Top OpenBSD Donors | Hacker News Reader

Top OpenBSD Donors

openbsdfoundation.org

144 pointsttflee59 comments

Background: Smartisan is an Android phone maker in China. Smartisan fans pay for admission tickets to attend Smartisan's new product release events, and Smartisan donates the ticket sales to an open source project. So far they've donated to OpenSSL ($160k), OpenBSD (CA$280k), and OpenResty (pending approval).

Edit: IIRC, Smartisan's first donation to OpenSSL happened right after HeartBleed.

They donated $320k in two batches to OpenSSL in 2014. Is the $160k you mention for this year? Do you have a source for the exact amount? The PR News wire bit does not mention the exact sums per org.

I went back and checked the video for the latest release event in October 2016. Smartisan collected about 2 million RMB (Chinese Yuan) in ticket sales. They also donated another 1 million RMB originally for Smartisan Open Source Foundation (its own charity arm). So that's about 3 million RMB in total donated to OpenSSL and OpenBSD.

For its December 2015 event, Smartisan tried to donate ticket sales to OpenResty, but OpenResty could not legally accept the donation due to complicated Chinese laws governing non-profit organizations. So the money is still in Smartisan's bank account and pending regulatory approval.

For its 2014 event, Smartisan donated 1 million RMB to OpenSSL.

> For its 2014 event, Smartisan donated 1 million RMB to OpenSSL.

They donated 2 million RMB, see https://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-announce/2014-Dece...

My bad. I only knew one of the donations. Anyway, I'm asking a friend at Smartisan and see if their PR could release a detailed list of past donations.

Why would they donate to openssl in USD but openbsd in CAD? Aren't they both Canadian projects?

OpenSSL is a corp out of Maryland. OpenSSH is a OpenBSD project.

So we should expect Chinese backdoors in OpenBSD too?

I really do hope this is sarcasm, hard to detect over text.

One thing I've learnt about this world is that no one will do something for you just for the mere joy of doing it.

There's always costs/benefits analysis involved.

The "mere joy" of doing something is itself a benefit, so I think you've just proved yourself wrong.

How can one measure "joy" with money? How can some quality have more value than some quantity (cost)?

I did not prove myself wrong.

It may be that you would have avoided being so cynical if they had not made that donation, but as can be seen, their contribution will keep the project going for a time.

The very fact that this reached the front page of HN indicates that it has a PR value - that a value in itself. Or maybe they trully want to help out projects that they most likely depend on daily.

In any case, this is a positive thing so why repeat the propaganda that if it's coming from China/Russia == bad?

Evaluating individual cases is much more productive and in this case, I don't really see an ulterior motive here.

Surprise surprise, no donations from any of the big VC firms, including YC. Freeloaders.

Because you have to move fast and break things and it is very hard to break OpenBSD :)

If you're serious, then how is open source software "free" if there is an expectation of donations?

We should all strive for "Free as in freedom, not as in beer".

Oh here we go...

I'd really like it if VC/incubators etc. would set up a donation system where they give X$ to projects that are used by their funded companies. I also wouldn't mind seeing an equivalent to the YC-nonprofit program specifically dedicated to the development of interesting FLOSS software (or the support of existing projects).

At the very least I'd be interested in seeing an overview of the various FLOSS code that is used by every YC batch (maybe such a list exists?).

Or Apple.

Smartisan (the phone maker) is placed in the top level, called "Iridium". It's defined as $100,000 and above.

That level of donation used to be defined as $100,000 to $250,000. [0] The removal of the top limit could in theory mean that Smartisan actually donated more than $250,000.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161114061632/http://www.openbs...

$280,000 !

Well, that works :-)

Never heard of Smartisan, checking out their phones now.

If you know Chinese, I will suggest you watching the videos of the release events. That's a very popular event in China since the speech skills.

I don't understand much Chinese, but here is a video of one of those events in case you want to see what jiyinyiyong is talking about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hPpeKPDoDg

It seems to be quite entertaining, by judging from the number of laughs/minute :)

If they are mandated by the PRC government to install spyware on all their phones... maybe you should reconsider that.

So Google donated to OpenBSD from 2012 to 2015 but not in 2016 (or less than $5000), interesting.

They seem to be their only long term recurrent donor.

Edit: Actually they are just part of the Core Infrastructure Initiative now https://www.coreinfrastructure.org

Yeah, Microsoft donated both individually and as part of the Core Infrastructure.

They still have time, as do anyone else.. 2016 isn't over. :-)

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

DuckDuckGo also gave more than any of Microsoft, HP Enterprise, or Yandex.

...Does that in any way surprise you?

DDG has a program dedicated to donating money to open-source projects: they do it every year. MS, HP, and Yandex might also do so, but they don't have to same kind of dedication.

Its strange to see negativity to genuine support for open source projects. Instead of inventing conspiracy theories to try to explain away and diminish the donations perhaps it might be better to focus on the positive.

And maybe be try to understand why all the billion dollar companies so popular here rely on open source but do not seem to accomplish much beyond token gestures and posturing. Clearly Smartisan shows if there is a will you can do a lot. Maybe there is something to learn here that can lead to a positive change.

I think its beginning to look more and more like HN should stick strictly to VC and new tech stores. There is no social or moral dimension here to process any other information.

Considering few people here seems to have heard about Smartisan before this thread, I think we can agree that this sort of donation works very well for publicity among geeks.

Perhaps they're simply grateful for OpenSSH and for all that it enables?

Or maybe they're just mistaken...? (I'm kidding)

In celebration of this milestone, Smartisan will donate approximately 3 million RMB from sales of tickets of this year's and last year's launch events to OpenSSL Software Foundation and the OpenBSD Foundation, two Android open source service organizations.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smartisan-technology...

Reads like a confirmation of aMayn's theory, donating to OpenSSL and OpenSSH simultanously makes sense.

They donated over 300k USD to OpenSSL in 2014: https://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-announce/2014-Dece...

Well, there is a lot of code from *BSD in Android, for example libc.

OpenBSD: https://github.com/android/platform_bionic/search?q=openbsd

Thanks to Yonghao,Luo, a great guy!

Reminded me that I forgot to donate to them this quarter :)

I wonder if their Smartisan OS is OpenBSD-based

I would imagine they have some infrastructure running on OpenBSD.

Or they're doing it for the tooling e.g. supporting openssh

edit: Smartisan's PR indicates the other donation is to OpenSSL, so it seems likely the primary purpose of the OpenBSD donation is in fact SSH.

From the spec page http://www.smartisan.com/en/m1/#/specs it appears their OS is based on Android.

Sadly not; but I would buy an OpenBSD phone... if anyone wants to make it, please call me!

Same here, especially since it'd mean it would /also/ run all the other open source operating systems. It'd be a great litmus-test ("hardware so open that even OpenBSD supports it").

Sign me up too!

But to be honest, the problem with Android is not the Linux kernel but the fact that most phones were never designed to be continuously updated.

Actually Linux is a very poor choice when a product depends on out of tree binary blobs to operate. The lack of stable driver ABIs and APIs are a real problem for long term maintenance. I'm really surprised that the BSDs aren't a much bigger player in the embedded space.

Wasn't the original Danger developed phones based on NetBSD?

Yes, but the real problem is the code source operating system that runs the cellular baseband.

No, and a little yes. Their phones are Android based, but Androids libc is OpenBSD based: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20140506132000

I expected Apple here, though I'm not sure what version of BSD they forked for OSX.

FreeBSD

Apple did not "fork" anything, and certainly not OpenBSD. Their core OS (Darwin) was developed by NEXTStep. It reused chunks of the original BSD (from which FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD were all forked at one point or another) mostly for I/O interfaces, but the actual kernel architecture is very different.

AFAIK Apple are are not involved in OpenBSD at any level, nor do they donate to any OSS project; they just maintain a few selected ones.

> Apple did not "fork" anything, and certainly not OpenBSD. Their core OS (Darwin) was developed by NEXTStep. It reused chunks of the original BSD (from which FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD were all forked at one point or another) mostly for I/O interfaces, but the actual kernel architecture is very different.

That's wrong. Apple pulled in and integrated a lot of code from FreeBSD itself to modernize NeXTStep.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths:

> most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD versions

> The XNU kernel used on OS X includes a few subsystems from (older versions of) FreeBSD, but is mostly an independent implementation.

I don't see where what you state contradicts what I said.

cf. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Da...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com