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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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