Microsoft Now OpenBSD Foundation Gold Contributor

http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150708134520

by saghul • 11 years ago

267 96 11 years ago

Yay! OpenBSD does great work, I'm glad they are getting serious support now. Hopefully other large vendors do the same thing...I'm looking at you Intel, HP...

liviu-3• 11 years ago

Both Intel and HP have donated to OpenBSD: http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html

sudioStudio642• 11 years ago

I stand corrected. Cheers.

TruthSHIFT• 11 years ago

How much does one need to contribute to be Gold?

brynet2• 11 years ago

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

Iridium: $100,000 to $250,000

Platinum: $50,000 to $100,000

Gold: $25,000 to $50,000

Silver: $10,000 to $25,000

Bronze: $5,000 to $10,000

bcg1• 11 years ago

OT, but incidentally, gold is more valuable than platinum at the moment:

http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html

http://www.kitco.com/charts/liveplatinum.html

SoMuchToGrok• 11 years ago

FYI - Gold contributor means the donation was somewhere in the range of $25,000 to $50,000.

caiob• 11 years ago

Shame, that's pocket change for a company like Microsoft. Happy to see they're contributing nonetheless.

Fuxy• 11 years ago

Someone must have had some funds left over in the advertizing budget.

Regardless it's a very smart move and much appreciated.

Thank you Microsoft!

jmsdnns• 11 years ago

windows supporting openssh is most likely the reason

mulander• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure they got a donation closer to the lower $25,000 bound. I check the fund raisin page quite often and up to this morning it showed a total of $100,000 raised. It's now at $125,000.

Still great regardless of the amount. I'm happy that the money was donated to the project.

pki• 11 years ago

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...

100k -> 125k, yep

jabits• 11 years ago

What's the point of trying to say "Good job" if you're just going to minimize the gesture in the same paragraph? This adds nothing but a negative spin...

s_dev• 11 years ago

Theo de Raadt always complained that such companies never gave back. HNers were always quick to suggest he change his open source licence. Hopefully this means him and his crew can do a better job than they are already doing without them feeling they compromised on their values.

zxcvcxz• 11 years ago

What's in it for microsoft though? What is their end-goal? If they support opensource I'd rather they port some major programs to other platforms to make those platforms more viable.

Scarbutt• 11 years ago

If I heard correct, Microsoft wants to add openssh support to Windows 10, server and client.

mhurron• 11 years ago

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/archive/2015/06/03/lookin...

That is correct, adding a OpenSSH server and a client with Powershell was announced last month.

It's good to see Microsoft also contributing to the project, so many users of OpenSSH do not.

ams61102• 11 years ago

This has been possible with Cygwin for many years.

Someone1234• 11 years ago

Microsoft are adding OpenSSH support but NOT in Windows 10 RTM, and likely not this calendar year in general. The first Microsoft OS to receive OpenSSH support is likely Windows Server 2016 (or whatever name they finalise it on).

I just don't want people to run up Windows 10 on July 31st and then ask "but where is OpenSSH?!" Windows 10 might receive OpenSSH support in the future, but you'll be waiting a while. They only just announced the effort, engineering may not have even started yet in earnest.

morganvachon2• 11 years ago

Microsoft seems to be undergoing a huge sea change towards acceptance and promotion of open source software, and moving into a devices and services model for revenue as opposed to a software licensing model. It seems that most of the open source community still thinks they are "up to something" but I'm starting to believe that they are genuinely becoming a much better company than they were under Ballmer and Gates.

Either way, I'm happy to see them putting their money where their mouth was, literally.

sfk2• 11 years ago

I agree with much what you wrote, but why is this cause for happiness? It's basically the end of programming as a profession should every company go that way.

digi_owl• 11 years ago

MS has always been pragmatic. The shift is happening because they have gotten into the cloud business, with a primary focus on the infrastructure tier (Azure).

This means that as long as someone is renting compute time from them, MS don't really care what is running higher in the stack.

VLM• 11 years ago

My gut level guess is something in this list Might end up bundled into windows10 or 11 or ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD#OpenBSD_component_proj...

I suppose an internet router running OpenBGPD on windows approaches the "kill it with fire" level of visceral repulsion, but something more realistic like bundling openssh client or CARP or LibreSSL could totally happen.

liviu-3• 11 years ago

Well, it's no secret that Microsoft is planning to offer OpenSSH support:

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=2015060309042...

WorldWideWayne• 11 years ago

I'm hoping that they are going to generally start pulling a lot of Unix standards into Windows.

norea-armozel• 11 years ago

I'm thinking since they're working hard on their enterprise products (which includes virtualization, cloud computing/storage) that they're trying to bulk up their suite of products in one fashion or another. Especially since it looks like their enterprise offerings are making big gains in countries like the UK.

ams61102• 11 years ago

Goodwill if nothing else. I mean it's probably less than they spend on toilet paper in a month. At their scale, it's not an amount that has to have anything "in it" for them.

SixSigma• 11 years ago

When I donate money I don't think "What's in it for me, what's my end goal?"

prewett• 11 years ago

When a company best known for quashing competitors using very questionable means, whose modus operendi for years was to take other people's products and change it into their own thing (Java -> C#, for example), and one which loudly opposed Open Source, starts donating money, well, maybe they've had a shocking change of heart. Or, maybe there's some other reason.

That said, there's more and more evidence accumulating that Microsoft seems to have had a change of heart. I had a gut feeling I would like the new CEO. So far, so good.

Systemic33• 11 years ago

Worth noting that Facebook and Google are both silver contributors.

=== http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html ===

For 2015 The OpenBSD Foundation will recognize donors in the following categories based on contribution amount.

On request we will provide a link to your website for donations of $5000 or more, and display your logo for donations of $10,000 or more.

    Iridium: $100,000 to $250,000
    Platinum: $50,000 to $100,000
    Gold: $25,000 to $50,000
        Microsoft Corporation 
    Silver: $10,000 to $25,000
        Facebook Inc.
        Google Inc. 
    Bronze: $5,000 to $10,000
        2Keys Security Solutions
        Mandrill
        genua mbh

=============================================

liviu-3• 11 years ago

Also, Google has been donating every year since (at least) 2012, when OpenBSD started to make the donors list public.

brynet2• 11 years ago

Donations to the project have also been public for many years:

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

philip1209• 11 years ago

Out of curiosity, do they appear as donors so often due to corporate initiatives or employee gift matching?

peatmoss• 11 years ago

25-50k is generous, but won't float the project. I'll take this as a reminder to send some meager grad-student dollars their way.

mjcohen• 11 years ago

How much for these levels:

Vibranium

Adamantium

Unobtanium

sigzero• 11 years ago

Transformium

shmerl• 11 years ago

You forgot Orichalcum.

hackuser3• 11 years ago

    Gold: $25,000 to $50,000
        Microsoft Corporation 
    Silver: $10,000 to $25,000
        Facebook Inc.
        Google Inc.

Arguably these are small amounts for all three companies, but what is the best way to calculate a fair share - not just for large companies but for anyone? For example,

* How much does OpenBSD need?

* How much does each company benefit from OpenBSD's work?

* How much would it cost to license the software if it were proprietary? How much would it cost to build and maintain it in-house?

moviuro• 11 years ago

Some info here: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2015.html

seiji• 11 years ago

Those are hilariously small numbers. The accounting departments of those companies probably wouldn't even blink if one extra zero were added to the end.

If you're funding open source products like this, companies should fund at least 3-5 full time senior engineer salaries per year. We should praise "donating" $3 million to $10 million per year. Anything less is a joke seeing these amounts are from multi-billion dollar companies built on free software.

Imagine you lived next to a free buffet that only accepted donations. You ate there every day of the year, saved thousands of dollars over buying and making your own food, then thought you were being "generous" by dropping them a tenner at Christmas. Also, you're a full time tech employee who cashed out millions in stock and have several million dollar apartments in cities around the world. But, sure, you're generous by dropping them $10.

alecco3• 11 years ago

Tiny amounts. The OpenBSD folks contribute a lot of code those corporations use, like OpenSSH and plenty of security bugs fixed for many projects not their own.

OpenBSD still is at a financial crisis and not enough people care. Not even the ones reaping benefits out of it.

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

Indeed. It almost looks as Microsoft simply wanted to "one-up" the other two and...that's it. They should've been on the Iridium level.

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

Who would have guessed 10 years ago that in 2015, Microsoft would be a bigger supporter of a FLOSS project than Google?

alecco3• 11 years ago

Microsoft loves BSD/Apache/MIT licensed software. Free stuff and no serious competition can evolve out of those projects.

outworlder• 11 years ago

We could recalculate the donation amounts in pizzas + diet coke. How long was the pizza+coke runway extended by these donations?

Because these aren't enough to cover salaries, so it's logical that's going to be used for pizza.

grdvnl• 11 years ago

All the comments in the thread are focussing on comparing Microsoft's contribution to Facebook or Google for one project and giving credit to Microsoft. But, it is important to remember that Google and Facebook contribute to OSS in different forms. For example, Google spends regularly on Google Summer of Code. There may be other example for Facebook as well.

I am not a fan/employee of any of these companies. I am just putting the contribution into a different perspective.

deegles• 11 years ago

CoreCLR alone is ~2.6 million lines of code, with several million lines of code to go [1]. I would wager that by raw LOC, Microsoft will open source more code in 2014-2015 than Google and Facebook combined.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/02/03/coreclr-is...

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

Probably has something to do with their OpenSSH adoption, indeed.

Theo de Raadt actually praised Windows in a ruBSD 2013 interview, saying their exploit mitigations were second to OpenBSD.

pekk• 11 years ago

Another way to read that is as more of a slam of his major competitor.

thaumaturgy4• 11 years ago

Only if you try hard.

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

Thanks to Lipner's SDL & executive support, Microsoft has done one of the largest 180's in the industry's history. Backward compatibility and time-to-market will continue to create problems. Yet, comparing security (even architecture) of Windows 7 with Windows 95 is almost like looking at two different companies' products.

So, I give them due credit for good effort they put in. Many other companies have yet to match that effort. It's why their stuff is the new, big target. ;)

alexnewman• 11 years ago

Canadian tax structure does not consider "software projects" eligible for charitable contribution, so the donations are not generally tax deductible.

This is why i'm not sending a check right now

jordanlev• 11 years ago

If the extra cost of the taxes is what's keeping you from donating, perhaps you can send in a reduced amount instead then? Foe example, if you wanted to donate $100 and your overall tax rate is 40% (resulting in an overall reduction of $40 from your taxable income), you could instead donate $60 and save the other $40 for your pending tax bill.

(Just an example... I'm not an accountant and I live in the US so I don't know if things are different in Canada, etc etc)

sliverstorm2• 11 years ago

... Which makes me wonder why the OpenBSD hasn't filed for 501(c)(3). I'm sure it comes with strings, but given the donation revenue they've generated, tax-deductible status could be a big lever in pure dollar terms...

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

They say on the foundation website that, in Canada, the overhead of doing that is too high to justify it. They're hardly getting in donations so any amount of overhead can detract significantly to the project. If it's serious overhead, that's a serious loss. So, they're just not doing it until they get enough donations to justify it.

raindev• 11 years ago

It's a shame that three top contributions by multibillion companies combined hardly cover a decent yearly salary for a single developer.

nickpsecurity5• 11 years ago

Good they're contributing something back. They should sponsor more developers to work on infrastructure they could integrate into their offerings. Even from their evil perspective, they'd still be able to use their EEE strategy for people foolish enough to buy their non-standard version. They'd benefit from increased innovation and reduced costs as projects get bigger. We'd benefit with components that had financial support to keep improving and maybe get more security review than certain FOSS projects that have never heard of that.

So, it's in their interest to expand their role in open source software whether they intend to play nice or evil. They'll benefit and we'll possibly benefit either way. At the least, quality and innovation should both go up. Microsoft could always use more of those. ;)

epety• 11 years ago

Microsoft windows dying, this is new business of microsoft ? http://blog.sudoask.com/great-dictator-on-software-dying-and...

Microsoft Now OpenBSD Foundation Gold Contributor

Related Stories