, or decides to cut ties?

Of course, if an IBM/Apple/Google/etc offers space/power, it may be a less risky proposition.

calpaterson• 13 years ago

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.

gtaylor4• 13 years ago

It's possible, but without any kind of answer we are all just guessing.

tptacek• 13 years ago

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 to business strategy.

Anyways, very early on, EnterAct managed to maneuver into a reputation for premium customer support. We got that reputation by doing some concrete things differently than our competitors: we staffed an appropriate number of CSRs, trained them to be nice to customers, did a lot of gratuitous tech support for basic computer problems, and were flexible about resolving billing disputes. Sadly, a lot of those things were differentiators at the time. A couple years in and we were essentially able to hang "best customer support" on our list of features, and eventually we became the most popular ISP in Chicago largely based on that.

But something I came to notice pretty quickly: the things we were doing to earn that support reputation stopped being empirical differentiators pretty quickly. Our largest competitor, run by Karl Denninger, did us a continuing series of favors by pissing off their customers. But other large regional ISPs pretty quickly learned not to set fire to their customer base, and, by the end, I think our customer service was pretty much at par for the whole area; we were no longer truly different based on support. The reputation, however, never left.

That observation has stuck with me for my entire career. I think about it all the time. It's banal, I know: "early impressions count a lot", but there's a little more to it than that: you can weaponize an early impression by turning it into your market positioning and having some message discipline.

I left EnterAct for a job in Calgary with a company called Secure Networks (SNI), doing development and security research. For the year prior to leaving EnterAct, I had also been working with the OpenBSD project, mostly by writing all their security advisories, but also doing a bit of part-time security research. SNI operated the world's first commercial vulnerability research team, and had a very close relationship with Theo; we had a full time employee who had essentially led the first OpenBSD security audit. I went drinking with Theo many times, and vividly remember hanging out in his basement with Tim Newsham eating bad pizza and trying to find vulnerabilities in Daniel Bernstein's qmail (we found one that would work if integers were 128 bits, but ironically missed the LP64 bugs that Georgi Guninski found; it was 1997, though).

This is all a long prelude to a simple point, which is that I think OpenBSD's reputation for security works in a very similar way to how EnterAct's reputation worked. OpenBSD started doing something very different than FreeBSD, Linux, and (particularly) NetBSD: they did an OS-wide audit for vulnerabilities, and aggressively fixed apparent bugs whether or not we could demonstrate that they were exploitable. That was a great move. But it was so obviously great that pretty much everyone (with the possible exception of NetBSD) quickly adopted the practice.

Among security research insiders, OpenBSD's reputation became a little bit farcical. Not that OpenBSD was comically insecure --- it wasn't --- but that its reputation so far outstripped its actually differentiation. People found a bunch of vulnerabilities in OpenBSD and laughed as the claim at the top of the OpenBSD changed from "no vulnerabilities" to "no remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in the default install".

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

I'm sure the OpenBSD project would like its threat model to include NSA. But OpenBSD is not a meaningful ally in a contest between you and NSA. NSA wins that fight. OpenBSD's userland was much stronger than FreeBSD's in 1999, but I'm not sure I think their kernel is stronger in 2013, and that's probably what matters more.

Let me wind this bloviation up with a caveat: one thing a reputation for security gets you is a feed of talent that is interested in working on security problems. OpenBSD certainly got that. So for instance, OpenBSD's developers designed and built privilege-separated OpenSSH. There is a lot of good security work that has started inside the OpenBSD project, and I don't mean to talk any of that stuff down. I'd just be careful about taking the project's overall reputation to the bank, especially if you have serious adversaries.

Sorry for hanging this sprawling comment off your (simpler) point; I just don't want the root comment on the thread to be me talking down OpenBSD.

andyjohnson0• 13 years ago

Interesting thought. I wonder what precautions are taken w/r/t Linux?

chongli2• 13 years ago

Why not just do what Linus Torvalds does and simply trust his hash function? For anyone to tamper with the Linux kernel sources and have him not notice they'd have to generate a SHA-256 collision and somehow get this change past thousands of clones of the repository.

takeda• 13 years ago

I've seen a picture posted on Slashdot how they server rack looks like. There are many very old machines, I am sure that at least one reason is fear that they break during transportation.

Found it: http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg

sliverstorm13• 13 years ago

Why not move the machines, and if the Amiga breaks down and they can't find a replacement, end Amiga support? I mean, that's not a wonderful outcome, but what would you prefer to see given the following options?

a) Shut down OpenBSD

b) Shut down Amiga support in OpenBSD

I mean, is it even a hard choice?

Besides, if there are many developers who like developing for Amiga, surely they would be able to find a replacement?

dmunoz• 13 years ago

That image has been present on the lower right corner of the openbsd homepage for a long time. Given the name of the image, I imagine it's been present since at least since 2009, but my (fuzzy) memory wants me to believe there has been an image of a rack there even before then.

osxrand• 13 years ago

Am I the only one who want's to organize and clean up those racks? :)

crististm• 13 years ago

The AC instructions note made me smile.

It reminded me of a post-it I left in the company lab with a diagram for how to do proper gigabit cross-overs. I could still find it there five years later after they rearranged the lab several times.

jsz0• 13 years ago

There must be more to it than that. Two racks aren't using $20k in electricity.

luckydude2• 13 years ago

Huh, no Sun4/470? I wonder what happened to the one Theo got from me. Too slow I guess but it was a fun machine back in the day.

sdkmvx• 13 years ago

OpenBSD supports a number of odd and unusual platforms and does builds on them. See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html. Older hardware can both use a significant amount of electricity and require much more hand-holding than is possible. Virtualization and emulation are not acceptable substitutes because they claim that doing builds on e.g. VAX is one of the best ways to ensure that the code works on VAX as opposed to simply booting on VAX. They also regularly find bugs affecting all platforms that are exacerbated by one particular architecture (think alignment or endianness issues).

nailer4• 13 years ago

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?

whyme2• 13 years ago

I don't see why they're proposing a all or none situation when they could choose to move and in doing so, limit the number of platforms they support. If anyone complains about a specific platform being dropped, well have them pay for the overhead associated with it.

mrweasel4• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the older hardware at least require some degree of hands on administration. Rebuilding an testing a new kernel on a VAX with no remote administration features would slow things down. Having stuff easily available makes a lot of sense to me.

kps• 13 years ago

Not likely. Everything of that sort has a simple serial console port.

jlgaddis8• 13 years ago

Because Theo.

tobiasu5• 13 years ago

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. Reboot them. Constantly update to the latest development version, making them panic quite a bit. Diagnose that. Installation procedure requires console access, monitor adapters, weird keyboards, ... They don't fit in racks properly. There are security concerns. Etc, etc.

It's wrong to think of the machine room as rack space than can be had for cheap somewhere else. It's much more like a lab (with the mad professor living on top, controlling the experiment).

myrandomcomment• 13 years ago

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.

brasetvik• 13 years ago

You may not be using OpenBSD, but the same organization is behind OpenSSH.

Imagine being without ssh, then go donate. :)

drdaeman2• 13 years ago

Correction: OpenSSH, not SSH at all.

mhurron• 13 years ago

Name another free ssh implementation.

On every* UNIX and UNIX-like OS ssh is OpenSSH. OpenSSH is why we don't telnet everywhere anymore.

*- Honestly, I don't know of anything that ships with something that is not OpenSSH.

chubot• 13 years ago

What other SSH's are there? I believe if you use any Linux distro, or any BSD, you are using OpenSSH.

The only Unix systems I know of that don't use OpenSSH are embedded devices.

(note: I donated based on being OpenSSH user; I am not an OpenBSD user but I'm glad it exists)

bluedino• 13 years ago

It'd be nice if a company, or companies that use SSH in their products would pool together 20k a year to pay for this.

xradionut5• 13 years ago

They could probably kill support and power for some of the "dead silicon" platforms they support. If the CPU hasn't been manufactured in the last decade or two, why support it?

protomyth4• 13 years ago

Because people still use it and it helps the project find errors in modern architectures.

rsync• 13 years ago

I am happy to see continued support for "dead silicon" as it provides a (possibly) non-compromised platform. It's also nice to have obscure attack surface available if one required it.

Did you see any leaked powerpoint slides discussing MIPS r12k vulns, created in conjunction with SGI ? I didn't ...

orbitur2• 13 years ago

They should probably try to define some sort of support schedule. The current setup of "let's support everything under the sun from the last 10 years" is unsustainable, but they seem to want to continue with that.

hhw6• 13 years ago

From Theo's comments on the mailing list:

"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. "

"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."

xradionut5• 13 years ago

Who still uses an 88K machine? I have the CPU board from a DG/UX machine, but the latest chips are from 93/94.

riffraff• 13 years ago

which other BSD would that be?

If the answer is "NetBSD", let's consider that the expenses in 2012 for the NetBSD foundation were $6k [0].

Either they don't support the architectures the same way or they are spending the money in a smarter way.

[0] http://www.netbsd.org/foundation/reports/financial/2012.html

mrweasel4• 13 years ago

I think Theo answered that question more than once. The different platforms reveal different kind of bugs, but having the platforms around also keeps developers around.

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

plainOldText• 13 years ago

I'm not an OpenBSD user, but I like their focus on security. And this could be a positive influence on other platforms. Donated.

PaulRobinson3• 13 years ago

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, ego-maniac.

As such many people are going to see this and laugh and think "good riddance", and will be happy to see OpenBSD disappear.

That will only be enhanced by the fact the books are closed, the shortfall on the electric bill is inexplicably $20k, and nobody is prepared to explain the detail.

In essence rudeness + shady accounting practice != open source community that should feel a sense of entitlement from non-core users

It's a shame because the code (especially the crypto code) is really good. Seriously, go read it: I used to love reading the OpenBSD source, but I never contributed anything because Theo was such an absolute jerk.

I hope the guys who work on the crypto stuff at least either keep doing so elsewhere (Free- or Net-), or a new project without the need for $20k in electricity bills spins up to keep going.

rubiquity• 13 years ago

We're in a post-NSA revelations world and you're happy to see a project like OpenBSD disappear just because the people behind it aren't nice?

PaulRobinson3• 13 years ago

Yes, because other projects will rise in its place run by people with better social skills, and they are more likely to build tools of use to a wider audience, and we'll see wider acceptance of crypto.

I genuinely believe my non-tech friends and family have such a poor approach to security, because the people who have a good approach to developing security tools have such a poor approach towards my non-tech friends and family.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

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.

transitionality4• 13 years ago

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

vezzy-fnord2• 13 years ago

Don't associate the entire project and foundation with the actions of their figurehead.

Honestly, Theo can be an asshole, but often his temper is warranted when he's faced with idiocy, like when RMS was unapologetically trying to persuade the removal of all mentions of non-free packages in OpenBSD. (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134850)

I know this is what RMS does, and actually I'm sympathetic with his views, but in that context it was bullshit. This is just one incident, who knows how much Theo has to deal with other people wasting his energy on non-issues, trivialities and misconceptions?

For what it's worth, he isn't any less of a dick than Linus. Yet Linus consistently earns hero praise and adulation, the criticism of his personality being secondary and written off as justified. So why isn't Theo's justified?

anthonyb• 13 years ago

I don't think Theo's reaction is really warranted. I mean, really? "slimy hypocritical asshole"?! And the follow up later on when someone calls him on this is pretty telling: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134896

I don't know the full history of that thread, but it's not mentions of non-free packages that RMS was talking about - it was ports in OpenBSD that allowed people to easily install non-free packages.

Ah, found the original: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119730630513821&w=2

And FWIW, I think Linus is a dick, too - but Linux has a much larger following, mainly due to reasons other than Linus.

sliverstorm13• 13 years ago

the shortfall on the electric bill is inexplicably $20k

Quick back-of-the-envelope: At $0.12/kWh, the shortfall is about 20kW of continuous power.

Do they have significant HVAC requirements? I don't think I see 20kW of iron in the two racks that get pictured.

tobiasu5• 13 years ago

Yes, AC is required. Machines need to be shut down whenever it fails.

chrissnell4• 13 years ago

For every watt you put in, you need to cool that watt, which requires a high percentage of a second watt. Some of that equipment is almost 20 years old, maybe more. One those old machines could warm an office back in 1994.

On top of the electricity for the servers and for cooling, there is also maintenance: replacing ancient drives and other system components when they fail (which may require paying out the arse for some gear on eBay), fixing cooling equipment (ever replaced a dead AC unit in your house?), network maintenance and upgrades, internet connection, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. $20K seems reasonable to me. He's not asking for $20MM or even $200K, guys. He's not mining bitcoins. Please be reasonable.

parennoob• 13 years ago

" Linus' rants on the Linux kernel lists are almost cookie cutter copies of Theo's."

Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference.

I can't be bothered to look for it right now, but there was an email on lkml where an inexperienced contributor basically asked "should i just give up?" and Linus chipped in with quite a friendly manner and mentioned how important contributions from everyone were to the project.

justin668• 13 years ago

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.

wbl• 13 years ago

The code quality and the fact that maintainer is blunt about problems are not unrelated.

Fomite5• 13 years ago

Neither is a project getting shut down because they can't raise money and one of their public faces being a jerk.

asdasf8• 13 years ago

So let's deal with the elephant in the room: the OpenBSD project is run by complete and utter jerks

Really? Could you give me an example of that? Because from where I sit, as someone having been around the openbsd world for ~15 years, I don't see it. I see lots of people bitch about it, but never any examples of it actually happening. It is just something people seem to assume will be taken as gospel.

PaulRobinson3• 13 years ago

I once offered to help work on some docs to make them a bit more user-friendly because at the time they were quite obtuse. Theo responded with something along the lines of requesting I please go away, as this project doesn't need people like me, and then a liberal sprinkling of lots of rude names and insults suggesting I was from under a rock/an idiot/etc.

I offered help and enthusiasm for the project. He called me a lot of names and suggested OpenBSD wasn't for people who weren't like him.

That's just me. Fine, I'm a big guy, I can take it. But I then watched for months as he did the same to countless other individuals. Newb: "Hey, we could do 'X'" Theo: "No, go away, I hate you", is pretty much the tone.

Then there is the more public stuff. The stuff that is historic but a little larger.

He created OpenBSD because the NetBSD core ousted him for his attitude and demeanour towards other developers.

There is a whole section of his Wikipedia page dedicated to his "Outspokenness" which is a polite way of calling what is actually his "Obnoxiousness":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt#Outspokenness

Nobody doubts he can write code, and that OpenBSD - and OpenSSH in particular - was a bonus to the open source World, but my point is that he and his inner circle are hostile to the rest of the community who aren't quite like them. It's a clique.

And cliques can't ask outsiders for help once they're established: they made up the rules, and they will live (and die), by those rules.

Theo had a choice: compromise, and be nice to people and understand other people's needs; or, don't compromise and be a bit of a jerk and piss people off but stay true to your own values.

He chose the latter. Fine. He should not be surprised that they are not running to their wallets when he needs $20k for electricity bills to continue running the project in that same way.

I'm not being rude about this, I'm being pragmatic. I don't particularly want to see OpenBSD die, but I can't see many people rushing to save it, and that's because the top hierarchy are perceived as - and are documented as regularly behaving as - complete jerks.

If Theo had been a little more temperate to more people, it's quite likely his $20k (and then some) would have been raised in under an hour. I know some FreeBSD guys have raised similar/larger amounts for smaller projects in the past within a day or two. How? By being nice people that other people want to support.

mrweasel4• 13 years ago

The OpenBSD developers are very direct, and will hurt your feelings if you can read the documentation. Honestly though, it seems reasonable for the most part. If you read the misc mailing list, I think you'll find that the people who are getting a rough treatment are those who didn't stop a think for a moment or who are them self giving bad or unrequested advice.

I only ever had a few email exchanges with Theo. One was a bug report and the other was a few questions for a project I did while studying, but he was friendly and helpful. Even if Theo had been a jerk, that doesn't change the fact that I've gotten a lot of value from OpenBSD in the past, without being asked for anything back, until now.

The closed books doesn't really bother me, I doubt that Theo or someone at the OpenBSD Foundation is going to run of to Cuba with the money. Maybe we should just accept that the people that they are asking for help are people like me who see a value proposition in: I give them €20 a month and OpenBSD doesn't go away. Only takes 1000 people like me to solve this and surely there has to be 1000 people in the world for who this is a great deal.

ams61102• 13 years ago

One thing new arrivals should know about OpenBSD: the man pages are good! Really. It took me a while to get out of my linux and windows habits of of immediately going to google or a mailing list or a forum when I didn't know how to do something. With OpenBSD, read the man page first. In most cases you won't need any other resources.

davidgerard3• 13 years ago

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.)

nknighthb4• 13 years ago

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.

protomyth4• 13 years ago

Really, the times I dealt with them they were quite pleasant and helpful.

forgottenpass• 13 years ago

There is "opinionated software" and then there is Theo being an intolerable, obnoxious, ego-maniac.

They're more or less the same thing, one is how you see people you like, the other is how you see people that rub you the wrong way.

dinkumthinkum2• 13 years ago

You're entitled to your view and I won't disagree with some of it ... but shady accounting practices? What are you alleging exactly?

blhack• 13 years ago

They accept bitcoins, here is their donation page, and they're the people that maintain openSSH, the software that I'd bet ALL of us use every day:

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

cLeEOGPw• 13 years ago

Thanks for link, donated some.

kscottz• 13 years ago

I would love to see more FOSS projects on GitTip (https://www.gittip.com/). It would seem to me that regular small donations that can be budgeted would be more helpful than just scratching where and when it itches. Giving $1 a week versus $50 at once is so much more convenient. We as the FOSS community need to own up that writing and hosting software isn't free, and most of us as highly paid engineers are in a position to be charitable and help out. My resolution for this year is to give away 1% of my income to the FOSS community and related charities (EFF, Wikipedia, Ada Initiative, PSF, etc). I challenge everyone on HackerNews to do the same. Stop bitching and put your money where your mouth and let's go help make a better world.

auvi• 13 years ago

Kudos to you!

jms7032• 13 years ago

What will happen to OpenSSH if OpenBSD can't keep the lights on?

wmf2• 13 years ago

It will find a new home that's not dying.

openbsddesktop3• 13 years ago

Are you perfectly sure that it will represent the same quality then?

jpessa• 13 years ago

what i find interesting (read: suspicious) is how they have seemingly prioritized and budgeted other things ahead of paying for electricity.

when i make budgeting decisions (whether personal or in business), i start with the needs before going to the "nice to haves". for openbsd, i can't help but assume powering their various servers/systems is kiiind of a priority...

so what i want to know is: - the over all budget $ amount for 2014 - what was the cost of power in 2013 * how did you get to $20k for 2014? - which priorities are worth funding over power

my suspicion is that there's plenty of room for give and take here.

jijji• 13 years ago

The bigger question is who pays $2000/month for electricity for a server?

schwap• 13 years ago

1666.67/month for electricity powering 2 racks of servers + HVAC.

hhw6• 13 years ago

That's actually a good deal; it's closer to the cost of what just 1 rack usually goes for in a proper data centre.

jms7032• 13 years ago

Can we get them some solar panels?

jethro_tell7• 13 years ago

Yeah suggested on the list. Dismissed as not helpful

maerF0x0• 13 years ago

You'd need something like a 10KW system? 2396 hrs sunshine in calgary. They use something like 24MWhrs .. is my maths working? Plus a massive battery system to get through the night, ... plus account for shorter sunlight in the winter.. Yup, not helpful :P

bhaile• 13 years ago

Thanks for linking it here and would be better if it was linked to an article providing additional details other than electricity costs. Other users have posted the relevant links.

On another note, the readability of the font was a turn off for me. Fortunately, there is an option to view it in plain text. adding &q=raw at the end of the URL. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2&q=raw

jlgaddis8• 13 years ago

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 donation of $20 wasn't even worth it. (Granted, $20 isn't much in the grand scheme of things but I feel that it reasonable covers my use of OpenBSD.)

There are many people who think that Theo is the worst thing for the Project (because he's such an asshole). OTOH, however, there are many who think that the Project wouldn't exist if it weren't for Theo.

wila• 13 years ago

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!

jlgaddis8• 13 years ago

I'm excited about buying a cupcake from one of the OpenBSD developers at the bake sale.

72deluxe• 13 years ago

Haha brightened up my morning, thanks! Very amusing haha

jlgaddis8• 13 years ago

Although the priority at this point is certainly paying the electric bill, you might also consider taking a look at the "Hardware Wanted" page [0] and seeing if you have anything laying around that one of the developers can use. It's typically not brand new top-of-the-line gear they're looking for so you might be surprised.

[0] http://openbsd.org/want.html

xradionut5• 13 years ago

I've scrapped most of these systems years ago. Still have a aviion dual cpu board somewhere in the shed, probably doesn't work.

openbsddesktop3• 13 years ago

VIDEOS

Exploit Mitigation Techniques: an Update After 10 Years (by Theo) http://tech.yandex.com/events/ruBSD/2013/talks/103/

An OpenBSD talk by Michael Lucas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXPV3vJF99k

lawnchair_larry• 13 years ago

Oh look, it's the talk where Theo blatantly and shamelessly pretends he invented all of the mitigations that Spender and Pax Team had many years before anyone at OpenBSD even mentioned it. They pioneered stack randomization and ASLR? Are you serious?

Aside from OpenSSH, OpenBSD is not security relevant, and hasn't been for about a decade. So when they don't get the 20k, nothing of value is lost.

justin668• 13 years ago

I just started watching these. About six minutes into the fifty minute talk Theo says "this wasn't our idea." If he's trying to convince people he invented that idea he's going about it in a subtle, reverse-psychology way. (he's not)

akulbe• 13 years ago

If you use OpenSSH... you benefit from OpenBSD's work, even if you're not an OpenBSD user.

SSH alone, and all the utilities that use it... have made my work/life SOOOOOO much easier. That may sound silly, but when you don't have to search for some 3rd-party utility because what you need is built-in... it makes life easier.

I'm donating.

diestl• 13 years ago

I wonder if this is a case of OS Darwinism. The fact that it seems to be hanging on by a thread shows most companies are using and contributing to Linux. I have never used OpenBSD so not sure what it overs over Linux as a Unix implementation?

spinchange• 13 years ago

I am also new to OpenBSD but had intended build a server with it per the advice in the top comment on this HN post from Zed Shaw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036661

My understanding is it has a reputation for being very secure, having thoroughly audited source code, and runs on lots of old and legacy hardware. It's also renown for having super thorough documentation. (see Zed's comment)

Judging by comments on this post, I think it is more a case of the maintainers and/or the foundation's management instead of loyalty or adoption of the OS. I believe HN also runs on OpenBSD too, if I'm not mistaken.

nzp4• 13 years ago

I believe HN also runs on OpenBSD too, if I'm not mistaken.

On FreeBSD.

dspillett• 13 years ago

You might not use OpenBSD as a whole but if you use Linux, especially in a server environment, you almost certainly rely on OpenSSH in some way, shape, or form, and that is part of the same project.

vezzy-fnord2• 13 years ago

The OS itself has never seen mainstream adoption, but it is renowned for being very well designed, as well as pioneering several OS security features like W^X, strlcat, strlcpy and countless other tweaks.

That and the foundation's most important projects are probably OpenSSH (absolutely essential, main focus here) and OpenNTPD, rather than the OS itself.

dinkumthinkum2• 13 years ago

I think you are very misinformed here. There are many commercial *BSD users that do not give back. There is one famous one that think building campuses that looks like a UFO is pretty important.

justin668• 13 years ago

I get that a lot of people don't care. I even get that some people have an unrealistic expectation that they should know how every dime of their donation is going to be accounted for, an expectation that must either not extend to their other charitable donations or serve as an indicator that they don't give a lot of money to charities at all.

What I don't get is where people - presumably people involved in information technology - conclude that $20k/year is a lot of money to spend on electricity. What utopia of free electricity for all are these people living in? Can I host a few servers there?

nknighthb4• 13 years ago

unrealistic expectation that they should know how every dime of their donation is going to be accounted for

This is done routinely by both for-profit and non-profit organizations. In fact, it's done routinely by individuals like myself.

What I don't get is where people - presumably people involved in information technology - conclude that $20k/year is a lot of money to spend on electricity.

Where I live, that would pay for the equivalent of 10-11 120-volt 20-amp circuits running at 80% capacity (per electrical code) 24/7. Some googling suggests Calgary rates are similar, which isn't surprising. We both get most of our power from hydro.

justin668• 13 years ago

This is done routinely by both for-profit and non-profit organizations.

I wonder if any nonprofit, ever, has given a by-the-watt power accounting of the sort some of the people here are advocating

Where I live, that would pay for the equivalent of 10-11 120-volt 20-amp circuits running at 80% capacity (per electrical code) 24/7.

aka several racks of equipment. My God, the audacity of OpenBSD developers, to ask for help powering this stuff!

siculars• 13 years ago

just donated 0.10 btc. really easy with bitpay integration. would rather not give paypal or my cc the fees.

soapdog• 13 years ago

Just sent 50 USD their way. Its not much but it is as far as I can spend. I recommend everyone helping. OpenBSD is one of those projects that benefit everyone not only those using it.

mariuolo• 13 years ago

What about emulators?

kriro2• 13 years ago

Seems insane that they can't get enough funding given the current security climate. Think of some of the eccentrics whatever you want but they have always been fighting the good fight as far as I'm concerned.

No BLOB is a very sane idea for example. I think we'd be further along if that was enforced stricter by other projects.

bolle• 13 years ago

22 seems an appropiate amount. Or whatever your portnumber is for your SSH-server.

aaronem2• 13 years ago

I'm sympathetic, but not enough so to donate $22,000.

SwellJoe2• 13 years ago

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 love years ago, OpenBSD keeps OpenSSH as a side effect. I guess I'm OK with that.

Maybe it's even necessary for OpenSSH developers to understand systems level programming at a level only OS developers can grasp, and maybe OpenSSH wouldn't be the absolute beast it is today without that kind of influence and widespread knowledge found in the OpenBSD team. I dunno. Whatever it is, I support the people and the things they do for me in OpenSSH even if I don't care much about OpenBSD.

eruditely2• 13 years ago

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

ffrryuu• 13 years ago

The one with the gold makes all the rules.

elwesties• 13 years ago

This may be a silly question but could they virtualise the process on EC2?

voltagex_2• 13 years ago

They're running on so many esoteric architectures it's not really viable.

garg• 13 years ago

Since low level systems programming in involved, they wouldn't be able to test it in a VM.

Senkwich• 13 years ago

Donated. Hope it helps.

jnazario• 13 years ago

i used to have commit but was kicked out (along with a bunch of other people over the years). i even wrote a book on openbsd. what i see from afar is that obsd alienated a lot of people with theo's behavior, theo's gone and surrounded himself with sycophants, and the rest of the world caught up to them (largely) in features. as a result the userbase has shrunk - why put up with tirades if you have a secure platform elsewhere - and the features have remained stale.

theo was a visionary, and together with some other really brilliant folks (not counting myself as one of them) accomplished what people said no one could. since then he's been fine tuning that vision but has more or less kept it at around 2003. the world has changed, theo - and as a result the project - hasn't. so, the world caught up and users moved on.

ajkjk• 13 years ago

Can someone explain why I would want to support OpenBSD?

I get, from the comments, that: openSSH is great (sure, I can believe it) and Theo is an asshole but you should compromise and give them money anyway.

I don't get why a parallel operating system ought to continue existing, especially one that comes from the same legacy codebase as several others. I also don't get why, if openSSH is so good, the goal isn't to write a new SSH or fund openSSH separately and drop the rest that can't be supported. Why does the world needs OpenBSD instead of having the talent focused on making a smaller number (..Linux) better.

Certainly the answer might be 'because that's what the talent wants to work on' but that's not a good reason to fund it.

I have also gotten the impression, from limited observation, that there are real problems in the open source community with too many people doing the same thing and not working together, and with people being jerks (or just generally anti-social or at least not-highly-personable) and making it hard to get involved or care about otherwise important projects. I don't think supporting Theo, from what I've read here, helps that trend.

I know very little. Can someone fill me in?

toyg3• 13 years ago

OpenSSH is one of many offshoots of the OpenBSD project.

OpenBSD being a full OS means that they need tools for everything. Occasionally, one of those tools will be superior to mainstream alternatives, thanks to the very strict practices of the project (which really sets the bar for any other project in the security field) -- OpenSSH being the most famous example. Even if their tools don't get adopted, a lot of their code and ideas do, benefitting the whole ecosystem.

Their practices also mean that a lot of the standard GNU userland is regularly audited with a degree of precision not found in more mainstream projects. The bugs they find will be fixed by everyone else, again benefitting everyone in the FLOSS world.

midas007• 13 years ago

OpenBSD overall is interesting. The installer alone signals how simple and elegant is the rest of the OS (take a look at the source [0]). A dozen basic questions give or take, and one can have a fully-functional box.

Revenue-wise, the best move would be for a shop like iXsystems, Pair or ByteMark to step up to cover costs. And, any shop that uses OpenSSH on a large scale should be able to pony up some cash to keep Open{SSH,BSD,CVS,{NTP,BGP,OSPF,SMTP,IKE}D} alive. For example, it would be nice to see OpenBSD on Amazon, and AWS might even be willing to fund kernel changes and more to accomplish that.

Finally: check out this handy script which makes it OpenBSD a whole lot easier to get started and complete common tasks. [1]

References:

[0] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/

[1] https://gist.github.com/steakknife/6120072/raw/shave

ryen• 13 years ago

I think OpenBSD should reach out directly to manufacturers of the many hardware platforms they support (HP, SPARC (now Oracle), etc) and ask for donations. Of course, only the companies that are still in business.

SilverSurfer972• 13 years ago

I would love to donate some Litecoin

annnnd• 13 years ago

I don't see the point - they should ask for subscriptions, not for donations. What will they do next month / year, ask again? And again?

dan1234• 13 years ago

They do offer Paypal subscriptions[0] You can donate 10-500 per month, in USD/CAD/EUR.

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

blahbl4hblahtoo• 13 years ago

I donated 50 bucks. These guys have been awesome for a long time. Sorry it took me this long to donate.

EDIT: Here's the thing. I don't directly use OpenBSD, but they have influenced more than just UNIX for a long time.

Aqueous• 13 years ago

Perhaps it would be best to move all non-specialized builds into Amazon or Rackspace or some automated CI service, and to move the specialized builds to a differnet, less expensive place, or keep them where they are. At the very least your electricity costs will go down.

ThinkBeat• 13 years ago

A lot of the discussion so far revolves around whether or not Theo can be abrasive. Who cares?

I would rather have a non compromising, highly secure operating system available, with all the source code available for me to see (none of that binary blob business) than a mediocre operating system that was somewhat secure from a guy who was really chill.

Funding the OpenBSD project is not a decision about the personality of Theo, its a decision on the usefulness and and the quality of work that the OpenBSD community creates.

When I am setting up and configuring and relying on a server with OpenBSD, I could care less if Theo is eccentric or not. I am in awe of the technical brilliance of OpenBSD.

And yes I have donated and do donate to the project, and I encourage clients I have that are running on OpenBSD to do the same.

mrbill• 13 years ago

I can see their point about "We need to keep this VAX around because building on actual hardware is different from building on emulation", however I'm sure there's bits of infrastructure, CRTs hooked to KVMs, etc, that could be replaced with newer and more efficient gear that can help with the power bill. You don't have to run the ENTIRE place on cast-off donations and stuff out of a dumpster.

D9u• 13 years ago

I suggest funding a solar power system, especially since the newer panels are even more efficient for a lower net cost-per-watt/kWH ratio.

Even on cloudy days the new panels will produce energy.

The panels are usually warranted to produce at least a certain (80% on mine) percentage for a set period of time. (25 years on my 5 + year old PV arrays) so the other considerations would be a charge controller/charger, a voltage inverter (from DC to AC) cabling and batteries for storage.

Of all the items, the batteries will be the main recurring expense as they generally don't last as long as the PV panels. Depending on type of battery, and how heavily cycled they are, batteries can last for 10 years, with proper care and use.

A system which maintains a constantly higher amperage will last longer than a system that has been allowed to be exceedingly discharged. (no less than 80% of capacity)

In my area electricity sells for $0.49USD per KWH ergo solar is the logical solution.

The end result is a self reliant system, independent of the issues associated with distributed power sources, while increasing responsibility for the consumer.

I find the cost/benefit ratio to be in favor of under-funded consumers, especially in the long term.

jason_slack• 13 years ago

I used to use OpenBSD on my daily laptop about 8 years ago. Loved it. Worked for a University and we had a few OpenBSD Servers in my department for web serving, email, etc. No other departments did.

Why did I stop? Theo was such an ass about questions on "his" mailing lists that, well, there were friendlier communities out there.

OpenSSH, however, I use a lot so I could donate a few bucks for that.

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

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