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.

Comments

NO

[DAldredge]

"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.

Re:NO

[SigILL]

I guess they don't want to become a true non-profit org for some reason.

They don't want to because of the huge administrative overhead that incurs. Theo'd much rather work on the next feature or security audit than on handling that.

Of course, you're free to set up your own non-profit "Friends of OpenBSD" foundation if you want to.

Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD?

[dizzy tunez]

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)

Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD?

[Syberghost]

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.

Re:Good for Mozilla.

[liliafan]

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.

Re:Good for Mozilla.

[DeBeuk]

A lots of people/companies asked the OpenSSH group to include the ability to include rate limiting due to large SSH user/dictionary attacks being run by script kiddies. One person even WROTE it for them. I believe the OpenSSH group's response was "Not an ssh problem."

It's not an ssh problem. Connection rate limiting is something you really want to do with a firewalling solution.

Re:Conspiciously absent...

[SigILL]

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.

Nope, they just didn't donate.

Hell, IBM even wanted the OpenBSD team to handle end-user support for one of their high-paying customers for free.