OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on

marc.info

825 pointsopenbsddesktop407 comments

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html and http://openbsd.org/want.html

So let's deal with the elephant in the room: the OpenBSD project is run by complete and utter jerks. Not just Theo, but he has set the bar quite low when it comes to friendliness and tolerance of questions from younger/less experienced contributors. Linus' rants on the Linux kernel lists are almost cookie cutter copies of Theo's.

There is "opinionated software" and then there is Theo being an intolerable, obnoxious, ego-maniac.

As such many people are going to see this and laugh and think "good riddance", and will be happy to see OpenBSD disappear.

That will only be enhanced by the fact the books are closed, the shortfall on the electric bill is inexplicably $20k, and nobody is prepared to explain the detail.

In essence rudeness + shady accounting practice != open source community that should feel a sense of entitlement from non-core users

It's a shame because the code (especially the crypto code) is really good. Seriously, go read it: I used to love reading the OpenBSD source, but I never contributed anything because Theo was such an absolute jerk.

I hope the guys who work on the crypto stuff at least either keep doing so elsewhere (Free- or Net-), or a new project without the need for $20k in electricity bills spins up to keep going.

We're in a post-NSA revelations world and you're happy to see a project like OpenBSD disappear just because the people behind it aren't nice?

Yes, because other projects will rise in its place run by people with better social skills, and they are more likely to build tools of use to a wider audience, and we'll see wider acceptance of crypto.

I genuinely believe my non-tech friends and family have such a poor approach to security, because the people who have a good approach to developing security tools have such a poor approach towards my non-tech friends and family.

I've been called an insult to idiots or similar by Theo de Ratt. Once.

I use OpenSSH every fucking day.

I'll take the insults. And apologize to the idiots. And pitch in when I can.

This is a good attitude. All of us have failings. Most of us fail at being geniuses. Theo fails at being diplomatic.

Don't associate the entire project and foundation with the actions of their figurehead.

Honestly, Theo can be an asshole, but often his temper is warranted when he's faced with idiocy, like when RMS was unapologetically trying to persuade the removal of all mentions of non-free packages in OpenBSD. (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134850)

I know this is what RMS does, and actually I'm sympathetic with his views, but in that context it was bullshit. This is just one incident, who knows how much Theo has to deal with other people wasting his energy on non-issues, trivialities and misconceptions?

For what it's worth, he isn't any less of a dick than Linus. Yet Linus consistently earns hero praise and adulation, the criticism of his personality being secondary and written off as justified. So why isn't Theo's justified?

I don't think Theo's reaction is really warranted. I mean, really? "slimy hypocritical asshole"?! And the follow up later on when someone calls him on this is pretty telling: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134896

I don't know the full history of that thread, but it's not mentions of non-free packages that RMS was talking about - it was ports in OpenBSD that allowed people to easily install non-free packages.

Ah, found the original: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=119730630513821&w=2

And FWIW, I think Linus is a dick, too - but Linux has a much larger following, mainly due to reasons other than Linus.

If you read through some of the OpenBSD pages, you can detect a lot of dislike for RMS. Example: http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#43

the shortfall on the electric bill is inexplicably $20k

Quick back-of-the-envelope: At $0.12/kWh, the shortfall is about 20kW of continuous power.

Do they have significant HVAC requirements? I don't think I see 20kW of iron in the two racks that get pictured.

Yes, AC is required. Machines need to be shut down whenever it fails.

For every watt you put in, you need to cool that watt, which requires a high percentage of a second watt. Some of that equipment is almost 20 years old, maybe more. One those old machines could warm an office back in 1994.

On top of the electricity for the servers and for cooling, there is also maintenance: replacing ancient drives and other system components when they fail (which may require paying out the arse for some gear on eBay), fixing cooling equipment (ever replaced a dead AC unit in your house?), network maintenance and upgrades, internet connection, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. $20K seems reasonable to me. He's not asking for $20MM or even $200K, guys. He's not mining bitcoins. Please be reasonable.

$20k is not inherently unreasonable, but I won't donate if I don't have a better idea of what is going on "behind the curtain", which is why I'm idly musing.

> which requires a high percentage of a second watt.

It's requires 1/3 of a watt. For every watt of heat you need 1/3 of a watt of cooling. (For typical A/C's.)

" Linus' rants on the Linux kernel lists are almost cookie cutter copies of Theo's."

Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference.

I can't be bothered to look for it right now, but there was an email on lkml where an inexperienced contributor basically asked "should i just give up?" and Linus chipped in with quite a friendly manner and mentioned how important contributions from everyone were to the project.

> Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference.

Plenty of us have had positive interactions with Theo.

I get the feeling the people Theo yelled at are the same people Linus would yell at. Given Theo's behavior when RMS was trolling the misc list, Theo seemed quite calm.

There's a lot of fuzzy thinking in this thread. The idea that the emails which somehow come to our attention because they appear on internet blogs or something due to their OMG WTF value are representative of their author's normal, everyday output has as much merit as assuming, for example, that that photo of rackmounted OpenBSD computers on the openbsd.com page represents the entirety of the project's electricity usage.

I notice that yet again, only bald assertions come forth, never evidence.

What do Theo and the project have to hide, exactly?

The code quality and the fact that maintainer is blunt about problems are not unrelated.

Neither is a project getting shut down because they can't raise money and one of their public faces being a jerk.

I highly doubt they are falling short of cash because of personality issues. I'm going to go with the fact that OpenBSD is much less popular than Linux and more niche, thus has a lot smaller userbase. And an even smaller userbase that is willing to donate money.

>So let's deal with the elephant in the room: the OpenBSD project is run by complete and utter jerks

Really? Could you give me an example of that? Because from where I sit, as someone having been around the openbsd world for ~15 years, I don't see it. I see lots of people bitch about it, but never any examples of it actually happening. It is just something people seem to assume will be taken as gospel.

I once offered to help work on some docs to make them a bit more user-friendly because at the time they were quite obtuse. Theo responded with something along the lines of requesting I please go away, as this project doesn't need people like me, and then a liberal sprinkling of lots of rude names and insults suggesting I was from under a rock/an idiot/etc.

I offered help and enthusiasm for the project. He called me a lot of names and suggested OpenBSD wasn't for people who weren't like him.

That's just me. Fine, I'm a big guy, I can take it. But I then watched for months as he did the same to countless other individuals. Newb: "Hey, we could do 'X'" Theo: "No, go away, I hate you", is pretty much the tone.

Then there is the more public stuff. The stuff that is historic but a little larger.

He created OpenBSD because the NetBSD core ousted him for his attitude and demeanour towards other developers.

There is a whole section of his Wikipedia page dedicated to his "Outspokenness" which is a polite way of calling what is actually his "Obnoxiousness":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_de_Raadt#Outspokenness

Nobody doubts he can write code, and that OpenBSD - and OpenSSH in particular - was a bonus to the open source World, but my point is that he and his inner circle are hostile to the rest of the community who aren't quite like them. It's a clique.

And cliques can't ask outsiders for help once they're established: they made up the rules, and they will live (and die), by those rules.

Theo had a choice: compromise, and be nice to people and understand other people's needs; or, don't compromise and be a bit of a jerk and piss people off but stay true to your own values.

He chose the latter. Fine. He should not be surprised that they are not running to their wallets when he needs $20k for electricity bills to continue running the project in that same way.

I'm not being rude about this, I'm being pragmatic. I don't particularly want to see OpenBSD die, but I can't see many people rushing to save it, and that's because the top hierarchy are perceived as - and are documented as regularly behaving as - complete jerks.

If Theo had been a little more temperate to more people, it's quite likely his $20k (and then some) would have been raised in under an hour. I know some FreeBSD guys have raised similar/larger amounts for smaller projects in the past within a day or two. How? By being nice people that other people want to support.

>I offered help and enthusiasm for the project. He called me a lot of names and suggested OpenBSD wasn't for people who weren't like him.

The mailing lists are all archived. Show me the link. The whole point was I hear bullshit stories all the time, but having been on the lists for over a decade, I know they are bullshit.

>but I can't see many people rushing to save it

Nobody cares what you can see. You just want some excuse to push your weird vendetta. Plenty of people are quite happy with openbsd, don't care about your imaginary problems, and have coughed up the $20k.

The OpenBSD developers are very direct, and will hurt your feelings if you can read the documentation. Honestly though, it seems reasonable for the most part. If you read the misc mailing list, I think you'll find that the people who are getting a rough treatment are those who didn't stop a think for a moment or who are them self giving bad or unrequested advice.

I only ever had a few email exchanges with Theo. One was a bug report and the other was a few questions for a project I did while studying, but he was friendly and helpful. Even if Theo had been a jerk, that doesn't change the fact that I've gotten a lot of value from OpenBSD in the past, without being asked for anything back, until now.

The closed books doesn't really bother me, I doubt that Theo or someone at the OpenBSD Foundation is going to run of to Cuba with the money. Maybe we should just accept that the people that they are asking for help are people like me who see a value proposition in: I give them €20 a month and OpenBSD doesn't go away. Only takes 1000 people like me to solve this and surely there has to be 1000 people in the world for who this is a great deal.

One thing new arrivals should know about OpenBSD: the man pages are good! Really. It took me a while to get out of my linux and windows habits of of immediately going to google or a mailing list or a forum when I didn't know how to do something. With OpenBSD, read the man page first. In most cases you won't need any other resources.

If you EVER use OpenSSH for ANYTHING, you can cough up $20 for grumpy Theo.

(I've interacted with Mr deRaadt once. He was perfectly lovely and helpful.)

> If you EVER use OpenSSH for ANYTHING, you can cough up $20 for grumpy Theo.

Theo provides negative value. There are no circumstances (least of all extortion) that would make me give him money or aid of any sort.

> (I've interacted with Mr deRaadt once. He was perfectly lovely and helpful.)

Most of us will never know. His public attitude has ensured that.

If you don't want to aid him, that's quite alright, but I'm not sure how OpenSSH balanced against his abusive comments to select users on mailing lists is somehow a net negative...

It's not like we're talking about Wagner's antisemitism vs his music here!

Really, the times I dealt with them they were quite pleasant and helpful.

There is "opinionated software" and then there is Theo being an intolerable, obnoxious, ego-maniac.

They're more or less the same thing, one is how you see people you like, the other is how you see people that rub you the wrong way.

You're entitled to your view and I won't disagree with some of it ... but shady accounting practices? What are you alleging exactly?

Just to make the call to action a little more direct, the donation link is here:

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

Done. Reading this is sad.

Thanks, just donated, I use openssh every day so it just makes sense.

Wow. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I had no idea OpenSSH fell under the OpenBSD umbrella! It certainly makes very good sense for me to donate now!

Most FOSS projects with the name pattern OpenXYZ fall under the OpenBSD umbrella in one way or the other.

Doubtful, it's a really common pattern (opencv, opencollada,OpenOffice, opensolaris etc etc)

Note: OpenXYZ, not OpenSomethingSomething. Anyway, OpenBGPD, OpenOSPFD, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenSSH, OpenIKED. OK, so it's more like OpenABCD and I should probably have written "many" instead of "most". :)

Just donated to support the project as well.

Yes, did too. We need things like this to counter the evil clowns that try to take over our internet.

  [scott_s@local ~] history | wc -l
     500
  [scott_s@local ~] history | grep ssh | wc -l
     191

Donated.

Great point. OpenSSH is rock solid and it and underpins many, many other projects and businesses.

I don't think it's going too far to say that companies making heavy use of (i.e. profit from) OpenSSH are obligated to donate.

many do by employing the openssh maintainers to do that. it's the best way to contribute to openssh without contributing to theo.

Grep has a -c flag :)

    $ history | grep -c ssh
        380

Donated.

The shell history really ought to have some sort of de-dupe feature. Too many lines of history get taken up by duplicate entries!

If you use bash, have a look at HISTIGNORE and HISTCONTROL.

Use HISTCONTROL=erasedups in your .bashrc

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#index-H...

try adding setopt HIST_SAVE_NO_DUPS to your .zshrc

you could also have a look at HIST_FIND_NO_DUPS and HIST_IGNORE_ALL_DUPS (more options at http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Doc/Release/Options.html )

If you still use bash, now is a good time to upgrade to zsh

'Upgrade' and a sourceforge link don't usually go together :-/

I'm a zsh user but am surprised that you guys are still using sourceforge instead of github.

Donated, thanks for openssh the reminder.

Same here. Donated as well.

Maybe they should rename to OpenSSH Foundation then ...

If the maintainers of that page are around here, I suggest putting some visualization of how close you are to the goal on there. It's amazing how much of a psychological motivator a bar filling up is.

Somebody from the Foundation said on misc that they were going to do that.

from the First or Second one?

Sorry, couldn't resist.

Are you working for the Mule?

Jokes seldon get my approval on HN but this on does.

LOL :)

I believe my terrible pun will make you cry, sis.

Wrong license: http://www.mulesoft.org/licensing-mule-esb

This is a great point. I work on tools that would be perfect for this: Crowdtilt[0] and our open-source tool Crowdhoster[1]. This situation specifically reminds me of a Crowdtilt campaign that launched here on HN after the Internet Archive burned down[2], so I would be very happy to help.

[0]: https://www.crowdtilt.com/

[1]: http://www.crowdhoster.com/

[2]: https://www.crowdtilt.com/campaigns/please-help-the-internet...

Asian donation is negligible?

I don't think so. The foundation probably doesn't have anyone anywhere in Asia with a bank account that can receive Paypal donations. The idea is to save transaction costs, not limit donations to certain parts of the world.

Just donated as well.

Thanks done, OpenSSH is an indispensable tool.

Off topic, bluekitten it seems you've been hellbanned and your message show as dead. Looking at your comment history, I can't imagine what triggered it, so if you see this it might be a good idea to send an email to pg.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6939835

A more useful answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7079380

There seems to be a trend that most *BSDs are having donation problems and missed 2013 budgets.

For example [1], [2]

I encourage all to donate to our BSD friends. We all benefit from their work.

[1] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org [2] http://www.netbsd.org/donations/

The FBSD goal for 2011 was 400k (raised 460k). 2012 was for 500k goal. 2013 is 1M goal.

They've raised almost 750k the last time that page was updated..

Makes me wonder, though. There are plenty of fairly large commercial offerings based on those systems. The corporations using them (e.g. Sony, Apple) could probably easily afford a million in donations.

The could, but the license leaves them equally able to say "fuck you very much" on donations or code.

That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back.

> That is the wonders of the BSD license and others that follow the same principles, profit for free from the work of others without giving anything back.

Does any Open Source license require monetary donations from companies using the code?

Sony and Apple and a lot of other companies using BSD licensed software DO give back -- in the form of code and employing developers to work the projects.

A few trees don't make a forest.

I'd be interested in a list of software that Apple and Sony contributed back to FreeBSD and that is in the ports, do you have such a list? It looks like that this is a very asymmetric relationship.

For Apple, there's quite a lot if you're willing to grovel through commits, but at the moment nothing is bigger than Clang/LLVM -- a large chunk of the core team is directly employed by Apple, and with FreeBSD 10 Clang is directly incorporated into the core system. Apple has, at various times, employed other FreeBSD core committers directly. They very quietly have done a lot to support the project.

Sony, IIRC, employed some Japanese committers who were working on ACPI at one point.

Wow, GPL zealots sure are direct with their dishonesty these days.

Is there any way I can order them some LED lighting gear?

Since PayPal won't accept donations from where I live (Japan), here is an alternative way of donating through the Calgary Computer Shop:

https://https.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/order

Having just donated I would like to say that the man pages are wonderful. I like them so much that I have a oman alias and made a quick (and dirty) script to fetch them.

https://github.com/ninjin/ppod/tree/master/hck/openbsd_manpa...

Try them out when coding C or when writing portable shell-scripts, they are a blessing. There is also the official web interface:

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi

Huge +1 to the quality of OBSD man pages being awesome

Thanks. Made a donation.

Useful (non-slashdot) links:

Initial ask for help: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138730448307723&w=2

How much it costs: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2

Why old hardware platforms matter: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2

Why not kickstarter: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973837906139&w=2

And most importantly, the donation link: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html

I wish they had done an appeal before the end of 2013. I usually do my donations then, when I "close the books" for the year.

From their donation page, donations are not tax-deductible (for individuals at least; businesses may be able to expense them).

Nevertheless, I donated $50 just for the excellent work they do on OpenSSH.

A very rational decision. Nobody else will sell you a comparable product for that price. Is there even a comparable product?

They did:

> Date: 2013-12-17 18:20:48

It just took a month to have this thread on HN (there were others).

Like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6924644 from 2013-12-18.

  > 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses [annually?]

> 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.

and there's no way that overcoming those logistical reasons would be cheaper than $20,000? at all? okay, well then, I guess that limits your options doesn't it.

It certainly seems rather unlikely that moving the machines to another location would reduce the expenses to $0.

I can well imagine that there would be a lot of difficulty in moving an large eclectic collection of old machines into a modern data center, and that such an undertaking might be extremely expensive.

Maybe not to zero, but what about from $0.14/kWh to $0.06/kWh?

(I don't actually know what they currently pay)

The answer is in the second line of your post. We don't know the details of their situation. But somebody who does know says that there are good reasons not to move. Doesn't seem that implausible that he might be right.

I don't think any of us truly have a problem with OpenBSD being unwilling to move their machines. We have a problem with OpenBSD being unwilling to move their machines, offering practically zero explanation why, while simultaneously asking for strangely large sums of money "because they can't move their machines".

If it wasn't for those three elements coming together, we wouldn't give a damn.

"Mom, I need $1000. Right now. For...reasons."

> while simultaneously asking for strangely large sums of money

It's not a strangely large sum for what they need it for.

Moving many machines and reconfiguring networks and setups is far from 'free'. And as others have said, frequent physical access is a necessity, so the new location would have to be within a commuting distance of the current one if you want your core devs to keep working the way they do.

I really love how we keep getting advice.

Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale?

It's funny to hear this sort of thing from someone trying to accrue $20k in donations. Yes, many people will give bad advice. No, you don't really get to complain about it when you are asking them for large sums of money.

It's kind of off-putting, to be honest. This quintessential open-source abrasiveness is fine and dandy until you start asking for cold hard cash.

This. Don't be a dick to people giving you money - customers or donors.

If you can't turn it off, don't be donor facing.

Sure, they should totally just get their PR person on it.

Oh look, now they're asking for $40,000

Is there no one at OpenBSD who can't not be a dick? The situation is more dire than I thought.

From what I can tell the current mentality is: We don't need to accept feature requests or patches to get donors, we could just get more users and sell CDs

"oh Look here's a poor idiot in the Mailing list that didn't become a UNIX expert before asking a question, let's flame the shit out of him."

Alright Let's collect some money. Wanna know why? fuck you it! It just needs to be this way. Wanna help or suggest a solution? fuck you unless it's a check.

How is this system not working?

I'm sure they have their reasons and they've already carefully thought through all of the most common suggestions. The project's been around for awhile.

Frankly, that sounds a lot like an appeal to authority.

"They probably are doing the right thing because they are who they are" isn't really a valid argument.

You must be a hoot at parties.

That's probably true, a simple, polite answer or even a no comment would be far less abrasive. Here's his answer to 'maybe we should evaluate the scope of the project and see if we still need to support VAX':

>Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem. If you aren't in the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy.

>I really love how we keep getting advice. >Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale?

A simple no answer would do. Or maybe just the actual reason he runs the VAX.

You don't need a PR person; you just need someone who's not a dick.

I daresay any of their developers would quickly turn into dicks having to deal with that kind of public exposure.

And that's where disenfranchising non dev types is a real problem. Theo talks about pulling devs to make shirts and stickers and how that's a waste of time, but there are people out there that aren't kernel hackers that love to contribute to something bigger than themselves. No one's good at everything and the OpenBSD persona of being for and including only experts has made them a very lopsided organization with loads of talent but no diversity of skills.

Being nice to stupid people is as much of a skill as hacking up some kernel code.

I'm not saying you're wrong. But we have to get realistic here, OpenBSD is not going to turn into Canonical, not overnight, maybe not ever. I'm sure we would all love for it to suddenly sprout a bedside manner, but it probably won't, and you or me sitting around saying it needs one isn't helpful.

What we can rely on it being is technologically awesome. What else can you say that about? If you try to change the culture of OpenBSD, assuming that's even possible, the quality will inevitably suffer.

Could you honestly say you'd prefer OpenBSD to be more like Ubuntu?

No, I don't want that. But there is a big divide between those two things and having a little help with the business/relations wouldn't make them canonical. On the other hand there have been years (like 2012 and or 2011) where there were less than $30-40k donations to the OpenBSD project/foundation. remove electricity and there's just enough money for nothing. If you want a plausible OS you'll need a couple bucks; it's not an iPhone app. So instead of turning into canonical, maybe get some help to raise a few hundred thousand so you can run the boxes and have people behind the keyboards.

As for technically awesome, we are talking about a 'modern' OS that has poor support for multiple cores (servers will only have one core -theo), runs poorly inside a hypervisor and doesen't work as a hypervisor. An OS that does't support any of the newer types of file systems like zfs or btrfs. These things aren't strictly necessary, but that's kinda where things are headed in the server industry.

The code for the OpenBSD kernel is really clean and simple. It is well audited, but has half the security features of something like linux. This is a great approach if you don't stray to far from the kernel, but if it's not a firewall it might need a browser, java and or flash.

I think I am being realistic. It doesn't seem crazy that they could go on a fundraising binge, and get/hire some busines/PR/fundraising help that allows them to really meet their goals in the future. I'm not talking canonical money but you know 3-400k to power the servers and pay a couple people. That's a long term solution. We can all donate, and buy our disks but we'll be back here in a year.

"Being nice to stupid people is as much of a skill as hacking up some kernel code."

I'd rephrase that as 'finding simple tasks peripheral to the main effort that would allow non-expert people to contribute time to the project without detracting from the main work'.

We need PR people to devote their time and expertise to open source projects, just as developers do.

We wouldn't even need a very good one. I bet some kid still in school, studying PR, would do a better job than Theo.

I guess you don't know Theo de Raadt ;)

The guy is infamous for being one of the most aggressive, sarcastic and trollish OSS developers out there. He's been like that for 20+ years, he's not going to change just because they are 20 grand short.

Part of the success OpenBSD has enjoyed is in fact due to this uncompromising attitude: Theo pushed hard against security-by-obscurity, binary blobs, undocumented proprietary hardware and poor development practices. With openSSH, they pretty much set the bar for security-related programs the wotld over.

At the same time, Theo's personality routinely drives away a lot of very capable developers and users, which limited the overall popularity OpenBSD could ever reach.

>At the same time, Theo's personality routinely drives away a lot of very capable developers and users, which limited the overall popularity OpenBSD could ever reach.

It would be nice if we could all work in an environment where we could be abrasive as we want and still get paid. But this is life and not many people have that opportunity.

If Theo want's to put up a fight about blobs and proprietary hardware, he should do that. Talking down to people who genuinely agree about his goals and are trying to help is really self destructive.

A couple relevant quotes from the justly famous talk "You and Your Research", by Richard Hamming:

"If you chose to assert your ego in any number of ways, ``I am going to do it my way,'' you pay a small steady price throughout the whole of your professional career. And this, over a whole lifetime, adds up to an enormous amount of needless trouble."

"I am not saying you shouldn't make gestures of reform. I am saying that my study of able people is that they don't get themselves committed to that kind of warfare. They play it a little bit and drop it and get on with their work. "

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

> where we could be abrasive as we want and still get paid

If your code is wrong, I'll say it's wrong. I won't say you are an idiot, I won't make comments on your background and I won't judge you when I should be judging your arguments. I'll point what's wrong and why I think it's so and I'll welcome you if you prove me wrong and adjust my views accordingly.

Excessive abrasiveness is not a good trait for a community leader.

Theo's bad attitude is more the stuff of rumor rather than fact. More than a decade ago, when I first heard about Theo's abrasiveness, I went through nearly every mailing list post he'd ever made looking for the dirt (I was a teenager with time to kill). The end result? A dozen or so flames directed toward people who, in my eyes, seemed to have it coming.

It's a shame people don't talk as much about his tireless dedication to an important but relatively small open source project. He really is one of the true open source heroes.

I was doing CS at U of C same time he was. While I have a lot of respect for him in many areas, and found him entertaining to hang out with at times, there is just no way to overstate how abrasive and how much of an opinionated arrogant asshole he can be. (Something I don't think he'd disagree with.)

>No, you don't really get to complain about it when you are asking them for large sums of money.

Attitudes like this are a big part of why I am far happier to run a for-profit business at near-breakeven than I am running a not-for-profit or cooperative enterprise.

$20K is... rather less than what my RHEL bill would be if I was using RHEL and not CentOS.

I mean, I'm a pretty small shop, and $20K is a lot of money for me (thus I'm using CentOS and not RHEL.) - but by the standards of a whole operating system? twenty grand is small potatoes. Hell, /my/ power bill is rather more than $20K a year.

I think they should hold a bake sale.

  > 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.

I don't understand this comment. If the choice came down to moving versus shutting down entirely, why is moving an unacceptable answer?

Seriously? What's not to understand? He said they had reasons that prevent them from moving and didn't want to discuss it further. Why push it?

Isn't he in a better position to decide what's unacceptable than you are?

Probably, but then again if he wants my money he better explain why he needs it and how he's going to spend it, doesn't he?

That being said since OpenBSD is all about security maybe that's the reason they don't want to move the servers to some place where they won't be able to monitor physical access to the machines. That's pure speculation though.

If he's asking for money from me, I would like to know why it's not an option. The root of the issue being raised is power/space, so I'd definitely want to know why I'm forking up for something the project could potentially get for free.

It's not a big deal, and I don't expect him to go into detail. He just won't get a cent from me without elaborating, and that's OK. I'm not mad, and I understand he has mis-givings. I just don't think that answer is acceptable enough for me to donate, but that's my subjective opinion (and not everyone else's).

If you're asking for help and you have constraints, you better qualify those constraints in a way that builds confidence.

The more transparency you have in your discussion, the more supportive people will be.

> The more transparency you have in your discussion, the more supportive people will be.

I think that's total, obvious nonsense and if you need to be convinced, here's an exercise: consider how much money the average nonprofit would raise if people knew where all that money went.

The average nonprofit isn't worthy of the money they get so unless you are trying to say OpenBSD is not worthy of the money and the only way they can get it is to hide the details then I don't get what your point is.

You mean like publishing accounts? Maybe even including salaries for the highly paid people?

Because every US nonprofit is required by law to do that. You can browse it all on line: http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/990finder/

That is a nice tool, thanks. Someone else posted something similar recently and it wanted to charge $250 for membership or something like that.

The web is bringing a lot of good transparency to nonprofits but there's still a lot of repugnant wastefulness and avarice that often isn't captured well by a 990 form. (publishing salaries is pretty huge, though)

I stand by my point that the more a person learns about the average charity the less they're going to want to donate... transparency doesn't magically lead to supportiveness. And wanting a project to account for every watt of electricity is just completely silly.

edit: transparency is a way for better charities to look good relative to poor ones, yes, but all things being equal, it's a negative for fundraising: as with business and government, a lot of what goes on in ANY organization is ugly to look at and is bound to turn some people off. (none of that is an argument against transparency itself, let's just not kid ourselves about its usefulness for raising money)

The more transparency there is, the better the legitimate charities look and the less likely people are to throw money at what turn out to be obvious scams.

Transparency is critical.

I get your point, but I think you're generally wrong. My criterion around that for donating is not, "Is this place perfect?" but "Is this place materially more screwed up than any other organization?"

I'm sure there are some people with unrealistic standards that would not donate at all. And I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that take advantage of a lack of transparency to do dubious things. But the solution to that is more transparency. And more analysis of the transparent information, so that people can easily contextualize it.

OpenBSD is developed and released in Canada. I'm not sure if they are a US non-profit or not so maybe these laws don't apply.

Which is the point exactly. People DO have confidence in the nonprofits they donate to. It might not be warranted at all, but the nonprofit has actively built confidence for their audience.

If I'm donating I would like to know exactly where the money is going, and what options have already been explored. OpenBSD should have referenced, full documentation about these things if they want to maximize donations.

Apparently, there isn't very much documentation/open accounting, and they aren't willing to discuss options to reduce the bill. That doesn't inspire confidence.

> Apparently, there isn't very much documentation/open accounting, and they aren't willing to discuss options to reduce the bill. That doesn't inspire confidence.

It is a lot of work for a small team to itemize and publish every expense, but some rough breakdown of monthly expenses that my donation would be going towards would really help.

If they know they need $20k, they must have arrived at that number somehow. Publishing that estimation would be a good start.

If their books are clean, this is actually pretty easy. Just pulling an annual operating budget should be much easier, if they have good financial practices and controls in place.

They're not looking for a lot of smaller donators in this specific instance (although I'm sure it's appreciated), but rather one large Canadian company to foot the bill and on that company's books for accounting purposes.

These costs are not much versus the costs of hiring developers.

Not sure how much they are hiring developers. They said the number they need annually is more inline with $150,000. I'm not sure if that's in addition to current donations or total but you wouldn't be hiring many devs with $150k - $20k for power- wherever Theo needs.

And suppose OpenBSD wanted to know exactly wtf you were planning on doing with OpenSSH after you downloaded it... what servers are you planning to connect to, what keys are you planning on using? You know, if you're going to use OpenSSH they want to know exactly what for. Just leaching off the project doesn't inspire confidence.

OpenBSD releases quality software that all of us use EVERY SINGLE DAY as far as I'm concerned Theo can take the money and buy a yacht with it as long as they keep doing what they are doing.

Yes he can(and probably should) buy a yacht. What you're missing though is that by not being transparent they miss out on a lot more contributors. So it's not a super smart move.

Also keep in mind that a lot of contributors might not use OpenBSD, yet they might be interested in offering some small amount if they believe it's for a good cause and they know where that money is going.

...there isn't very much documentation/open accounting...

So your feeling is similar to that toward a homeless dude? You'll give him a sandwich but not cash? If they're saying power is the shortfall, maybe we just need to buy them some solar panels or wind generators or something.

Especially if the fate of OpenBSD as it stands is hanging in the balance. Depending on who is offering, this may be because of the uncertainty of whatever arrangement is being proposed. For example, if a smaller company or an individual offers to foot the bill, what happens if the company/individual later has a budget crunch of their own, or decides to cut ties?

Of course, if an IBM/Apple/Google/etc offers space/power, it may be a less risky proposition.

> why is moving an unacceptable answer

It seems likely that they don't trust anyone else to have physical access to the machines for security reasons. Their threat model probably includes national governments.

It's possible, but without any kind of answer we are all just guessing.

A somewhat related note about branding.

My first "real" job was in the mid-90's; I was the first technical hire at a small Chicago ISP (EnterAct) that grew into a relatively large ISP (when I left, we were default-free peered to several tier-1 providers and had more POPs than I can name). It was great, and the team that started it --- two Big-5 accounting firm programmers --- was inspiring, particularly when it came to business strategy.

Anyways, very early on, EnterAct managed to maneuver into a reputation for premium customer support. We got that reputation by doing some concrete things differently than our competitors: we staffed an appropriate number of CSRs, trained them to be nice to customers, did a lot of gratuitous tech support for basic computer problems, and were flexible about resolving billing disputes. Sadly, a lot of those things were differentiators at the time. A couple years in and we were essentially able to hang "best customer support" on our list of features, and eventually we became the most popular ISP in Chicago largely based on that.

But something I came to notice pretty quickly: the things we were doing to earn that support reputation stopped being empirical differentiators pretty quickly. Our largest competitor, run by Karl Denninger, did us a continuing series of favors by pissing off their customers. But other large regional ISPs pretty quickly learned not to set fire to their customer base, and, by the end, I think our customer service was pretty much at par for the whole area; we were no longer truly different based on support. The reputation, however, never left.

That observation has stuck with me for my entire career. I think about it all the time. It's banal, I know: "early impressions count a lot", but there's a little more to it than that: you can weaponize an early impression by turning it into your market positioning and having some message discipline.

I left EnterAct for a job in Calgary with a company called Secure Networks (SNI), doing development and security research. For the year prior to leaving EnterAct, I had also been working with the OpenBSD project, mostly by writing all their security advisories, but also doing a bit of part-time security research. SNI operated the world's first commercial vulnerability research team, and had a very close relationship with Theo; we had a full time employee who had essentially led the first OpenBSD security audit. I went drinking with Theo many times, and vividly remember hanging out in his basement with Tim Newsham eating bad pizza and trying to find vulnerabilities in Daniel Bernstein's qmail (we found one that would work if integers were 128 bits, but ironically missed the LP64 bugs that Georgi Guninski found; it was 1997, though).

This is all a long prelude to a simple point, which is that I think OpenBSD's reputation for security works in a very similar way to how EnterAct's reputation worked. OpenBSD started doing something very different than FreeBSD, Linux, and (particularly) NetBSD: they did an OS-wide audit for vulnerabilities, and aggressively fixed apparent bugs whether or not we could demonstrate that they were exploitable. That was a great move. But it was so obviously great that pretty much everyone (with the possible exception of NetBSD) quickly adopted the practice.

Among security research insiders, OpenBSD's reputation became a little bit farcical. Not that OpenBSD was comically insecure --- it wasn't --- but that its reputation so far outstripped its actually differentiation. People found a bunch of vulnerabilities in OpenBSD and laughed as the claim at the top of the OpenBSD changed from "no vulnerabilities" to "no remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in the default install".

And at some point in the last 10 years, didn't OpenBSD's distro servers get owned up?

I'm sure the OpenBSD project would like its threat model to include NSA. But OpenBSD is not a meaningful ally in a contest between you and NSA. NSA wins that fight. OpenBSD's userland was much stronger than FreeBSD's in 1999, but I'm not sure I think their kernel is stronger in 2013, and that's probably what matters more.

Let me wind this bloviation up with a caveat: one thing a reputation for security gets you is a feed of talent that is interested in working on security problems. OpenBSD certainly got that. So for instance, OpenBSD's developers designed and built privilege-separated OpenSSH. There is a lot of good security work that has started inside the OpenBSD project, and I don't mean to talk any of that stuff down. I'd just be careful about taking the project's overall reputation to the bank, especially if you have serious adversaries.

Sorry for hanging this sprawling comment off your (simpler) point; I just don't want the root comment on the thread to be me talking down OpenBSD.

Thomas, thanks for that comment. If there was a "best of HN", this comment should be a part of it. Good storytelling, a great business lesson tidbit for all of us, interesting technical discussion, and a good reality check.

Well said.

Sorry for my slightly o/t comment.

This is a great observation, I don't think it diminishes OpenBSD at all, anyone wondering if this comment is worth reading, it is :)

Useful info.

Fortunately for me, I never had a CSR interaction with them. I used them until they augured in.

wgl@mcs.com

I don't recall if I stayed to the bitter end, but I started making provisions for a move after I ended up arguing with Karl over whether inbound mail was being corrupted, maybe around the time of a conversion to (from?) maildir.

I think I started when it really was only Karl, was Dawn his first hire? Hmm, I probably still have the t-shirt as well.

ajm@mcs.com (or .net)

Ah, yes, you are right--it was .net.

And that was my shortest email ever--11 characters complete.

> And at some point in the last 10 years, didn't OpenBSD's distro servers get owned up?

Pretty sure that was a solaris box.

I know OpenBSD's reputation is primarily security, but I use it for a different reason. It's simple, stable, and doesn't break.

Back when I was in high school and I had a lot of free time and all that, the various incarnations of Linux were a delight. Even after that, I still went with it out of inertia and spent many evenings tweaking Gentoo.

I eventually just goddamn gave up. I got sick of every upgrade breaking something in my system and then especially got sick of deciding between figuring out how to use wpa_supplicant and installing NetworkManager which screws up my network settings as soon as I plug in the Ethernet cable while I'm still on my wireless. In a flight of rage I thought ok, I've had enough of this crap, and went the OpenBSD route.

Seriously, it has all the nice parts of Plan 9 while still actually being able to run all the tools I need. I still have Linux and Windows boxes for the odd tools that don't work on anything else (I do embedded systems for a living, and there's a lot of vendor lockdown there), but for my day-to-day workstation, I found nothing better.

And OpenBSD has the best-written man pages in all of Unix.

When I got thrown in the deep end with Solaris, many years ago, I'd read the Solaris man page for the options, but first I'd read the OpenBSD man page to work out what the hell the command was for and why.

Yes, that's an important point. The Linux manpages are a joke, they're half useless almost all the time.

The most offensive man pages are GNU project pages that effectively say, "for real documentation read the info page". Which, as someone that can never remember how to use info, is frustrating and just serves to piss me off...my first thought is "and a big fuck you to you, too". And then I look it up online so I don't have to read how to use info before I can read how to use the command I was looking for docs on.

I don't know if this is common practice anymore...I don't remember the last time I saw a defective man page like this, but I still remember it with great anger. I love GNU, but I hate the kind of condescension it takes to try to force someone to use a different tool because you believe it to be superior to the standard tool (when it's really not; I find info pages to be obtuse to create, and difficult to read).

Info pages are hypertext, and because of that they are better suited for a complete manual for a complex program than man pages.

But we have other hypertext formats available. It'd be better if GNU started using some format that everybody already usees and knows how to write.

This fundamentally goes against the Unix philosophy though which is to provide small well-defined parts from which you can construct a complete solution from.

If you need a complex manual for a complex program, something is wrong.

"GNU's Not Unix."

Which is probably the greatest problem with it.

What does this even mean? The name GNU itself is a joke.

I mean, the project wants to create an operating system that looks like UNIX, acts like UNIX, smells like UNIX, but from scratch with appropriate license that allows usage and access to source to anyone - so that the project doesn't get into legal trouble from whoever actually owns UNIX?

So drunk Stallman in 1981 says: "hik, let's call this, hik operhikating system GNU, hik, because it's not UNIX hik, but it sure looks like one, hik, but it's not, hik, but it kinda is hik, but it's not theirs hik it's everyone's hik". That's how I like to imagine it happened.

info pages are yet another artifact of RMS's sad devotion to ITS and other dead environments.

I was like you once, then I learned you could do e.g.: info coreutils|less

Now I no longer have anger management issues

Well that sure is handy. Hopefully I'll remember that next time.

Wow, thanks for the tip. I will never have to use info again!

GNU's stance on man pages is entirely correct! For real documentation, read the info page, but you rarely want real documentation, you just want a quick example or the command-line invocation syntax, or what a particular argument does. And 99% of the time, that will be in a man page.

The problem lies when you want to find something 1% of the time, and it's here that man pages become sprawling unindexed messes. For example, take a look at the man pages for perl or zsh: you'll have no chance finding anything, as those programs are so large that they need a wealth of documentation to go into them. At the same time, the info page for ls contains the things you rarely need to see such as exactly how things are sorted or the minute details of timestamp formatting. If this were all in the man page, you'd complain that you couldn't find anything in it.

I don't know, I always found the perl and zsh man pages to be rather pleasant. They were sprawling, sure, but having long ago given up on brevity, they have no fear of meticulously describing how a feature or flag works. And they're just man pages, so you don't need to read the manual-for-the-manual first like I always find myself doing when I'm forced to use info.

This was my impression as well after using OpenBSD, and when I pointed that out a while back on HN, it was pointed out that the core linux manpages have gotten much, much better in many cases[1]. In that respect, it may be another example of the GP comment.

1: My go-to example was always ifconfig, but linux's manpage for ip(8) really isn't that bad, as is actually the linux equivalent. Quality probably varies quite a bit based on the package that supplies the utility though, while OpenBSD's quality is fairly universal.

I wonder where the best place to report manpage bugs to is - for things like the builtin commands that may not have a single upstream. Does Ubuntu pull in a manpage update from Fedora? What about the other way around?

If it is a GNU utility, the man page usually contains a bug report link. AFAICT GNU is the upstream for all their documentation.

It's like you are me, from a couple years ago.

What parts of Plan 9 are you referring to?

Only subjective, but technical ones. Simplicity and stability of well-integrated userspace tools, sane defaults, good portability.

Similar story. Signed up to post this :)

In 2009, our development team lost a whole 10 hours to a degraded Linux mdadm RAID1 that wouldn't rebuild due to an obscure error after a digger severed our power and internet connection. No internet access as power came up first so no access to online help. mdadm is buggy. Documentation sucks. Error messages suck. Only recourse was a full restore from tape which took a long time. This was the last straw after over a decade of dealing with this crap from network dropouts, laziness, half-arsed features, distro wars, politics and churn.

Some previous Unix experience in the late 1990s with OpenBSD on an old SparcStation 5 (the only thing that would run on that machine nicely) jumped into my mind on the way home. It had that warm, fuzzy, well-engineered, well-documented feeling about it, like an old HP RPN calculator. Got home, downloaded it and installed it on my laptop, replacing Ubuntu.

4 years down the line: one happy person with the same laptop running 5.4 still with that warm, fuzzy, well-engineered, well-documented feeling.

Not once has it let me down. Not for a minute in the 4000+ hours I've been using it. It just works.

"...and installing NetworkManager which screws up my network settings as soon as I plug in the Ethernet cable while I'm still on my wireless."

Any bug numbers? I'm not seeing that on Debian Wheezy or CentOS.

But I have just ordered a CD set to try this OpenBSD to see what all the fuss is about and to learn something.

Ahh, the good old days.

Have you seen this? ruBSD last year http://www.openbsd.org/papers/ru13-deraadt

Totally off-topic, but I remember those days. At some point, I got a copy of my customer record and saw "MCS bailers" in the referral field. Got a good chuckle over that. I don't even remember what KD did, but I remember choosing EnterAct because you were one of the last ISPs in the area that offered a dial-up shell. That was in the days when I had a Commodore 128 set up in my home office to mess around on.

> And at some point in the last 10 years, didn't OpenBSD's distro servers get owned up?

Yes, a cvs bug I believe. No kernel will protect you from bad user-mode code that really wants to execute everybody's shell script.

> Among security research insiders, OpenBSD's reputation became a little bit farcical.

I spent lots of time looking through the OpenBSD Kernel, togheter with FreeBSD and Linux kernel. It was my job for years, looking for vulns and writing exploits for them.

I still admire the OpenBSD Kernel for their simplicity and tidiness.

No comparision to FreeBSD kernel-side. FreeBSD kernel often have commits of several hundreds of KBs of mostly unaudited code. They still don't enable stack-protection today in 2014. It's a joke. My windows phone had stack protection in 2003.

No comparision to Linux either, the Linux kernel is so huge, so full of code that even if it's way more audited than FreeBSD, there are still vulns lurking everywhere and exploits for linux kernel came out almost monthly. Probably it's the reason it have so many security features, more than OpenBSD nowadays.

Windows, their kernel is a work of art. Microsoft only have to fire the guy that says "hey I got a great idea lets parse some random protocol inside the kernel"

But I disgress. OpenBSD is still very good. Very safe in the default install. It will protect your firefox from being owned by a NSA-sized enemy that really want to hack you? no. But the problem is in the browser, not in the kernel. Don't use a big browser. It's not in the default install :)

> Don't use a big browser. It's not in the default install :)

Missing entirely the point of the parent post. I can claim anything is secure if I seal it in enough concrete.

But the reverse is also true. You cannot realistically claim that anything with over a million lines of code is bug-free.

That may explain why unlike all other operative systems out there, OpenBSD distro gets smaller as time passes.

Interesting thought. I wonder what precautions are taken w/r/t Linux?

Why not just do what Linus Torvalds does and simply trust his hash function? For anyone to tamper with the Linux kernel sources and have him not notice they'd have to generate a SHA-256 collision and somehow get this change past thousands of clones of the repository.

I've seen a picture posted on Slashdot how they server rack looks like. There are many very old machines, I am sure that at least one reason is fear that they break during transportation.

Found it: http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg

Why not move the machines, and if the Amiga breaks down and they can't find a replacement, end Amiga support? I mean, that's not a wonderful outcome, but what would you prefer to see given the following options?

a) Shut down OpenBSD

b) Shut down Amiga support in OpenBSD

I mean, is it even a hard choice?

Besides, if there are many developers who like developing for Amiga, surely they would be able to find a replacement?

Or hidden option c): ask people to donate money.

Well, yes, clearly. But it's been a month since the initial ask, and this sort of "threat":

the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on.

suggests the necessary $20k (cash) has not been forthcoming.

P.S. I understand it's not a threat in the sense of ransom etc, but the most correct word is not coming to my mind.

I completely agree with your association. In my view OpenBSD is very plainly holding itself hostage for $20,000 cash and expecting everyone to accomodate them.

Oh, right, I've seen this movie before. [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_JOGmXpe5I

It's game theory.

All three options exist, but the maintainers pretending that option b doesn't exist at this point in time increases the probability that option c will succeed.

If the pretense doesn't work, be very much assured that they will go with option b.

The Amiga port isn't live. It hasn't been maintained for a while IIRC.

There are two important points that shouldn't be forgotten about aggressively pushing cross-platform: it retains developers and exposes bugs. There's a great deal of usefulness behind it, beyond simply making it obvious that the workstations we get today are shit.

Ok, Amiga was just an example I pulled off the top of my head.

I am not suggesting all legacy platforms need to be cut. I'm suggesting that it's possibly an acceptable risk, and also if a replacement UltraSPARC simply cannot be sourced, there can't be that many developers working on UltraSPARC anyway. (Just as an example)

That image has been present on the lower right corner of the openbsd homepage for a long time. Given the name of the image, I imagine it's been present since at least since 2009, but my (fuzzy) memory wants me to believe there has been an image of a rack there even before then.

Am I the only one who want's to organize and clean up those racks? :)

The collection of stuff in between the racks is making my neck itch.

The AC instructions note made me smile.

It reminded me of a post-it I left in the company lab with a diagram for how to do proper gigabit cross-overs. I could still find it there five years later after they rearranged the lab several times.

I thought most (if not all) gigabit Ethernet implementations auto-detect host-to-host connections and handle the crossover for you.

They do. Maybe he meant 100BASE-T4.

They all do now, but it's still an optional element of the standard.

It was optional in 100Mbit. In gigabit, it is mandatory.

"Automatic MDI/MDI-X Conﬁguration is intended to eliminate the need for crossover cables between simi-lar devices. Implementation of an automatic MDI/MDI-X conﬁguration is optional for 1000BASE-T devices. The assignment of pin-outs for a 1000BASE-T crossover function cable is shown in Table 40-12 in 40.8."

Here's a link that does not require IEEEXplore access: http://www.scribd.com/doc/46141801/802-3ab-1999

I say, I stand corrected. I was sure I read the opposite somewhere, but I would not dream of contesting your reference.

There must be more to it than that. Two racks aren't using $20k in electricity.

Huh, no Sun4/470? I wonder what happened to the one Theo got from me. Too slow I guess but it was a fun machine back in the day.

OpenBSD supports a number of odd and unusual platforms and does builds on them. See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html. Older hardware can both use a significant amount of electricity and require much more hand-holding than is possible. Virtualization and emulation are not acceptable substitutes because they claim that doing builds on e.g. VAX is one of the best ways to ensure that the code works on VAX as opposed to simply booting on VAX. They also regularly find bugs affecting all platforms that are exacerbated by one particular architecture (think alignment or endianness issues).

OpenBSD's main value is high security standards.

- Is there a significant amount of people with high security standards and an interest in SGI workstation hardware?

- What about people who have high security standards and Sharp Zaurus hardware?

If these groups aren't as important, as say, ARM and x86 users, perhaps it could be worth dropping some of these platforms?

As a longtime OpenBSD fan and advocate, this has always fascinated me. I loved SGIs back in the day but they are slow as shit today and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal. These platforms survive in OpenBSD land because somebody still cares enough about them to enjoy hacking on them. There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think.

Personally, I do wish OpenBSD could somehow regain the popularity it once had and that support for modern hardware like 10GBE and scaling PF throughput w/ multi-core CPUs would improve. I don't know what it would take to bring people back.

>There's no point in saying "Drop them!" because the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think.

If it's worse for the rest of the ecosystem, there's a point.

Is that clear? It's not as if when SGIs are taken away, developers efforts will seamlessly efficiently shift to amd64. I like to think that "oddities" like SGI are data-points to test against, and help keep abstraction alive by disallowing traps like pretending that everything is an x86.

I'd be interested to hear whether or not this is the case from people closer to such a condition, though (ie: OpenBSD, NetBSD, ???).

If they would rather refuse free hosting and will "not allow the conversation to that way" then it means they want to keep support for some physical hardware that's hard to find in existing datacenters.

This is like saying "I don't care if my arcade goes out of business, I'm going to keep the power hungry cabinets alive even though they only get used once every 3 years."

Why should everyone else pay the 20K to subsidize ancient hardware support? If there really is a subset of people who really really depend on this, then they should be forking up the cash to pay for something that could be had for free elsewhere if support was restricted to 95% of the platforms in use by the vast majority of people.

If there is an argument that maintaining this will somehow improve security overall and not just on ancient hardware then I would love to see it. But if the Devs working on it could care less of what the rest of us think, then maybe those Devs should pay their electricity bills to support their toy platforms because I could care less about what they think too ...

That is the argument. Obscure kernel and driver bugs are frequently only made apparent as edge cases on said ancient weird hardware, but the fixes benefit all platforms from a code-correctness point-of-view.

But many of those old hardware platforms can be emulated. So if their reason of existence is only triggering edge cases, there are other ways to do so.

Emulation isn't guaranteed to manifest the same edge case issues that surface these defects, though.

Then again, it's possible that emulation could surface other edge case issues. That's completely orthogonal to the value of non-emulated archaic architectures for this purpose, however.

Actually most can't be emulated because emulators don't exist and those which can typically can't be emulated correctly (Sparc emulators for example which are notoriously sparse and bad quality).

Some of the architectures also have different endianess and incredibly complicated peripherals to the cost effective host machines as well meaning that it's actually more power efficient to run native. A headless 100MHz VAXstation for example draws less power than the equivalent host that would be required to provide a full, accurate emulation with peripherals. These aren't arcade machines.

OTOH, the preservation of such historically relevant architectures would benefit enormously from emulation. This is an aspect that should get some attention and which could, possibly, open up another funding avenue to the project as a side effect.

Not really. The OS syscall interface, ABI and the fact everything is abstracted via your C compiler normalises the differences between the machines pretty well meaning you only end up dealing with portability issues.

Portability issues is where real hardware benefits. It's where you have battles of unusual register sizes, endianess, host/network order differences, different memory models and memory protection, different performance characteristics, different timings and different exploits.

Unless the emulation is 100% accurate, including timing, which is a really difficult thing to do (look at the effort MAME goes to), then the benefits over real hardware is moot.

Emulators are also expensive to write due to the above, have their own bugs and don't always recreate the bugs in the real hardware (which are sometimes exploitable).

I was thinking about MAME (more specifically, about MESS). If two groups benefit from a single effort, it seems to be an good investment, even if it costs nearly twice as much.

Also, using emulated hardware could cut down the usage of the real pieces, which could then be better studied and preserved. Doing less builds on vintage hardware is, actually, a good idea.

"... and unusable for any kind of modern desktop usage unless all you do is write code in a terminal."

Sounds good to me. Many times (actually most times) I have no need for a "desktop" metaphor on my screen in order to get things done. I actually get more done big jobs done faster without the desktop metaphor in the way.

"... the devs working on them probably could care less what the rest of us think."

That's what makes them so special.

Perhaps in the long run the most "powerful" and sought after computers will not be the ones with the latest chips, but the ones that the user has the most knowledge of and control over.

Can you imagine the old-timer reminiscing: "Remember when computers didn't have backdoors built-in?" or "Remember when you did not have to pay for a license to write programs for hardware you bought?"

But if the project stops keeping obsolete build machines around, they would save on electricity bills. Hackers could still hack, they just wouldn't be killing the project with legacy support costs.

Read further into the thread -- specifically the messages from asshat Theo. He is absolutely opposed to anything like that.

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2

"I really love how we keep getting advice. Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale?"

I think if you're openly soliciting donations under the premise that they're essential to keeping the project running at all, you can put up with the people you're trying to get money out of asking questions to ensure that the money you're asking for really is as needed as you say it is.

Not Theo.

He clearly says things like "that's not up for discussion", "I'm not going into details", etc.

If anyone ever truly deserved the title BDFL...

I think if you ever use OpenSSH for anything whatsoever, you can put up with a grumpy Theo.

Especially since he is almost always technically correct--the best kind of correct.

What OpenBSD foundation really needs is a tactful and charismatic person to act as firewall and pf between Theo and the people with overflowing bank accounts, who are more accustomed to dealing with obsequious salesdroids than a person who is not only ten times smarter than their entire golf group put together, but also so aware of it that he cannot hide how much of a waste of time it is for him to suck up to any one of them, no matter how much he could use the cash.

Do you think Apple would have gone anywhere if Wozniak was the one talking to all the investors?

No, what OpenBSD needs is a broader FOSS community that doesn't turn every bump in the road into a referendum on bruised feelings from years ago, and recognizes its indebtedness. I type 'ssh' how many times a day?

Not that I don't understand those feelings. I've spent enough time lurking on openbsd-misc to have seen Theo and friends be beastly. But never without some provocation. And one might wish better impulse control on any number of online personalities.

(And if you find this rude, note that I'm not involved with OpenBSD -- not even on the mailing list anymore -- so blame me, not 'the OpenBSD community'.)

I'm not sure the "B" applies, unless it's from the same acronym as BOFH.

I may or may not agree with you, but don't call people asshats on HN.

He's earned it. He is however technically excellent.

The important part of sdkmvx's comment is that those SGI workstations help find bugs that also affect x86 users. The more diverse ecosystem makes it easier to reliably detect and reproduce tricky race conditions, endianess bugs or memory management mistakes.

From Theo de Raadt, on-thread:

  On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all
  platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the
  platforms we run, following that they are fixed.  It is a harsh
  reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved.

I was trying to think of a good way to say exactly this, but he says it better (and more authoritatively) than I ever could. Broad platform support is a significant factor contributing to overall quality in products like *BSD, and it's apparent in looking at the source.

We used to maintain SGI boxes for this same reason but we've pulled back. The main benefit we got from older RISC stuff was that they bitched about unaligned loads. If you are going to support any of those models you need at least one box like that in your cluster. SPARC was faster than MIPS so we kept SPARC.

I think Theo could probably thin down the cluster and still be good but maybe I'm wrong and he'll show up with examples that require all of that hardware. That would be interesting because in our case we've sorted out the problems and rarely see things blow up on the RISC boxen.

You appear not to realise that SGI hardware contains MIPS CPUs. A large amount of code is shared between these platforms:

http://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html http://www.openbsd.org/octeon.html http://www.openbsd.org/loongson.html

A mips32 port would also be very desirable for all those shitty little routers with their ancient Linux kernel, but sadly nobody is working on that at the moment.

So, should the network and firewall OS that many people claim OpenBSD is, slash its support for MIPS devices?

There's probably a few hobbyists that still use SGIs. Octeon is mostly commercial vendors, who could pay for all of OpenBSDs needs out of their fancy executive toilet paper budget. And there's one OpenBSD hacker who uses Loongson, even GNU cult leaders use GNU/Linux on Loongson instead.

More than one OpenBSD hacker used loongson

If you want to support MIPS for embedded applications then loongson is one of the fastest and cheapest ways to run stuff right now.

How's availability outside of China? I'm not finding many of these systems in the US.

I don't know about the US but there is a place in the Netherlands that says they have netbooks and small systems in stock.

Good point, I didn't know MIPS is still used in the embedded space, I thought it was all ARM these days.

But OpenBSD could be testing on an embedded MIPS development device at any data center they want.

MIPS is on the rise again as recent SoCs are more power efficient than ARM. I don't have a source for this unfortunately.

Sony Bravia EX series televisions are MIPS and Linux based for example.

It's not power efficiency, it's money.

MIPS SoC licensing is less expensive than ARM licensing at the smaller volumes inherent in low-end routers (.vs phones and tablets).

Except, Sharp Zaurus is ARM.

There's generic rack mountable ARM boxes. They don't need a Zaurus in their datacenter.

I don't see why they're proposing a all or none situation when they could choose to move and in doing so, limit the number of platforms they support. If anyone complains about a specific platform being dropped, well have them pay for the overhead associated with it.

Theo says it's because if they drop $platform, they'll lose the devs that like working on $platform who quite possibly work on @other_platforms as well.

So Theo would rather shutdown instead?

Change is hard, but I think it's worth a shot. And you never know maybe spending more time focused on real needs will create a better product from all the extra attention given to things that are work worthy.

Realize that funding for OpenBSD has been an ongoing problem for decades now. Theo would like to focus exclusively on managing the project, but instead he has to keep dropping everything to deal with the funding problem.

And, the OpenBSD development team has contributed a lot to the software community, so it's extra frustrating not to get enough support back.

I'd expect that at some point it just stops being a fight you want to keep fighting.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of the older hardware at least require some degree of hands on administration. Rebuilding an testing a new kernel on a VAX with no remote administration features would slow things down. Having stuff easily available makes a lot of sense to me.

Not likely. Everything of that sort has a simple serial console port.

Sorry, forgot about that. Still it not a nice way of managing a server.

Because Theo.

This discussion comes up every time only because some people seem to think OS development is like racking new x86 servers running RHEL.

Many of the machines do not have LOM. They have hardware failures instead. They hang because they get trashed building OpenBSD and ports pretty much 24/7. There is debugging and serial cables going on. Someone needs to push that NMI button and check the LEDs flicker like they should. Reboot them. Constantly update to the latest development version, making them panic quite a bit. Diagnose that. Installation procedure requires console access, monitor adapters, weird keyboards, ... They don't fit in racks properly. There are security concerns. Etc, etc.

It's wrong to think of the machine room as rack space than can be had for cheap somewhere else. It's much more like a lab (with the mad professor living on top, controlling the experiment).

While what you say is correct, Theo's stance on this is still a bit unreasonable. A review should be done to see which systems can be moved or supported by the means of remote power off strips and IP console servers. They should be perfectly willing to move that gear if someone offers them the space. All the Sun SPARC, Alpha and Intel most likely falls into this category. Only systems that someone needs to be physically there to access should be left onsite.

I have donated to OpenBSD a number of times because I believe the project is of great value. In all cases where I used a release (for firewalls mostly) I purchased a CD set.

maybe he doesn't want anyone else to have physical access (for security.

I feel like it's useful to point that OpenBSD won't say exactly why the bill is so high, and apparently they don't have open accounting. That bothers me a bit.

Link to relevant reddit comment thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1vakm9/openbsd_develo...

What kind of "why" do you expect? There is a pretty large collection of computers, network equipment, UPS and HVAC stuff. You want a machine per machine watt usage?

8 year old image of one of the racks, is only grew since... http://www.openbsd.org/images/newrack.jpg

It's a due diligence kind of thing. If you're asking people to make significant monetary contributions, it makes sense to provide a clear picture of what you're using that money on.

Exactly. Donors of non-profits like to see where the money is going. If you're doing an arms length transaction, then it's ok to say "No need to look behind the curtain, and feel free to buy from someone else."

They could at least say, We use X watts to power Y machines

If they don't know at least numbers like that, there are some bigger issues.

That bothers me too, what if they are mining bitcoins with the energy/funds? That wouldn't seem too far-fetched for unaudited tech-savy people.

I'm sorry, but that is just absurd. Some of the servers in question are coming up on 20 years of age. We didn't have the power-conserving hardware back then that we have now. Those old SPARCstations put out heat like a hair dryer. That stuff uses a lot of power and remember that ever watt of power you put into a server needs to be cooled. So, basically double the electricity costs for any given piece of gear. This rack is not cheap to run or cool, and definitely not in a home basement without access to highly efficient (and huge) datacenter-class cooling and power infrastructure. There are reasons that this gear needs to stay at Theo's place. If you don't like his reasons, you don't have to donate. He didn't email you and ask for a donation; you read the story here.

Cool. I won't then. If you want money, then (as has been pointed out quite a few times) you need to be able to give an explanation for what your hardware does.

You're expecting a medium to large size company to donate to you. Those companies have a moral and fiduciary duty to know what they are spending their money on. It seems odd that the "Open"BSD project doesn't feel the need to be open about the hardware they use!

Just an idea: those who have reservations about donating to OpenBSD could just buy a CD-ROM set. You pay for a product part of the cost of which supports the project. And if OpenBSD dies, you can keep it on the shelf and say 'I helped'.

My understanding is that 1000 CD-ROM sets will bring in the CA$20K needed

Can someone explain why I would want to support OpenBSD?

I get, from the comments, that: openSSH is great (sure, I can believe it) and Theo is an asshole but you should compromise and give them money anyway.

I don't get why a parallel operating system ought to continue existing, especially one that comes from the same legacy codebase as several others. I also don't get why, if openSSH is so good, the goal isn't to write a new SSH or fund openSSH separately and drop the rest that can't be supported. Why does the world needs OpenBSD instead of having the talent focused on making a smaller number (..Linux) better.

Certainly the answer might be 'because that's what the talent wants to work on' but that's not a good reason to fund it.

I have also gotten the impression, from limited observation, that there are real problems in the open source community with too many people doing the same thing and not working together, and with people being jerks (or just generally anti-social or at least not-highly-personable) and making it hard to get involved or care about otherwise important projects. I don't think supporting Theo, from what I've read here, helps that trend.

I know very little. Can someone fill me in?

OpenSSH is one of many offshoots of the OpenBSD project.

OpenBSD being a full OS means that they need tools for everything. Occasionally, one of those tools will be superior to mainstream alternatives, thanks to the very strict practices of the project (which really sets the bar for any other project in the security field) -- OpenSSH being the most famous example. Even if their tools don't get adopted, a lot of their code and ideas do, benefitting the whole ecosystem.

Their practices also mean that a lot of the standard GNU userland is regularly audited with a degree of precision not found in more mainstream projects. The bugs they find will be fixed by everyone else, again benefitting everyone in the FLOSS world.

all I want to say on this (to me, tiresome) topic is: if you or your company (especially if that is one and the same!!!!1) have ever used OpenSSH you should at the ABSOLUTE MINIMUM buy a damn CD. you really ought to donate a solid hundred in your local currency but if you can't, skip a couple pints this month and buy a CD.

if you use CARP or OpenBGPd and have never bought a CD, you need to buy two ;p

I get that a lot of people don't care. I even get that some people have an unrealistic expectation that they should know how every dime of their donation is going to be accounted for, an expectation that must either not extend to their other charitable donations or serve as an indicator that they don't give a lot of money to charities at all.

What I don't get is where people - presumably people involved in information technology - conclude that $20k/year is a lot of money to spend on electricity. What utopia of free electricity for all are these people living in? Can I host a few servers there?

> unrealistic expectation that they should know how every dime of their donation is going to be accounted for

This is done routinely by both for-profit and non-profit organizations. In fact, it's done routinely by individuals like myself.

> What I don't get is where people - presumably people involved in information technology - conclude that $20k/year is a lot of money to spend on electricity.

Where I live, that would pay for the equivalent of 10-11 120-volt 20-amp circuits running at 80% capacity (per electrical code) 24/7. Some googling suggests Calgary rates are similar, which isn't surprising. We both get most of our power from hydro.

> This is done routinely by both for-profit and non-profit organizations.

I wonder if any nonprofit, ever, has given a by-the-watt power accounting of the sort some of the people here are advocating

> Where I live, that would pay for the equivalent of 10-11 120-volt 20-amp circuits running at 80% capacity (per electrical code) 24/7.

aka several racks of equipment. My God, the audacity of OpenBSD developers, to ask for help powering this stuff!

> some of the people here

Name them, link to the comments, and explain exactly what you mean by "by-the-watt power accounting", or you're just inventing strawmen.

> several racks of equipment

The extent of the evidence we have is that there are two racks: http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg

There are significant gaps in the racks, and ~16U are occupied by UPSs. The rest is a mix of fairly modern and legacy gear with a few external HDDs and a few 1U pieces of network gear. In a real datacenter, it would occupy perhaps 1.5 racks.

My arguments are backed by publicly-available evidence. Yours are backed by vague assertions by people who assuredly do not need you defending them. If they wish to convince anyone, they can release further evidence.

> My God, the audacity of OpenBSD developers, to ask for help powering this stuff!

Oh look, another strawman. Nobody believes requesting aid with an electric bill is unreasonable. It is the amount being requested that is shocking, and the extreme secrecy breeds suspicion.

If the price of OpenSSH is keeping all of OpenBSD running, I'll send OpenBSD some money.

I've never used OpenBSD except to tinker with it, and likely never will. But, I use OpenSSH hundreds of times a day (both in automated jobs and in the terminal). It is utterly necessary to me; likely necessary for all of us, really. So, while a company would have shed the extra weight and focused on its core product that users love years ago, OpenBSD keeps OpenSSH as a side effect. I guess I'm OK with that.

Maybe it's even necessary for OpenSSH developers to understand systems level programming at a level only OS developers can grasp, and maybe OpenSSH wouldn't be the absolute beast it is today without that kind of influence and widespread knowledge found in the OpenBSD team. I dunno. Whatever it is, I support the people and the things they do for me in OpenSSH even if I don't care much about OpenBSD.

Value of openssh cannot be understated. it is one of the most important pieces of software ever. Even if Theo's attitudes are distasteful.

They accept bitcoins, here is their donation page, and they're the people that maintain openSSH, the software that I'd bet ALL of us use every day:

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

Thanks for link, donated some.

You may not be using OpenBSD, but the same organization is behind OpenSSH.

Imagine being without ssh, then go donate. :)

Correction: OpenSSH, not SSH at all.

Name another free ssh implementation.

On every* UNIX and UNIX-like OS ssh is OpenSSH. OpenSSH is why we don't telnet everywhere anymore.

*- Honestly, I don't know of anything that ships with something that is not OpenSSH.

Dropbear, seen for example in OpenWRT.

Not that it's nearly as feature full as OpenSSH, nor as architected around security (process separation and all). But it's nice when you need a small sshd.

Yup, Dropbear is great for use on embedded devices. I only heard about Dropbear because once upon a time I needed an SSHd for an old Unix (believe it was Tru64). Unfortunately, no PRNG shipped by default, so I ended up symlinking /dev/zero to /dev/random. Thankfully this was not a production server, but an internal one laying around my house.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_SSH_servers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_SSH_clients

Personally, I've mostly used OpenSSH on desktop and servers and Dropbear on embedded/low-memory devices. I've also installed lsh-server out of curiosity once, but that was just to take a look, not for production use.

However, I believe, security- and featurewise, OpenSSH is probably a best option (unless device's really low on resources).

Hmmm, I think SmartOS uses a different SSH. Might be misremembering though.

There is some full implementation of SSH in Java that I found the one time I looked for. There's also Putty, but that's just the client.

What other SSH's are there? I believe if you use any Linux distro, or any BSD, you are using OpenSSH.

The only Unix systems I know of that don't use OpenSSH are embedded devices.

(note: I donated based on being OpenSSH user; I am not an OpenBSD user but I'm glad it exists)

It'd be nice if a company, or companies that use SSH in their products would pool together 20k a year to pay for this.

They could probably kill support and power for some of the "dead silicon" platforms they support. If the CPU hasn't been manufactured in the last decade or two, why support it?

Because people still use it and it helps the project find errors in modern architectures.

I am happy to see continued support for "dead silicon" as it provides a (possibly) non-compromised platform. It's also nice to have obscure attack surface available if one required it.

Did you see any leaked powerpoint slides discussing MIPS r12k vulns, created in conjunction with SGI ? I didn't ...

They should probably try to define some sort of support schedule. The current setup of "let's support everything under the sun from the last 10 years" is unsustainable, but they seem to want to continue with that.

From Theo's comments on the mailing list:

"On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved. "

"Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems.

Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them."

Who still uses an 88K machine? I have the CPU board from a DG/UX machine, but the latest chips are from 93/94.

The developers who volunteer their time to work on it: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/arch/m88k/incl...

Keep in mind that OpenBSD is by the developers for the developers. That it's also useful for a lot of users is just a nice side effect, helpful for testing and funding.

> Keep in mind that OpenBSD is by the developers for the developers.

It is until the developers can't afford to keep the lights on.

At home when things get though, we cut costs and hope for better times.

If OpenBSD isn't exaggerating about shutting down the project, then it seems reasonable to review their policy regarding old platforms and focus on what gives the most return.

Dropping platforms will lose them developers. Developers who also work on the main platforms, or atleast whose work crosses over.

You know what else loses developers? Shutting down the project.

Sounds like people should donate then yes? Shut down a niche arch and the developer will leave and not contribute anything, even to x86_64, just the same as the project going broke.

What proportion of the openbsd development team is contributing because they want to work on some ancient k-car chassis.

which other BSD would that be?

If the answer is "NetBSD", let's consider that the expenses in 2012 for the NetBSD foundation were $6k [0].

Either they don't support the architectures the same way or they are spending the money in a smarter way.

[0] http://www.netbsd.org/foundation/reports/financial/2012.html

There's also bitrig, a fork of OpenBSD on not so friendly terms. OpenBSD lost a number of developers when that happened. They don't appear to currently support 88K, and aim to target current architectures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it'd be worth their while to support another architecture to accommodate a developer who would do all the work to maintain that platform, as well as contribute in other areas.

There's Dragonfly BSD, which is doing several interesting things.

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/

They absolutely do not support the architectures in the same way. Most NetBSD ports are cross compiled and not tested, you are lucky if they boot before hard locking.

OpenBSD has a strict policy that supported architectures must be self hosted, tested, and built against HEAD constantly.

I believe that the Foundation does not have a lot of hardware, volunteers own and support them. As of a few years back there is a "tier" system for NetBSD support too, http://www.netbsd.org/ports/#tiers which means that it is up to eg the Vax maintainers to keep things working rather than everyone.

I think Theo answered that question more than once. The different platforms reveal different kind of bugs, but having the platforms around also keeps developers around.

Theos answer: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973312304511&w=2

As I commented when this appeared here the other day as: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7059581

The fact this was submitted here and disappeared is kind of indicative of their problems.

Fascinating given the attention that FreeBSD was given (and was able to raise) when posted on HN about their own funding problems.

Many people find Theo de Raadt intolerable, which unfortunately may be affecting some of their Friendly Network Effect™ and, by extension, their fundraising ability (pure speculation, of course).

Supporting them is important given their work on other projects, but it seems like outright dismissing alternatives to someone cutting them a check (e.g., moving the servers, etc.) is also probably limiting the help they're going to receive.

As a long time FreeBSD user I wish the BSDs would find a way to "unite" in a way, try to put redundant infrastructures in common.

Right now I feel like linux is slowly eating all the market share, if it continues that way the BSDs will regress back to the lines of Hurd and Plan9.

Competition is always a good thing, even in the OSS world.

As a Linux user who hasn't dabbled in the BSDs for a long time, I can't but agree about having them around. My first reaction to this headline was to find a donate link, and I don't even have anything running OpenBSD, here or at work. I'm not sure uniting would be a good idea, however; having separate projects focused on separate needs seems to be a good thing to me.

Competition is always a good thing, even in the OSS world.

Linux is just a kernel. The problem is that outside the kernel there is perhaps already too much competition. E.g. there is glibc, eglibc, bionic, dietlibc, etc. There is SysV init, systemd, Upstart, OpenRC, etc. Then we have GNOME, KDE, Unity, Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE.

For practically any component in a Linux system, except the kernel itself, there is already a lot of competition. The BSDs add four more, albeit incompatible (with Linux and each other), user lands.

I think the FLOSS world would profit from less fragmentation and more focus on making the good projects better. Of course, polishing existing work is not as much fun as writing your own ;).

>Competition is a good thing, so we should consolidate and have less competition

That makes very little sense.

Then re-read my comment within the context of this discussion, which is OpenBSD being on the verge of bankruptcy.

If I believed all the BSD forks had a chance to live long and prosper on their own I wouldn't be saying that, but right now it seems to me that none of them have any real long time chance to remain generic OS on par with Linux (except possibly FreeBSD but it's not even certain anymore). Linux just moves too fast these days.

Your comment doesn't make more sense from reading it more often. Saying "because I don't understand how the BSDs work or their development processes, I think they should stop existing to prevent them from having to stop existing" is still nonsensical, no matter how you slice it.

It's nonsensical because you misunderstand it. He is saying he thinks two or more of them ought to combine efforts in order to prevent all of them from failing.

Two of them "combining efforts" is removing one. That is no different than one of them "failing". That is the point. Contrary to armchair OS designer belief, you can't just say "hey guys, stop working on your project and go work on someone else's because I don't know what I am talking about and think this will somehow help something". Go tell linus to start working on mercurial because you think he should. What is the result of that conversation going to be?

You have it wrong;

> Competition is a good thing, so we should unite bit-parts that are in danger of being stomped out to ensure the dominant player still has competition in the future.

"Unite bit-parts" is stomping them out, that's the point. Even if you just magically convinced all the openbsd developers to stop developing openbsd and go start working on an OS they don't like instead, that would just be getting rid of openbsd to try to prevent losing openbsd. That makes absolutely no sense.

getting rid of openbsd to try to prevent losing openbsd

No, it would be getting rid of openbsd to try to prevent losing bsd.

BSD stopped 20 years ago, if you are worried about losing it you are a little late. This weird misconception that because openbsd is begging for money that other projects with the letters "BSD" in them are in some sort of danger is bizarre. Inventing a problem that doesn't exist, then suggesting doing something that wouldn't solve it as a solution is simply insane.

BSD stopped 20 years ago

I doubt you were truly unable to determine I was not talking about the Berkeley Software Distribution, but the family it spawned. Which leads me to conclude you are being obtuse. For... pleasure? I don't know.

No, I am pointing out something very obvious and important that you seem to have missed. A bunch of totally independent, distinct projects don't all vanish because one of them wants money. The entire premise that "BSD" would vanish makes no sense.

First, a lot of code migrates around, look at any of the release notes for any BSD and watch how much is from another BSD project. These are not silos.

Don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD and use it for somethings, but they don't really take security very seriously. Theo just gave this lecture with examples http://tech.yandex.com/events/ruBSD/2013/talks/103/

I disagree that BSD market share is eroding. It may not be gaining as many desktop users, but it's still popular on the server side, especially on file servers due to support for ZFS, is used as the base for other operating systems like MacOS X, Juniper's JunOS, and even Playstation 4's OS. Netflix adopting FreeBSD also means a very large portion of bits being shuffled around the Internet are off FreeBSD servers.

It certainly would seem like merging build farms or continuous integration systems for the ports should be doable. The setup for such a thing wouldn't be free, but it would benefit all the BSDs if they could agree to it, and make this business of supporting esoteric hardware a little less of a sticking point.

The thing is they had their schisms for a reason, and inability to work together is kind of baked in, even if much of the code does in practice cross pollinate further downstream.

The other question is if it's possible to get the benefits of the strange old hardware support without the old school power consumption. I think many relative youngsters would be surprised by how thirsty some of those classic UNIX boxes were, and the hardware must be close to dead now. At some point the only remaining working SPARCstation will be used to build OpenBSD.

OpenBSD overall is interesting. The installer alone signals how simple and elegant is the rest of the OS (take a look at the source [0]). A dozen basic questions give or take, and one can have a fully-functional box.

Revenue-wise, the best move would be for a shop like iXsystems, Pair or ByteMark to step up to cover costs. And, any shop that uses OpenSSH on a large scale should be able to pony up some cash to keep Open{SSH,BSD,CVS,{NTP,BGP,OSPF,SMTP,IKE}D} alive. For example, it would be nice to see OpenBSD on Amazon, and AWS might even be willing to fund kernel changes and more to accomplish that.

Finally: check out this handy script which makes it OpenBSD a whole lot easier to get started and complete common tasks. [1]

References:

[0] http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/

[1] https://gist.github.com/steakknife/6120072/raw/shave

A little bit off topic, but this reminds me again of how much the web needs an easy payment system (as easy as in-app purchases in mobile). EFF, wikipedia, I often see notices or news of things they're doing and think to myself that I should donate. But I'm usually in the middle of something and stopping everything to take out my wallet, get the CC, fill out a form, etc. is just too disruptive. So I try to remind myself to do it later, but then forget.

As Bitcoin expands its adoption this will become less of an issue.

Maybe. Doing anything with bitcoin today is a giant pain in the ass. Which is easier?

a) Typing in a credit card number + billing address.

- Signing up for an account at a Bitcoin exchange.

- Transferring money to them (by doing a?)

- Waiting for them to exchange it.

- Transferring it to the recipients' wallet (this one step is kinda-easy, I'll grant)

- Hoping the price of bitcoin holds stable-ish so that my bitcoins are still worth something when the recipient converts them back.

I personally just hold a certian amount of bitcoins and buy some more when I spend them. I used bitcoins to send openBSD some money, and was able to do that while boarding the subway.

I personally am willing to risk 10 - 20% value to help establish a reasonable stability in BTC/USD exchanges. Once the exchange becomes more stable and nerdy people hold some amount of bitcoins the above problem is fixed, it's just that right now regulation and volitility are still a problem.

The first 3 steps of b are mostly due to the legacy banking infrastructure. Once some Bitcoin banks are opened then those three steps will turn into:

- Send Bitcoin from bank to recipients' wallet

The last point won't be an issue once Bitcoin stabilizes after its growth phase.

Way to make an unfair comparison.

Replace a) with

- Fulfill an arbitrary number of legal requirements

- Sign up for an account at a bank

- Transfer money to the bank (by doing a?)

- Wait for the check/deposit to go through (hopefully neither you nor the bank fucked something up)

- Put it in your debit/credit account (this one step is kinda-easy, I'll grant)

The last thing about "Hoping the price holds stable" is irrelevant. The recipient can convert them immediately.

A fair comparison is the act of paying with your (funded) credit card versus paying with your (funded) Bitcoin wallet. I can say from experience that the Bitcoin wallet is significantly easier in a lot of cases (and also carries less of a risk of getting skimmed or having a payment database hacked or something).

The tagline for such a payment system should be "Let's not have another heartfelt message from Jimmy Wales".

Indeed, they should consider looking more at Europe, especially France and Germany. Their donation page seems to focus too much on US, Canada and seems to assume the rest of the world is happy with PayPal.

Other organization provide all information for SEPA bank transfers on their donation page (e.g. http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Donate/SEPA), while the OpenBSD donation page just provides an email address that you should contact if you want to donate via a simple, plain bank transfer. That's kind of discouraging.

Theo has a german bank account right here: http://www.openbsd.org/bank-donation.html

I find it confusing that "OpenBSD" and "OpenBSD Foundation" have different donation sites. Nevertheless, being able to donate directly to these bank accounts is great!

I think it makes a lot of sense that a project with OpenBSD's priorities does not publish its own bank information on the web.

Flattr was intended to provide easy microdonations:

http://flattr.com/

Unfortunately, when I was using it, there weren't many interesting FLOSS projects to contribute to. Perhaps things have gotten better.

I really like gittip https://www.gittip.com/

Square Cash is pretty sweet, just send an email

EFF and Wikipedia both have prominent options to donate via Paypal. Wikipedia offers an Amazon option as well.

Either of those are two clicks (choice and confirmation) plus authentication which is identical to my in-app experience.

The biggest difference isn't about the process, but at what level a user has bought in to it - a payment shim from a particular provider or an ecosystem (Google / Apple).

I wonder how folks would react if Chrome / Safari started popping up a button to allow a seamless donation through Wallet/iTunes whenever a page presented a PayPal link or a CC form?

You should probably add "not run by an intolerable company" when speccing out a universal payment system. There are a number of people who absolutely refuse to touch paypal due to bad experiences or the bad experiences of someone else.

Amazon less so, but in my experience, almost nobody takes them.

They let you donate with Bitcoin, which for me is about two mouse clicks.

i used to have commit but was kicked out (along with a bunch of other people over the years). i even wrote a book on openbsd. what i see from afar is that obsd alienated a lot of people with theo's behavior, theo's gone and surrounded himself with sycophants, and the rest of the world caught up to them (largely) in features. as a result the userbase has shrunk - why put up with tirades if you have a secure platform elsewhere - and the features have remained stale.

theo was a visionary, and together with some other really brilliant folks (not counting myself as one of them) accomplished what people said no one could. since then he's been fine tuning that vision but has more or less kept it at around 2003. the world has changed, theo - and as a result the project - hasn't. so, the world caught up and users moved on.

http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html and http://openbsd.org/want.html

I would love to see more FOSS projects on GitTip (https://www.gittip.com/). It would seem to me that regular small donations that can be budgeted would be more helpful than just scratching where and when it itches. Giving $1 a week versus $50 at once is so much more convenient. We as the FOSS community need to own up that writing and hosting software isn't free, and most of us as highly paid engineers are in a position to be charitable and help out. My resolution for this year is to give away 1% of my income to the FOSS community and related charities (EFF, Wikipedia, Ada Initiative, PSF, etc). I challenge everyone on HackerNews to do the same. Stop bitching and put your money where your mouth and let's go help make a better world.

Kudos to you!

VIDEOS

Exploit Mitigation Techniques: an Update After 10 Years (by Theo) http://tech.yandex.com/events/ruBSD/2013/talks/103/

An OpenBSD talk by Michael Lucas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXPV3vJF99k

Oh look, it's the talk where Theo blatantly and shamelessly pretends he invented all of the mitigations that Spender and Pax Team had many years before anyone at OpenBSD even mentioned it. They pioneered stack randomization and ASLR? Are you serious?

Aside from OpenSSH, OpenBSD is not security relevant, and hasn't been for about a decade. So when they don't get the 20k, nothing of value is lost.

I just started watching these. About six minutes into the fifty minute talk Theo says "this wasn't our idea." If he's trying to convince people he invented that idea he's going about it in a subtle, reverse-psychology way. (he's not)

If you use OpenSSH... you benefit from OpenBSD's work, even if you're not an OpenBSD user.

SSH alone, and all the utilities that use it... have made my work/life SOOOOOO much easier. That may sound silly, but when you don't have to search for some 3rd-party utility because what you need is built-in... it makes life easier.

I'm donating.

Seems insane that they can't get enough funding given the current security climate. Think of some of the eccentrics whatever you want but they have always been fighting the good fight as far as I'm concerned.

No BLOB is a very sane idea for example. I think we'd be further along if that was enforced stricter by other projects.

Although the priority at this point is certainly paying the electric bill, you might also consider taking a look at the "Hardware Wanted" page [0] and seeing if you have anything laying around that one of the developers can use. It's typically not brand new top-of-the-line gear they're looking for so you might be surprised.

[0]: http://openbsd.org/want.html

I've scrapped most of these systems years ago. Still have a aviion dual cpu board somewhere in the shed, probably doesn't work.

I'm not an OpenBSD user, but I like their focus on security. And this could be a positive influence on other platforms. Donated.

I suggest funding a solar power system, especially since the newer panels are even more efficient for a lower net cost-per-watt/kWH ratio.

Even on cloudy days the new panels will produce energy.

The panels are usually warranted to produce at least a certain (80% on mine) percentage for a set period of time. (25 years on my 5 + year old PV arrays) so the other considerations would be a charge controller/charger, a voltage inverter (from DC to AC) cabling and batteries for storage.

Of all the items, the batteries will be the main recurring expense as they generally don't last as long as the PV panels. Depending on type of battery, and how heavily cycled they are, batteries can last for 10 years, with proper care and use.

A system which maintains a constantly higher amperage will last longer than a system that has been allowed to be exceedingly discharged. (no less than 80% of capacity)

In my area electricity sells for $0.49USD per KWH ergo solar is the logical solution.

The end result is a self reliant system, independent of the issues associated with distributed power sources, while increasing responsibility for the consumer.

I find the cost/benefit ratio to be in favor of under-funded consumers, especially in the long term.

Just sent 50 USD their way. Its not much but it is as far as I can spend. I recommend everyone helping. OpenBSD is one of those projects that benefit everyone not only those using it.

I read through some of this thread last night and was about to throw them a few bucks. I don't really consider myself an OpenBSD user although I do have a router here that runs it for pf. Other than that, I haven't touched it in probably a decade.

I'm glad I read through the whole thread because by the time I got to the end of it I had changed my mind. In one e-mail to the list, Theo basically said (in effect) that a donation of $20 wasn't even worth it. (Granted, $20 isn't much in the grand scheme of things but I feel that it reasonable covers my use of OpenBSD.)

There are many people who think that Theo is the worst thing for the Project (because he's such an asshole). OTOH, however, there are many who think that the Project wouldn't exist if it weren't for Theo.

His $20 reply is an answer to the "why don't you sell more merchandise" question. Where he tries to explain that the merchandise model has a lot of hidden costs.

As you read the whole thread, I suppose you've also seen this quote?

Nicolai, and others,

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all of those stepping up to the call for contributions. Every little bit helps.

See: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138974990608900&w=2

Anyways, talk is cheap. Donate helps which as a lot of others here I just did. Thanks Theo!

A lot of the discussion so far revolves around whether or not Theo can be abrasive. Who cares?

I would rather have a non compromising, highly secure operating system available, with all the source code available for me to see (none of that binary blob business) than a mediocre operating system that was somewhat secure from a guy who was really chill.

Funding the OpenBSD project is not a decision about the personality of Theo, its a decision on the usefulness and and the quality of work that the OpenBSD community creates.

When I am setting up and configuring and relying on a server with OpenBSD, I could care less if Theo is eccentric or not. I am in awe of the technical brilliance of OpenBSD.

And yes I have donated and do donate to the project, and I encourage clients I have that are running on OpenBSD to do the same.

What will happen to OpenSSH if OpenBSD can't keep the lights on?

It will find a new home that's not dying.

Are you perfectly sure that it will represent the same quality then?

If I had a choice between, say, donating $10 to OpenBSD of which only $2 goes towards OpenSSH development and letting Google take over OpenSSH, I'd take my chances with the latter. I don't see why Linux or OS X users should subsidize OpenBSD.

Yeah, there's plenty of people here saying "hey, you use OpenSSH on x86, you should donate". But the the reason they need the donations is to pay the power bills for running things like Vax servers for OpenBSD development on ancient platforms? Not the most convincing argument.

And if you and many more were interested in 'why' there are some strange ports, you'd get your answer. Search and you might be surprised.

It's easy to just say "hur, they be stupid to port on vax/macppc/sparc/whatever". Do your homework.

All of the explanations I've seen are related to encouraging OpenBSD developers and surfacing bugs in OpenBSD, how does that help the typical x86 OpenSSH user? "We want $20k to help maintain this other thing we do that you have no interest in."

I'm sure Google would be able to figure out how to monetize OpenSSH.

That is truly a horrible image you put in my head.

Besides, with all their might, Google got pwned hard by NSA.

Well, Mac OS X's firewall is based on pf - OpenBSD's packet filter. So OSX users turn on firewall _are_ using OpenBSD's work.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-2422.1.72/bsd...

I wonder if this is a case of OS Darwinism. The fact that it seems to be hanging on by a thread shows most companies are using and contributing to Linux. I have never used OpenBSD so not sure what it overs over Linux as a Unix implementation?

I am also new to OpenBSD but had intended build a server with it per the advice in the top comment on this HN post from Zed Shaw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7036661

My understanding is it has a reputation for being very secure, having thoroughly audited source code, and runs on lots of old and legacy hardware. It's also renown for having super thorough documentation. (see Zed's comment)

Judging by comments on this post, I think it is more a case of the maintainers and/or the foundation's management instead of loyalty or adoption of the OS. I believe HN also runs on OpenBSD too, if I'm not mistaken.

> I believe HN also runs on OpenBSD too, if I'm not mistaken.

On FreeBSD.

You might not use OpenBSD as a whole but if you use Linux, especially in a server environment, you almost certainly rely on OpenSSH in some way, shape, or form, and that is part of the same project.

The OS itself has never seen mainstream adoption, but it is renowned for being very well designed, as well as pioneering several OS security features like W^X, strlcat, strlcpy and countless other tweaks.

That and the foundation's most important projects are probably OpenSSH (absolutely essential, main focus here) and OpenNTPD, rather than the OS itself.

I think you are very misinformed here. There are many commercial *BSD users that do not give back. There is one famous one that think building campuses that looks like a UFO is pretty important.

what i find interesting (read: suspicious) is how they have seemingly prioritized and budgeted other things ahead of paying for electricity.

when i make budgeting decisions (whether personal or in business), i start with the needs before going to the "nice to haves". for openbsd, i can't help but assume powering their various servers/systems is kiiind of a priority...

so what i want to know is: - the over all budget $ amount for 2014 - what was the cost of power in 2013 * how did you get to $20k for 2014? - which priorities are worth funding over power

my suspicion is that there's plenty of room for give and take here.

Thanks for linking it here and would be better if it was linked to an article providing additional details other than electricity costs. Other users have posted the relevant links.

On another note, the readability of the font was a turn off for me. Fortunately, there is an option to view it in plain text. adding &q=raw at the end of the URL. http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138972987203440&w=2&q=raw

I'm excited about buying a cupcake from one of the OpenBSD developers at the bake sale.

Haha brightened up my morning, thanks! Very amusing haha

I can see their point about "We need to keep this VAX around because building on actual hardware is different from building on emulation", however I'm sure there's bits of infrastructure, CRTs hooked to KVMs, etc, that could be replaced with newer and more efficient gear that can help with the power bill. You don't have to run the ENTIRE place on cast-off donations and stuff out of a dumpster.

I think OpenBSD should reach out directly to manufacturers of the many hardware platforms they support (HP, SPARC (now Oracle), etc) and ask for donations. Of course, only the companies that are still in business.

just donated 0.10 btc. really easy with bitpay integration. would rather not give paypal or my cc the fees.

I used to use OpenBSD on my daily laptop about 8 years ago. Loved it. Worked for a University and we had a few OpenBSD Servers in my department for web serving, email, etc. No other departments did.

Why did I stop? Theo was such an ass about questions on "his" mailing lists that, well, there were friendlier communities out there.

OpenSSH, however, I use a lot so I could donate a few bucks for that.

Donated. Hope it helps.

Perhaps it would be best to move all non-specialized builds into Amazon or Rackspace or some automated CI service, and to move the specialized builds to a differnet, less expensive place, or keep them where they are. At the very least your electricity costs will go down.

22 seems an appropiate amount. Or whatever your portnumber is for your SSH-server.

I'm sympathetic, but not enough so to donate $22,000.

I don't see the point - they should ask for subscriptions, not for donations. What will they do next month / year, ask again? And again?

They do offer Paypal subscriptions[0] You can donate 10-500 per month, in USD/CAD/EUR.

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

The bigger question is who pays $2000/month for electricity for a server?

1666.67/month for electricity powering 2 racks of servers + HVAC.

That's actually a good deal; it's closer to the cost of what just 1 rack usually goes for in a proper data centre.

Can we get them some solar panels?

Yeah suggested on the list. Dismissed as not helpful

You'd need something like a 10KW system? 2396 hrs sunshine in calgary. They use something like 24MWhrs .. is my maths working? Plus a massive battery system to get through the night, ... plus account for shorter sunlight in the winter.. Yup, not helpful :P

This may be a silly question but could they virtualise the process on EC2?

They're running on so many esoteric architectures it's not really viable.

Since low level systems programming in involved, they wouldn't be able to test it in a VM.

What about emulators?

I would love to donate some Litecoin

The one with the gold makes all the rules.

I donated 50 bucks. These guys have been awesome for a long time. Sorry it took me this long to donate.

EDIT: Here's the thing. I don't directly use OpenBSD, but they have influenced more than just UNIX for a long time.

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