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OpenBSD Project in Financial Danger
DieNadel writes "In an entry to the OpenBSD Journal, Marco, from the OpenBSD project, warns about the somewhat disturbing financial situation in which they are now. The OpenBSD team is the one that also develops the OpenSSH suite, used nowadays almost everywhere. From the entry: 'What I want to point out what a lot of people don't seem to realize is that OpenSSH development is paid from the same pool of money as OpenBSD. OpenSSH is in use by millions around the world however the revenue stream just simply isn't there. This is where other projects could help. Without naming entities or projects by name there are others out there that are sitting on some cash. It would be wonderful if these entities could share some of the wealth to keep us going.'"
How many businesses are actually using OpenBSD in production anymore? Not counting the people unknowingly using OpenBSD based appliances. I can't remember the last time I heard of someone running production stuff on OpenBSD - at least in part because so many of the OpenBSD teams ideas being adopted by other *nix variants or freely available lockdown scripts.
Maybe the reason OpenBSD isn't getting support from businesses is that the most IT shops never have an OpenBSD box doing anything but acting as someone's pet project in a test lab.
Did you notice your comment was modded funny? I'm not sure you meant it as a joke but thats how people are seeing it. The number of voters who would vote based on OSS issues alone is extremely small. There is a way for a software writer to stay out of bankrtuptcy, its known as charging for your work via proprietary methods. What Open Source is, is a failed business model. If you want to make money, don't be an idiot and release the fruits of your labor under the GPL or BSD license. If you don't mind starving and being taken advantage of, then go right ahead.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
If OpenSSH had been a commercial project, then they would be charging for the use of OpenSSH and wouldn't have this financial problem.
Perhaps a better title would be "When F/OSS fails those that develop it."
Oh wait, does that make too much sense?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
so fucking donate to openssh already. you want to keep using it right? if openbsd disappears, there's a good chance that openssh is going to disappear (completely is unlikely ... but the rate at which it is developed will certainly diminish). along with the other open* projects
... the fact that you get to use it is a perk
... so it's perfectly understandable that they don't give a shit about your ideas and more importantly, lack of a donation
openssh is developed by the same people who develop openbsd. they develop it for themselves
now, when you or your company hire a developer to work on openssh, then maybe you can have some control over this "overhead" you talk about. but, you're not doing this are you?
if you think setting up a foundation will solve the problem, you're living in a fantasy world. it's a hassle. every time a new release comes out, people talk about it. a foundation will not solve the problem
but, since you "don't give a shit about OpenBSD"
vodka, straight up, thank you!
"I'll just say I completely disagree with the assessment that the code is good quality."
Yeah, a retard who isn't even qualified to assess the quality of code might say that.
"It isn't good quality when it comes to being able to handle difficult situations (it doesn't scale well). It doesn't fail gracefully."
So, you are just making shit up then? Doesn't scale well to large SMP machines? True. Does this have any impact on security and DoS attacks? Of course not. And failing gracefully is done when it should be, and not when it shouldn't. For instance, silently corrupting your data because of a problem might be failing gracefully, and is apparently normal in loonix land, but in the BSD world that means its time to panic(). Sure, your box is down now, but that's preferable to quietly fucking up data.
"It isn't good quality from a usage point of view. It is difficult to use even for people familiar with Unix in general, and the community is filled with dinks who, apparently, take their attitude from Theo."
And obviously you don't know unix at all. OpenBSD is by far the easiest to use, sanest, most managable unix around. Christ, it and loonix distros are the only unixes to even ship with a usable shell by default.