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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.
Is this going directly to OpenSSH efforts, or to OpenBSD in general? There's nothing in there that specifically states which.
There has been much talk in the recent past about the difference between wanting to support OpenBSD (and by default, OpenSSH), and just OpenSSH itself. Is it even possible to support 'just' OpenSSH?
Either way, a classy move by the Mozilla Foundation.
Now if you guys can just make Thunderbird stop sucking, I'd be much happier.
Is this something that can be deducted from Income Tax as a charitable donation?
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
"It seems that quite a few people have answered the call for aid made by OpenBSD's de Raadt."
Nice to know that some people don't let their personal feelings get in the way of doing what's right.
For clearly demonstrating they are part of the whole community. If other organizations would take the same attitude, we would all be much better for it.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"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
It's sad that Cisco isn't on the list...
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
This money is coming from the Mozilla Foundation, which makes serious dough from google searches run via the firefox browser's default start page and the default search engine field. So use firefox, hit CTRL-k to search with google, and keep it going.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
This just goes to show how little financial support there is for open source projects. Everyone thinks that the F/OSS and contracts will relieve everything, but the truth is, open source software needs all the help that it can get. Mozilla Firefox is one of the few projects that was lucky enough to gain widespread recognition, but in order for open source to survive, we must all work for it, not take it for granted.
You may not realize it, but there are countless of excellent OSS projects out there. Imagine the amount of people that have monetary troubles every single day; now image that as being a lot more difficult, and you will see the struggles of an open source programmer. Advertising and the occassional donation simply ISN'T going to do it. The worst part is, no one has figured out a source for an actual revenue stream. If we don't ensure the survival of an increasingly popular commercial model, we might face another "dotcom" crash--after all, money has to come from somewhere.
That he uses the money to establish a foundation that is equipped to do things like fundraising and marketing. As I said before, being a non-profit is hard as heck, he needs to run it like a business and hire people who have real world non-profit experience. Raising just enough money to get by without committing to major organizational change is extremely shortsighted. Let's also hope that others follow the Mozilla foundation's example.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The Appleseed Project could use funding. And a foot massage.
Mostly we'll just settle for a foot massage.
Think of it this way, if the median salary for the development team is say $55k/year, plus benefits and taxes, and there are what maybe 4 team members (developers + manager)? You are looking at a cool 1/4 mil per year. Which means that $10k will keep the developers paid for roughly half a month of full time work.
Nothing against OS development, but if you want a professional package, someone has to pay for it.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
You could argue 0 is too low, and even then you would be wrong. Mozilla is already giving much more: The best browser in the world whose development costed a lot more in man-hours and money. They have no obligation whatsoever of giving a dime to bsd any more than you do.
So regardless of how much money the Mozilla foundation makes, if out of their heart, self interest or whatever decide to donate $10k ( or even $10), all you get to say is "thank you", and if you really want to show appreciation, ask "is there anything I can do for you?".
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
Theo has always stated that it was more difficult to setup a non profit in Canada. There was also recent statements that for international donations it is even more difucult to do. If they were in the U.S. they could more easily accept non profit or 'Not for profit' donations from US residents but then they may run into future crypto export restrictions when they try to export advanced crypto from the US. So they stay in Canada and can do what every then need to do to keep OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenNTPD, OpenBGP & OpenCVS as secure as they can without worrying about politician whims on crypto export matters.
I've noticed some undue emphasis placed on OpenSSH & OpenSSL. They are GREAT packages, but not the only thing people benefit from. Don't forget, that nearly every commercial operating system has pilfered code from the BSD projects.
EVERYBODY should contribute, especially the companies that have profited from the hard work of the team.
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)
OpenBSD project. The Mozilla Foundation made a $10K donation to the OpenBSD project in support of development of OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and related activities. The OpenBSD project does great work in the area of creating a secure Unix-like operating system (which runs Firefox, of course) and developing related security technologies. In particular the Mozilla project uses SSH extensively for various purposes, including securing connections to the Mozilla CVS repository. The OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects have been experiencing some financial difficulties, and based on their importance to the Mozilla project and to the wider open source and free software world we felt that it was well worth showing our support for them.
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
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=114312315700005&r= 1&w=2
There has been such a great soap opera on this on the OpenBSD mailing list.
It's nice to see mozilla.org donate some cash but the real money should be coming from IBM, Redhat, Cisco and all the other vendors that bundle OpenSSH into their products. Somewhere in that post is a link to an email chain where IBM demanded Theo fix a bug that was in OpenSSH. (I believe the bug was fixed in a more recent version of OpenSSH then they were bundling.)
Sure, they could change the license for OpenSSH and start making money off it but that's missing the point of what the BSD license is all about.
It costs a lot of money to run that project and keep ahead of the jerks who are trying to break into your systems every day.
If you use products from vendors that have OpenSSH bundled in them and they aren't on http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html then send them an email and ask them to give regularly. that's the only thing we can do to help keep us safe on this hostile internet!
GO PUFFY
I seem to recall RMS getting a 'genius grant' a while back. IIRC, those grants come with no strings, not traceability, and aren't conditional upon the recipient being tax-exempt. Basically, the idea seems (I know this sounds nutty) that people who are passionate about something and have made it their life's work will take such gifts in the spirit intended by the giver.
Now, I may be wrong, but I do not recall a flamefest back then about how that anticapitalist hippie Stallman would just spend the money on pizza and T-shirts. Why is it, then, that when the Mozilla group seeks to fund OpenSSH, the standard seems to be different?
Darwin is based on FreeBSD, not OpenBSD -- though I must admit, I have no idea how much cross-pollination there is among the *BSDs -- but like most of the civilized world, they do use OpenSSH.
However, postingwithout backing it up is kinda trollish. I'd be interested in seeing the information whose existence is implied by that statement.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
Suck it netcraft!
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
This is like donating to the EFF, then finding out that the money was redirected to PETA. That's just plain offensive.
EFF and PETA are political organizations with specific ideologies. Mozilla, OpenBSD and OpenSSH are apolitical volunteer SOFTWARE PROJECTS! Sheesh.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Software Freedom Conservancy offers nonprofit umbrella to free and open source projects
see this groklaw page for entire article http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200604011 21120517
Here's yet another creative idea to protect FOSS developers. The Software Freedom Law Center has launched the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is designed to permit certain projects accepted as members, such as Wine, uClibc and BusyBox currently, to apply for and then benefit from nonprofit tax-exempt status. The Conservancy does all the onerous paperwork needed to set it up and run that way.
It does the paperwork and it provides the umbrella. It will file one tax return covering all members' projects, and it will handle the other corporate and tax issues that are associated with becoming a nonprofit and then operating as one, as well as holding project assets and managing them as the project directs. That leaves projects members free to code. It's a free service, if your project is accepted as a member.
The Mozilla Foundation's mission is to "promote choice and innovation on the internet". When you donate to them, you're giving money to further that mission.
Choice is not limited to simply web browsers. Without Free OSes, you can't connect to the internet in a Free way. As an established, mature project that is having only monetary difficulties (not community difficulties), OpenBSD is an obvious choice to give money to.
As a group that develops OpenSSH and provides security audits, OpenBSD is also obviously helping innovation (not necessarily by making new features, but by making sure the ones there work well). Once again, it makes perfect sense for the Mozilla Foundation to, in the course of "promoting choice and innovation on the internet" to donate to them.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.