>"and get management to make a donation in kind"
Unlike FreeBSD and pretty much every other serious donation-supported project (including NetBSD) the OpenBSD Foundation is not a [strike]legal non-profit[/strike] "tax deductible charity" (in the US that'd commonly be a 501(c) tax empty). So donations are not tax deductible and may run into barriers that others sail through. Many of the matching programs I've seen for example simply have official non-profit status as a flat-out requirement. While of course it might be possible to negotiate exceptions with management, just in having the conversation at all we're already talking massively more friction, and friction is the enemy of spending.
OpenBSD has some little bit of handwaving about it (Canadian, too much trouble) which may well be valid in isolation but is irrelevant in the larger picture, and feels more like a common pattern of prideful disdain at being about "anything but the code". But to the extent money from non-coders is considered important, the interests of non-coders also have to be at least mildly considered if an increased response rate is desired. It's the 100% right of OpenBSD to make it a PITA and have snark and proudly run rough sites and such, but of course that's going to have natural consequences in interactions with the rest of the world.
There's no right or wrong answer here, but I don't think your "it's pretty sad and says a lot about the IT industry that they are not" actually fully captures the situation. Other foundations are registered non-profits, have somewhat nicer pages (not crazy webapp monstrosities, but even little things like simple acknowledgment of smaller donors that OpenBSD blows off), and so on. Donors are special and rare, and a bit of personal recognition and appreciation is free and can go a long way. A lot of coders may dislike the softer general human networking side of things, but tossing it aside will generally result in a reduced experience unless there is some other form of stickiness.
Yes, it is true The OpenBSD Foundation is not a US 501(c)3 (side note: that is not the only type of US non-profit). That is because instead it is a _Canadian Not-For-Profit-Corporation_, which is a legal non-profit for Canada.
Please, do NOT spread FUD that The OpenBSD Foundation is not a non-profit. It absolutely is.
Proof: Canada Federal Corporation Information https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/cc/CorporationsCanada/fdrlCrpDt... The OpenBSD Foundation Bylaws: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/foundation/bylaws.html
This is absolutely true; however, the OpenBSD Foundation is not a charitable organization (and donations don't get any special income tax treatment) -- because Canada is far more restrictive in our definition of "charity". The FreeBSD Foundation wouldn't have any special tax status if it was set up in Canada either.
I have added an edit and tried to reword that bit slightly, I hope that you find it a little better. It was an honest terminology flub I guess, when I used "legal non-profit" I was aiming for the more colloquial sense it's often used in America when discussing "donations", which is the subtopic at hand here, wherein it tends to be taken for granted that the entity provides receipts for tax deduction. However, I can see how it'd be confusing and could be taken the wrong way, or feel like a slur. FUD was the very farthest thing from my mind.
I stand by the thrust of the post however. The quality of code produced and its foundational status for much of the development world is not in question, but I don't think the (often celebrated) "roughness" of Theo et al in small ways is either (again, mostly in small ways like not listing anything but huge donors or that Comic Sans initial LibreSSL site [1]). This is not a value judgement; I think there are good arguments for both sides about the pros and cons of "public friendliness" and the resources that takes up vs the return for any given project. But it's not fair to pretend that abrasiveness is or should be cost free either. When you launch a project like LibreSSL in the midst of a relatively huge (and as always temporary) amount of temporary news coverage over the subject and the first general impression of the project to the general public is [1]
>"This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters," the site says. "Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags."
well, that may or may not result in a lot of people "donating now" right? Like it or not webs of trust, proxies, and authorities are the methods people have to use to evaluate most of the information input they deal with in life, at least as a first pass filter.
I want OpenBSD to make as much money as they need, but I don't think they're immune to basic forces of competition that everyone else faces either. I'm honestly not sure if they're actually even facing any money issues they care about beyond a basic "more is certainly helpful and would allow for more hardware testing and the like". There are other models beyond soliciting individual small donations, and I see significant corp ones (and pressuring other large companies to toss in $10-50k a year might be effective, why isn't Apple in Gold/Platinum?). But in the restricted context of the post I was replying too arguing that the lack of tons more coming in from smaller distributed sources, small businesses and so on, and then slamming all involved, well I don't think that's entirely fair. OpenBSD could do better there, if they need/want to. And I've repeated that because if they're happy with how things are now then there is certainly no need for them to change. Not everything is about getting as much as possible, if they're satisfied with what they have as "enough" then good for them.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/opens...