OpenBSD Foundation reaches funding goal for 2014 | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD Foundation reaches funding goal for 2014

marc.info

90 pointsadamnemecek10 comments

To put the number in perspective -- this is about how much a single full time engineer will cost to employ. Let's lowball and imagine that OpenBSD in comparison to firefox is 1/100th the size. Mozilla has annual revenues of >300 million dollars, compared to OpenBSD's $150 thousand.

They are asking for donations to cover electricity costs. The real donations, of course, has been in the time the community has put in this.

> Let's lowball and imagine that OpenBSD in comparison to firefox is 1/10th the size.

What do you mean by "size" exactly? I doubt that OpenBSD has anything close to 10% of Mozilla's workforce, expenses or user base.

> I doubt that OpenBSD has anything close to 10% of Mozilla's ... user base.

AFAIK it's somewhat popular on networking hardware. It's a different category of 'users' but it's users regardless.

The openBSD foundation is also responsible for openSSH which I think might actually have a bigger install base than firefox...

I wonder if they would get significantly more donations if they renamed themselves to the openSSH and BSD foundation.

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't openSSH more or less a done deal? How many man hours are they honestly putting into that now-a-days?

Looks reasonably active[1]

[1]http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/

New releases are made quite regularly.

Dates and changelogs can be found here:

http://www.openssh.com/txt/

Workforce and expenses are closely tied together, and those depend on how much you have to spend. You can't spend 20 million dollars or hire 100 engineers if you don't have the budget for it.

I did correct the lowball to 1/100th.

I hesitated posting this because I do not want to give the impression that OpenBSD is not worthy of donations. That being said I am not sure that it is useful to present Mozilla's entire annual revenue as it is all for Firefox. Mozilla does a lot more than just Firefox.

Just curious: how is FreeBSD's development process founded, in comparison?

...I know software quality is in no way proportional to investment, but the fact that there is so little money invested in OpenBSD's development might alone be a reason for a company not to use it, despite some known qualities! (I know, some will say that by this reasoning we'd all use Microsoft products instead, but if you calculate the money + man hours invested in Linux for example, you'd probably have a figure in the tens of millions or more likely hundreds of millions of $...)

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