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.
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.
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.
"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. "
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.
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.
If you can't turn it off, don't be donor facing.
Oh look, now they're asking for $40,000
"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?
"They probably are doing the right thing because they are who they are" isn't really a valid argument.
>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.
Being nice to stupid people is as much of a skill as hacking up some kernel code.
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?
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.
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 wouldn't even need a very good one. I bet some kid still in school, studying PR, would do a better job than Theo.
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.