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OpenBSD Looking At Funding Shortfall In 2014
Freshly Exhumed writes "Today the OpenBSD mailing list carried a plea from Theo de Raadt for much needed financial aid for the OpenBSD foundation: 'I am resending this request for funding our electricity bills because it is not yet resolved. We really need even more funding beyond that, because otherwise all of this is simply unsustainable. This request is the smallest we can make.' Bob Beck, of the OpenBSD Foundation, added: 'the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on.'"
The electricity bill in question is $20,000 a year for build servers located in Canada.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Maybe I’m just biased due to familiarity with Theo de Raadt’s personality, but that “plea” came off quite negative to me. Not saying I’d expect begging, but this was closer to demanding.
Obviously they aren’t looking for a huge swarm of people to donate a little but rather a company to sponsor them, but I also found the vagueness off-putting. My first question would be what are those logistical reasons. Not saying they aren’t valid, but that seems like an obvious question. If someones got free rackspace and is willing to give them power/bandwidth, you’d need a pretty compelling reason beyond “the stuff is kinda heavy and we like having direct physical access remote kvms suck”.
Also as an aside, that’s one ghetto rack in the picture. At least we know they aren’t blowing the money on silly luxuries like 4 post racks, label makers, and cable management.
Apple would seem to have the greatest interest in keeping BSD afloat. It's not like they write their own really.
20k is just a drop in the bucket. What is that? 40-60 iPads?
... Theo's magnetic personality.
In a truly free market, a superior OS such as OpenBSD would never need to beg for funding. So either OpenBSD is not considered valuable enough by the people who use it (which is obviously stupid) or the goverment is interfering with their ability to raise that funding. Since the project is being hosted in Canada, which is a well known large scale welfare state with a very very socialist tendency, I think it is safe to assume that their problem is the country they are located in. I think they should consider moving to a free-er country such as Singapore, so the market can be free to reward their superior technology with all the funding they could ever need.
You know, it's really too bad. I was an avid OpenBSD fan until I interacted with Theo and he was extremely belligerent regarding pretty routine matters that required no hostility. Then his followers jumped on me as well, as if it was necessary to back up their fearless leader in what was perceived to be life or death combat.
In the past I had donated regularly to the project, but after that incident I began to give to the FreeBSD community instead. Who by and large seem to be a much more friendly bunch and certainly don't seem to be sweating massive power bills.
Seems to me that Theo's inability to conjure up the slightest bit of charisma in the face of utter defeat is symptomatic of why OpenBSD is dying. They needlessly humiliate and scorn their own followers over minor perceived philosophical or technical differences, thus the only path they can end up on is one with less and less support.
They will probably fail in the long run as a result of this behavior and their inflexibility to re-locate or distribute their build servers. Theo has ranted about how they must be in what amounts to his garage, but I don't buy it. I'm pretty sure they could easily be re-located -- but don't mention that in his presence or he'll surely burn you, too.
I was wondering why they were suddenly accepting bitcoins for donations, this explains it. Thanks!
1. the nature of OpenBSD means build servers are the word of god on the lips and hearts of every developer and user. their physical verifiability and integrity is sacrosanct. finding a remote build location in this the year of our NSA 2014 would prove difficult if not impossible.
2. this is controversial. its not an attempt to stoke a flamewar, but it i feel must be said. the BSD license itself hinders the visibility of the projects its designed to protect. It allows corporations, the very entities that theo wants his electric bill 'on their books' to ignore the project entirely and slurp down releases whenever a security hole shows up on their product. Other than a README most corporations arent required to think twice about the code, let alone where it comes from, under the BSD. IMHO only when openbsd.org starts returning srvfail will these companies know what theyve lost. GPLvN remind companies on a per-release basis where the bread for which their butter goes comes from. code must face the scrutiny of developers, engineers, legal teams, managers and a multitude of other stakeholders.
Good people go to bed earlier.
this shows just how irresponsible we all are. openbsd is arguably the most relevant/important OSS project after the linux kernel.
$20,000 for electricity? WTF type of wasteful infrastructure are they running?
>"The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the
> development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons
> prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might
> offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go
> that way."
Fuck you man. Fix your shit. You should have done this years ago instead of allowing this to happen now. If not, economics will do for you what you refused to do yourself.
Where did that number come from? Not listed in TFA.
https://gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD
Buy cheaper energy...
there aren't any major commercial success stories out there built off BSD technology with both the financial resources and the human simple decency required to acknowledge their upstream sources.
Solar panels!
I know it's different in other countries, where the grid is nationalized and people can choose between one of many providers, and maybe it's different in other parts of Canada, but at least where I am you usually only have one choice for a given area.
Theo et. al. might turn up their noses at the idea, but a $40,000 kickstarter to keep OpenBSD going might not be a bad idea.
Rewards might include: kudos for contributions, limited edition (kickstarter only) t-shirts/posters/soundtracks, CD sets (duh), and for big contributors ($2500-$5000) a customized VDD set up for whatever purposes you want, yours to keep or share as you like.
Finding God in a Dog
OpenBSD Foundation
I'd drop a benjamin for three balls.
Apparently there's free as in speech and free as in beer, but there is no free as in electricity.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
It certainly speaks volumes of their respect they have for upstream sources.
"Hey everyone, the open source foundation which enabled the most iconic and successfully marketed line of electronic fashion of the past decade is letting the people whose intellectual property they nicked to make their shit actually work go down in flames because, well fuck-em, that's how successful capitalists behave, right? Fuck those incompetent geeks who made things work, they should have had Jobs all important market charisma then..."
Does it make anyone else ill to think of how many MBA and business brats worldwide idolize and openly profess to emulate the conniving sociopath and his Barnum ways?
Here's a link to a photo on OpenBSD Journal of the build server racks and all the great (some quite old) machines being used:
http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg
Lots of memories looking at some of those machines... I'd be a bit concerned about the longevity of some of those.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
Didn't they do this last year as well? I seems Theo isn't drawing the dollars anymore and has to have a funding drives every few months.
But I agree with others, turning down offers of free hosting for the build servers then refusing and begging for money doesn't engender sympathy.
If you look at the FreeBSD donations page https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors they must be doing something right that OpenBSD does wrong. They have lots of corporate sponsors. If you develop something that (almost) no one wants, you should not be surprised if no one throws money at you.
That when you deal with a number of dumbasses on a regular basis, you begin to expect the next person to be a dumbass as well. Haven't you ever worked in IT end user support before?
it's different in other countries, where the grid is nationalized and people can choose between one of many providers
Really? Where does that happen? Just curious.
Of all those security vendors who use OpenBSD in their proprietary security appliance boxes why can't any of them give some money back?
That's why he has his own Wikipedia page subsection with quotes from others regarding his harsh attitude:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt#Quotes_from_others_about_Theo_de_Raadt
See, that's where I think a lot of people are giving Theo way too much slack. He's not just a developer, he's the self-appointed representative, the front man of the OpenBSD community. Who else has taken on that role in the past? Noone has. Theo has put this responsibility squarely on his shoulders, so every representation he makes, positive or negative, reflects not just on him personally as a 'developer,' but moreso on the entire OpenBSD community. The buck stops with him. And right now he's doing a great job stopping those bucks from coming to him as well.
That server collection is a dump, that looks about identical to my wiring. I love it. It tells me two things. The admin is not some OCD creep that obsesses over the wrong things. But it also tells me that there isn't a person with a marketing bone within 1000 feet of that server collection. I am not a fan of the MBA mentality but gathering money is what they do (usually for their own selfish gain).
The horrible truth is that a tech company with all marketing people will generally do better than a tech company with all tech people. The key is to make sure that you have the minimum number of marketing types and that they are sufficiently neutered so as to prevent them from taking over as they are like Money Tribbles who will quickly find and eat your storehouse of value turning it into more Tribbles(MBAs) until all the value is gone.
So if you want OpenBSD to get out of the swamp get a marketing guy. But keep him on a short leash or OpenBSD will swell up and then burst in the next bust.
Theoretically that's the situation in the UK, although in practice there appears to be collusion between the big six companies to effectively fix prices....
To me.
Anyway, developers don't get an excuse for being dicks unnecessarily. No-one does.
Except Linus among Linux fans.
Please enlighten me:
1. Why do you need to so many computers for your build servers?
2. Why does it cost $20,000 a year to power these computers when it takes a whole order of magnitude to power my entire house for a year?
Something doesn't make sense.
Further ideas for funding levels:
"Theo Happy Day" - for each person who contributes at that level, Theo behaves like a responsible, polite, civil, empathetic human being for an entire day.
"Fire suit" - for this contribution, you are entitled to one (1) interaction with Theo where he does not insult, belittle, demean, or behave in a condescending manner, towards you.
Please help metamoderate.
Sweden comes to mind, also the UK.
Not sure if it's actually nationalized in Sweden or if they have a system where one company owns the infrastructure for an area and other providers pay a fee to use it (kinda like telecom), but you have a choice of provider.
ipfw was replaced by pf in 10.7 Lion. Their man pages sometimes lag, I think. For 10.9, see:
ipfw.8
pf.conf.5
Actually it's both for FreeBSD at least. They added PF, but never bothered ripping out IPFW, or IPFilter for that matter:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/firewalls.html
I prefer PF's syntax though.
The GPL does not require companies to give back. A company may use a GPL based product internally, fix it, adapt it and never share a line of code. The GPL only applies when someone wants to distribute their derivative work.
Wait, BSD IS dying? Or at least one of them is? Who knew?
It seems that (judging from the picture) Theo keeps everything in one spot. I don't know how Debian and Gentoo distribute their build servers, but they spread it out among multiple developers and entities. Has Theo considered listing a university for help? I know OSU helps out with some Linux distributions.
I don't think what Theo proposes in his e-mail is going to garnish any sympathy from a business. A company isn't going to want to offload his costs onto their books with no strings attached.
Personally, I'd say they should cut down on some of the architectures that are supported. Some of the older ones (like VAX) aren't the most energy-efficient architectures nowadays. Running a few new x86 servers is going to be better for the electric bill than running a bunch of discontinued platforms. Bitrig is only focusing on x86 and ARM and that's allowing them to do things such as making clang the default compiler instead of having to stick with GCC 4.2.1 forever.
Why not host on github or sourceforge and use commodity home hardware for dev and test servers? Or get sponsors? (Maybe one of the companies who use open BSD)? Or charge for support?
The scarcastic part of me wants to post a jimmy wales: if everybody reading this post donated $3 we'd be funded by now. ;-)
Problems with donating to OpenBSD
(1) The donations are being requested after the end of the tax year
Most charitable donations occur in October/November/December for tax reasons. This is true of both deductible and non-deductible donations.
(2) Donations are not tax deductible
This isn't a huge problem, if the OpenBSD Foundation were willing to invoice the company for the amount; then it could still be deducted as a business expense, but then the OpenBSD Foundation would have to claim it as income and pay tax on it. This isn't terrifically onerous for them in any case, as they are not a charity, and thus have to pay tax anyway, unless they can just get someone to pay their power bill directly instead (something they've requested).
Another option would be to have a U.S. OpenBSD non-profit that could then support work by OpenBSD under contract, even if that work were something like "provide nightly builds of OpenBSD binaries in exchange for grant funds". They don't seem interested in/able to utilize, this approach.
(3) Invoicing would not exactly require some measure of editorial control, but...
There would be at least an implied expectation of quid-pro-quo, even if none exactly existed, since an audit of the company that was invoiced could require at least a paper justification for the value obtained in exchange for the invoiced amount. It doesn't have to be a great deal for the company, and it could actually be a completely lopsided deal, but there would need to be a token exchange of goods and/or services for the invoiced amount.
(4) If someone is willing to pay their power, they demand they be a Canadian company
I can understand the ramifications for this coming from a non-Canadian company; OpenBSD needs to understand the ramifications of "any port in a storm". There really aren't that many Canadian technology companies in this sector, compared to the U.S.; the highest percentage of OpenBSD-based products are in fact German.
(5) There are not a large number products based directly on OpenBSD
The companies that do have products based on it are generally not hugely profitable, and the small number that there are are listed here: http://www.openbsd.org/products.html which gives you some indication of their market penetration.
(6) The OpenBSD folks don't have the most stellar relationship with the rest of the Open Source community
Without assigning specific blame, this should probably be addressed sooner, rather than later.
--
All in all, it's rather difficult to set up a legal fiction that would let it be advantageous to a business to donate.
It's not that they do not provide valuable software, it's just that most of the value they provide is not in the OpenBSD OS itself, it's in the ancillary projects that are associated with the same people.
US $ 20,000 = € 14800 ( I convert to euroland givens, as I have no idea about the price of a kWh over there ). In euroland, a kWh costs more or less € 0.20. Hence, € 14,800 purchase 74000 kWh. 74000 kWh / ( 365 days *24 hours / day ) = 8.53 kW.
Now - I like the picture. But I refuse to believe that even these power-guzzling old machines draw a steady 8.53 kW on a 24/7 basis. No way. A quick look-up in wikipedia shows me that kWh rates in Canada are even lower than here in Europe. What is Theo hiding ??
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Don't a lot of companies build stuff based on the BSDs? Shouldn't those companies be donating money?
Having such a diversity of platforms makes errors more apparent (some bugs which while they might impact all platforms might only be obvious one one platform for whatever reason) ...
I absolutely agree. As someone who simultaneously developed for Windows/x86 and MacOS/PowerPC I definitely saw bugs manifest more easily on one system or the other. However, past two or three hardware architectures there is probably quite the diminishing return.
... and the interest of some devs might be tied to these weird architectures.
Well people tied to these "weird" architectures can make a donation. Take a look at the supported architecture list, quite a bit of trimming is possible if the respective esoteric communities can't at least pitch in for the electric bill.
Apple Reports Q4 2013 Year-End Results: $7.5 Billion Profit
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/28/apple-reports-q4-2013-year-end-results-7-5-billion-profit-on-37-5-billion-in-revenue/
Apple exploits open source to make these profits: https://support.apple.com/kb/TA25633
If Apple gets $7.5B, surely they could spare $20K, right? After all, they are making this profit by exploiting open source (BSD, LLVM, etc). If BSD dies, then Apple dies with it, right?
Supposedly easy as fuck as well but I've never bothered doing it and the disparaty between "supposedly" and "actually" can be as large here as anywhere else.
Of course it probably involves some kind of fee and energy no matter what form it takes is usually quite expensive here (i.e. old and poor people struggling while invading filth gets everything reimbursed —we're just like the UK only with double glazing :P).
This won't hurt much, it won't last long, keep calm and fuel your hatred, vote as far right as you can (if you can) while remembering that the nazi's are on the far left, and wait for the remaining idiots to catch on to what needs to be done. Got funds? Prepare.
New Zealand and Australia.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Isn't it glorious?
Linus doesn't need someone to pay his light bills.
Just a suggest to any OpenBSD group members here in slashdot.
Here is a Canadian company that openly support/advertise use of OpenBSD in their infrastructure.
http://www.shopify.com/tour/ecommerce-cms
They have the money and motivation to help out a fellow Canadian group, no?
To every OpenBSD member here in slashdot who cares, here is a Canadian company you guys should get in contact with
http://www.shopify.com/tour/ecommerce-cms
This Canadian company had the money and motivation to support the healthy growth of OpenBSD since they openly support/advertise the use of the OS in their infrastructure.
Just to help out fellow Canadian shouldn't be much a problem, no?
There are many good open-source operating systems out there that _don't_ have a complete and total asshole at the helm, why not fund them instead? Why can't the openbsd crowd seem to comprehend that the guy is _the_ reason that they can't raise money? He's like the cranky old racist uncle at the dinner table. Dump him already.
20,000 USD (or 20k CAD for that matter) pays for A LOT of electricity, so this sounds really fishy.
The electricity bill in question is $20,000 a year for build servers located in Canada.
I hope those servers aren't located in Ontario, because that bill is only going to go up in the years to come. Ontario must have (or be pretty close to having) the highest electricity rates in N. America. Decades of mismanagement of our electricity supply are coming back to haunt us.
I dont know about the rest of australia, but in victoria we cannot choose our provider.
We have one provider that we cannot buy electricity from, and several billing companies that we then deal with.
The link to the picture does say this "see eg this picture, which shows a subset of the machines involved in building OpenBSD releases." . So it isn't clear just how much equipment Theo is "hiding" but it isn't all in that picture.
...they should ask for donations to buy power-generating equipment. PV-panels, a wind generator, anything which fits the budget and is a feasible option in the area where they are active. The generated power can either be used directly to keep those servers running or it could be used to run the meters backwards. If you give someone a kilowatt hour she runs her server for a few hours. If you give him the capacity to generate his own power he will become free.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Just to remind everyone that these are the guys that produce OpenSSH.
http://www.openssh.com
If OpenBSD is not worth it, then maybe OpenSSH might be?
If Theo wasn't such an ass he wouldn't be in a such a bind.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Which companies use openBSD for a security appliance? I know of a few that use FreeBSD and many that use SE Linux.
The OpenBSD project is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. The electrical grid is provincially regulated but owned and operated primarily by a number of different investor owned corporations.
Alberta residents can choose from multiple distribution companies-in Calgary Enmax is most common. Further to that you can lock in on a contract rate where the price per kwh is constant throughout, or you can avoid a commitment and pay a spot price called the "regulated rate option".
If you pick R.R.O. then it is really no choice since all Providers offer about the same price. Contract rates vary more between Providers but often the lowest contract rate at a given time can be more expensive due to long contract terms and bigger exit penalties.
Overall though the choices do not significantly reduce energy cost. The more effective solution is to reduce consumption. If the bill is too large upgrade to more efficient modern hardware where possible and do load shedding of sorts, powering off certain architecture machines and scheduling builds of different architectures on alternating days and off peak hours.
20k seems steep to me but maybe not if it is residential rates...the picture looks like it might be in Theo's basement...
He wants to find a Canadian company that will, on an annually recurring basis, shift all the hydro expenses from one utility account to said company's utility account.
This is such a specific ask that I doubt it will be successful.
He needs to do something like a Kickstarter campaign or just accept donations. It's not difficult to setup a not-for-profit in Canada such that your tax implications would be negligible (if anything). The whole thing is considered an R&D expense, anyway, if he wanted to go the for-profit route. If anything, he'd receive a tax credit for it if he booked it on his personal or small business expenses.
I know this maybe a non-solution for OpenBSD, but for future projects, would it make sense to use servers with low-power mobile processors, such as mobile quad core i7 or would this slow down builds too much?
No way. Theo has made enough anti-Linux statements, there's no way he would argue that OpenBSD is the most relevant/important OSS project after the Linux kernel.
http://www.zdnet.com/open-source-rival-attacks-terrible-linux-3039204141/
If they only had a better "frontman" and marketing like FreeBSD has it would have never happend. Look how much money FreeBSD gets from private single person donations! We only need 5k users to donatte 4 bucks each! Donation meter on the website would help as people will see it and would dondate small but in quantities!
Old machines are much less power-efficient than modern ones, and it is wasteful to have them on 24/7. If OpenBSD were adapted for cross-compiling, all the builds could be performed on a single high-end Xeon server, and the old machines switched on only occasionally when it is necessary to do a native build for verification or testing.
I love OpenBSD, a *lot* of good has come out of it. (hello, ssh?) I used to run OpenBSD religiously for firewalls. However the 20,000 USD for electricity bit sounds fishy. If it really does cost that much, drop the old platforms that may have 1-3 vocal users. Drop hppa, drop vax, drop old pizza box sparc's, drop alpha. Those platforms were neat back in the day, but now there is no useful point. (they really can't even keep up with modern 100MB/s, 1GBps traffice, I tried vintage hardware plus OpenBSD a few years ago) This sounds less like Theo wanting to keep the project alive and more about him wanting to keep a huge inventory of crappy systems to play Admin with (holding OpenBSD hostage) Let it die, and from the ashes maybe a newer, leaner OpenBSD will fork.
Heinlein had it _wrong_. Seriously.
Being as 'traveled' as he claims to be there, you'd think he'd know that compared to the US, some societies make much more use honorifics and more cmoplex social codes of politeness (e.g. Japan), some use them much less (e.g. Scandinavia). They still work just fine as societies, and frankly I prefer the less formal ones.
Yes, thing move more smoothly if you conform to social codes. But the social codes themselves _are_ in fact meaningless. E.g. nobody with a PhD would ever be upset at not being adressed as 'doctor' unless society held that this was some token of respect. And again: In some societies you'd be expected to so so, and in others not.
Nice people are nice and assholes are assholes, regardless of their culture. But it's only these kinds of social codes that Heinlein thinks are so important, that can lead a person to think that nice person is an asshole, simply because they don't follow those codes - which they may have good reason for other than being rebellious or naive - such as coming from a foreign country. De Raadt seems to be an asshole regardless, but when it comes to Torvalds, I often see him being accused of being rude for saying things that would _not_ be considered rude in his native Finland, where people are very 'blunt' compared to Americans.
Can you name a single vendor who actually uses OpenBSD?
In Canada?
Well, part of their shortfall may be caused by the fact that selecting United States during the payment process does not change the list of Provinces to a list of States. At this time, it is not possible to submit a valid payment from the United States.
We used to have a nationalized grid with only one provider to choose from on the whole territory (hint : France). Now that it's been somewhat opened, prices are driven up. Traditionnally the prices are the same over the whole territory (at least for ordinary citizens and businesses), which is why slashdot discussions about expensive and cheap areas in the US read funny to me.
Of course there's quite a scale difference, huge territories with varying climates and resources, federal administrations so I don't suggest Canada-wide or US-wide fixed prices make sense but I believe you have at least one example of that philosophy with postage stamps.
France too, but it's pointless for the consumer and even risky as leaving the State provider once to suscribe with a private one means you lose the regulated-by-law price rates forever. The State provider is technically now a private firm owned at 85% by the State. Funnily, the private providers and producers are heavily subsidized : wind power etc., the european-wide rule that wholesale wind/solar power always must be purchased first on the interconnect grids, and the State provider (by large the largest electricity producer in the world) is forced to sell much of its nuclear electricity at a loss to all its competitors.
So, really, a market was mandated by law foremost for compliance with european treaties, and they made one up. On the other hand the huge company maybe feels more free when they want to gobble up european actors or invest in Europe and the rest of the world.
I've realized the company in question operates 73 nuclear reactors when you count the UK ones, that's a bit hilarious.
> Even then, I very much doubt they have zero bugs, yet they ship anyway.
Umm, that doesn't make sense. They should block a release when *you* doubt its bugfreeness? I think they'd rely on their own testing ;)
True, but he'd have to run around a bunch of wires for that. A static magnetic field doesn't cut it ;)
We're all vampires up here, there's no sunlight most of the year :)
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
For those who want to know numbers: http://www.ontario-hydro.com/index.php?page=electricity_rates_by_province
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
In Illinois electricity has been deregulated. We can choose our provider. Our town along with a handfull of others bargined for even cheaper rates. We now pay $.045 per kwh; half of what we used to. ComEd the Chicagoland regional electrial giant still owns and maintains the lines and we have a sperate charge for delivery on our bills.