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Comment by diziet | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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