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Mozilla Foundation Donates $10K to OpenSSH
eklitzke writes to tell us the OpenBSD journal is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation is donating $10,000 USD to the OpenSSH project. This comes as good news after the recent reported financial troubles from the OpenBSD and by extension the OpenSSH team. It seems that quite a few people have answered the call for aid made by OpenBSD's de Raadt.
"While donations are not US tax deductible as charitable contribution" is what their website says. I guess they don't want to become a true non-profit org for some reason.
Considering the rumors that the foundation makes something close to $72 million? (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6048377.html)
Quoting Chris Blizzard, a board member "I won't comment on the dollar amount, except to say that ($72 million) is not correct, though not off by an order of magnitude...."
Guess any amount is fine...but 10K seems too low, IMHO
For something like this, no, you cannot effectively donate JUST to OpenSSH. Even if you could specify this *specific* amount of money is to be used for that project, if they wanted to they could just allocate that much less of their own money.
Its going to both. OpenBSD and OpenSSH share the money. (Which is fine by me, since its the same dudes who makes the code to both projects)
"If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
Spider Jerusalem
The Slashdot post is misleading; they donated to the OpenBSD project in general, not one specific subproject within it. Doing that would open up a can of auditing worms that wouldn't be in anybody's best interest.
If you looked through the list of donations on Theo's donations page, it's quite curious that some of the larger commercial interests in the Linux World (RedHat, Novell, etc...) are NOT in there.
Of course, they may have requested no publicity.
This is Slashdot, I'll let you draw your own conclusions here... :)
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
I can see their point, there are other ways to get around this problem and other tools available to people. OpenSSH is a secure project every feature you add is another potential security hole, so really is makes sense for them to refuse to add this feature, in other instances where there is no other way to workaround this problem the developers would willingly add the code to the project but this particular case has other solutions.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
While I like OpenBSD I don't have a need to support OpenBSD. On the other hand I do use and would donate money to OpenSSH.
Uh, I hate to tell you, but it's all the same people. If you read the OpenSSH project is prettypage it states "OpenSSH is developed by the OpenBSD Project." So yes, you do have a need to support the OpenBSD project if you want them to continue to develop OpenSSH.
There isn't a entity setup for OpenBSD or any other of their projects it seems. It's questionable what actually happens with the money donated.
I'm sure they squander all the money on booze and hookers. Pardon the sarcasm, but it's pretty much the same as if you sent Linux a check to help support the Linux project. And if you check out the donations page, there's quite a list of names there. I'm sure if something fishy was happening to the money, someone would have noticed by now. Besides, the OpenBSD project is basically Theo's baby. Why would he jepordize it by not being honest?
Slackware
It's not an ssh problem. Connection rate limiting is something you really want to do with a firewalling solution.
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
Considering OpenBSD's pf packet filter already has support for connection rate limiting (and it works quite nicely), I'm inclined to agree with them. You could always run sshd via inetd or xinetd for connection limiting if needed.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Here is a simple solution: look in the CREDITS file of the OpenSSH and find the developers who are responsible for the areas in which you desire some improvements and email them with offers to provide them money, hardware, or whatever they need to improve OpenSSH.
For the sake of convenience, here is the CREDITS file to OpenSSH-4.3p1
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."