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Mozilla Foundation Donates $10K to OpenSSH

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the breath-of-fresh-air dept.

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.

11 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD? by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD? by dizzy+tunez · · Score: 5, Informative

      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
    3. Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD? by Syberghost · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  2. Congratulations to the Mozilla Foundation by stox · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. "
  3. NO by DAldredge · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

  4. NO by paulpach · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?".

  5. Re:Good for Mozilla. by liliafan · · Score: 5, Informative

    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)
  6. Re:Good for Mozilla. by DeBeuk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    --
    Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
  7. Re:Conspiciously absent... by SigILL · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    --
    Error: password can't contain reverse spelling of ancient Chinese emperor
  8. OpenBSD and the money by menix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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