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Comment by calroc | Hacker News Reader

Is it weird that OpenBSD struggles to keep the juice on in the post-Snowden era?

Well, who would really want to fund their compile farm of obscure vintage hardware if all they're really interested in is OpenSSH? Even if OpenBSD went bust, somebody would pick up OpenSSH eventually, without all the Vaxen and SGI machines and what not.

You may have missed the discussion from last time in which Theo explains the benefit of having older hardware. The dissatisfaction with OpenBSD seems to eerily mirror the incredibly short-sighted criticism of NASA funding : "Why do we spend all this money to send junk into space?" Which conveniently side-steps the innumerable benefits it produces.

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

  The answer to that is not news.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  > The recent discussion of a need for a replacement
  > Vax for package-building illustrates that.
  
  The vaxes being asked for draw almost no power, but it supplies the
  same benefits as the other architectures.
  
  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.

I didn't miss it, and it's completely beside my point (N.B. I'm a VAX owner myself, playing with OpenBSD and NetBSD on it now and then, so I appreciate their efforts). I'm talking about the majority of people. Pretty much everyone uses OpenSSH, because it's the de-facto standard in SSH implementations, so that's the part of the OpenBSD project that's interesting for everyone. Vintage computing on the other side - not really interesting for most people. People just don't care about old hardware platforms, even when Theo claims that supporting them all has an overall benefit on OpenBSD as a whole.

Indeed. I run OpenBSD on an i386 router, and I honestly don't care about supporting the other platforms. If they want me to donate a Soekris device and pay for the power, I will. At my residential utility rate, one of those things uses $8 in electricity a year. Hell, the twice-yearly OpenBSD releases cost me $100, so I almost think I've done my part.

Most users won't care about anything but i386 and AMD64 as supported platforms. What they should care about though are the bugs that was found because OpenBSD also runs in VAX, Sparc or some weird MIPS platform.

Supporting the weird and older platforms help make OpenBSD better, they aren't support "just" because some developer think they're funny. In the future you might care about ARM support and porting OpenBSD will be easier because they didn't only support i386 and AMD64.

If everyone did as you do and buy all the releases I don't think they would have had a funding problem. I don't currently run OpenBSD, but I still donate €20/month because I would hate to see the project go away.

Linux and OSS is still exceptionally popular and well funded. FreeBSD might be a temporary exception. Their funding issues are certainly giving them lots of free press though.

You're missing the point. OpenBSD is the oldest, most popular distribution with a fanatical devotion to clamped down, secure-by-default software. You'd think that people would be more understanding of the need for this now.

Especially with juniperOS/freeBSD routers getting wholesale owned and the ntp DOS attack. OpenBSD devs looked at the shit sandwich that is ntp.org code and rewrote it expecting future problems and they were right.

* OpenBSD.

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