OpenBSD Journal

Donations Update

Contributed by Marco Peereboom on from the Donations dept.

Frank Hecker from the Mozilla Foundation contacted Theo to inform him that the foundation decided to donate $10,000 USD to the OpenSSH project. Frank mentioned this today in the Mozilla Foundation's status report.

The OpenSSH project truly appreciates this gesture of solidarity from such a respectable open source project.

Besides this sizeable donation we also received hundreds of smaller donations, mostly from individuals and small companies. Thanks everyone for stepping up to keep OpenBSD/OpenSSH ticking.

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.211.207) on

    Fabulous! I've always encouraged as many people as possible to give Firefox a try ... now I'm doubly glad that I did. I understand Mozilla has been making a good profit from their Google search functionality ... it is really swell of them to share their good fortune.

    Comments

    1. By kestasjk (150.101.171.41) on

      I'm glad OpenBSD is getting some much needed funding, but I'm worried that this'll give open source developers more incentive to pressure people for funding in interviews.

      It's like that ad a woman put out when she needed a kidney donor; she got it right away, but what happens when everyone who wants a kidney is putting an ad out in the paper?

      Comments

      1. By bremac (142.227.158.5) on

        I'm not sure that's valid; very few projects are as widely used as OpenSSH.

      2. By Callum (58.136.93.157) on http://www.callum-macdonald.com

        > What happens when everyone who wants a kidney is putting an ad out in the paper?

        Then you have a market for organs, which by all accounts, would be a very good thing for both those in need of organs and those willing to donate them...

  2. By Roman (68.32.116.27) on

    Holy shit that's awesome!!!!

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (216.195.153.213) on

      I was about the make the exact same comment.

  3. By kamper (70.31.84.121) on

    Wicked cool. Does anyone know of a reasonable place to send "thank you"s without subjecting them to a spamming? I submitted a comment on the activities paged linked above...

    Comments

    1. By Nicolai Brown (12.216.45.89) on http://www.public.iastate.edu/~free-unix/OpenBSD/

      To no one in particular --

      A tangile way to thank the Mozilla people would be to use the built-in Google search functionality in Firefox. Just hit ^k and query away. Google pays Mozilla a small royalty for each search and it all adds up.

      Score one for Mozilla and OpenSSH!

      Comments

      1. By kamper (70.31.84.121) on

        Hmm, I've always found the search box inconvenient and space wasting. Instead I just have the "g" keyword mapped to a google search (the same way I have "man" mapped to the openbsd man pages :p).

        I wonder if that also results in payment. I'll have to sniff both and see if there's a difference and, if so, I can always tweak the search url I'm using.

      2. By Dunceor (192.16.134.66) on

        Hmm I didn't know that. then I must have generated a lot of cash for them :P

        Well nice of Mozilla to support the project. I hope more company's and organizations will follow.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (211.125.28.176) on

    Wonderful!

    Hopefully some other organisations/companies will step up :)

  5. By Nate (65.95.124.5) on

    As much as I dislike Mozilla as a web browser, I am tempted to stop using Opera because of this alone. It'd give Mozilla the Google hits Opera gets instead.

    Comments

    1. By Atholas (222.154.43.140) on

      > As much as I dislike Mozilla as a web browser, I am tempted to stop using Opera because of this alone. It'd give Mozilla the Google hits Opera gets instead.

      I, too, found Opera much better as a browser, and have been using it for a very long time now. I get both browsers for free, and I give them back (a little) something in return in the form of doing my searches through their respective Google search box. I use Firefox 100% now, for the precise reason that some of the money Mozilla generated through the loyalty program with Google goes back to a free software group that produces excellent quality code.

      I hope that Mozilla will make regular donation to OpenBSD in the future :-)

  6. By MikeG (216.59.226.159) on

    'Adaptec, Inc' is on the donations list? Cognitive dissonance.

    MikeG

  7. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

    Wow, I am really impressed with the Mozilla foundation for doing this.

  8. By Cody Chapman (71.214.0.112) cody.chapman@gmail.com on

    3 cheers for mozilla foundation for stepping up to the plate... I am also glad i promote firefox as the "only" web browser to use.... this definately cements my use of firefox...

  9. By Gimlet (128.252.79.112) on

    Wow, that was very gracious and very kind of the Mozilla Foundation. Not to mention very cool as well. :^)

  10. By SH (82.182.103.172) on

    According to Mozilla Foundation's status report the donation was to
    "the OpenBSD project in support of development of OpenBSD, OpenSSH, and related activities".

  11. By Jonas (85.226.192.82) on


    Thanks alot Mozilla!

  12. By Anonymous Coward (137.92.97.114) on

    Wonderful, I was going to say I will now install Firefox on all my PCs at home but they _already_ all run firefox.

    I will remember this, and in future situations promote firefox afew extra times for their support of OpenBSD.

    On my main workstation Internet Explorer is becomes kind of unstable when I have many windows open (30+). Im thinking about switching over to Firefox now. hmm... Yes I think I will make firefox the default browser on my main PC.

    Firefox is a good web browser.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (137.92.97.114) on

      We also all use Thunderbird as our email client at home. It has great spam filtering capabilities.

      When mozilla's web browser was ported to OpenBSD I was very happy. It is important for OpenBSD to have a good web browser because I use it as a desktop OS.

    2. By thomasw.xhrl (70.71.136.212) on

      thanks mozilla....firefox in x is the browser for me.

    3. By Anonymous Coward (134.225.216.83) on

      did u say just say 30+?

  13. By jtorin (130.28.2.90) on

    Really nice initiative from Mozilla!

    While I use Firefox as my default browser (on OpenBSD), this makes me even more friendly towards the browser and the organisation behind it. Open source helping open source. Great.

    I could add that I would really wish that Mozilla would look at and incorporate some of the security features that the OpenBSD team has worked on, like str*() cleaning, *alloc API usage changes etc. It would take time but it's worth it - as we have seen.

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (70.162.91.58) on

      I wonder if there will be some return back-scratching, and that somehow the OpenBSD team gives some audit time back to Mozilla. I don't want to imply they've been bought, but just seeing Mozilla get a bit more "security polishing" by the group that has the reputation for it would be neat.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (70.162.91.58) on

        And yes, I'm well aware that Moz uses SSH and that any improvements in SSH will go off to make Moz better. :P

      2. By Michael Knudsen (130.225.194.192) on

        The OpenBSD memory allocator has already uncovered a number of bugs in their code. This is one of ways that MF will benefit from supporting OpenBSD.

      3. By Anonymous Coward (156.34.216.1) on

        I'm just theorizing, but I suspect a full OpenBSDification of Mozilla's codebase would involve hundreds or even thousands of small patches that many of those arbitrating contributions to the mozilla source base would probably view as excessively paranoid and unnecessary (different priorities remember). I doubt it would be something they would go for, even if the OpenBSD project members found the time and resources for such a thing. IMHO, better to give an effusive 'thank-you!', and file the Mozilla Foundation away as worthy of support itself -- especially at that point in the future when they aren't flush.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

      Not all platforms supported by Mozilla have sane APIs

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (128.151.253.249) on

        So you statically link in missing functions on those platforms. Most of OpenBSD's libc improvements are simple, only a few lines. strlcpy() can be done in one line.

  14. By Anonymous Coward (80.66.40.101) nik.leet@gmx.net on


    great news!

    i installed firefox, thunderbird and some other mozilla projects on almost every workstation in my company since day 1 and recommend them to all our customers for years now. open source is helping open source - i love that - thats how it should be!

  15. By Anonymous Coward (142.109.90.79) on

    class act ... 100%.

    Thank you Mozilla ... What an incredibly nice gesture.

  16. By Anonymous Coward (216.138.229.76) on

    In the last few weeks I asked on the openssh-dev mailling-list I was looking for one of the openssh hackers to add some functionality to it and was going to pay.

    I just received 2 reply. I'm suprised not much people was interested. I wished to fund openssh developement by sponsorising a specific task. I feel my money is wisely spend this way, instead of giving without knowing where it's going to be used.

    I'm happy one of the core developer answered and the deal had been signed.

    The functionality I asked, once finish, will be given back to community and I'm sure will please all openssh users around.

    I'm looking to pay him 50% more that the amount he asked, it's company money anyway and we used openssh product for so long, why not give a good tip

    Comments

    1. By Jim (68.250.26.213) on

      What functionality are you requesting/buying?

    2. By Chad Loder (69.111.72.203) on

      One of the reasons few open source developers are interested in this kind of "donation" is because it's not really a donation. It is a contract job. The person doing the work has to pay income taxes on your "donation".

      Comments

      1. By Terrell Prude' Jr. (151.188.247.103) on

        > One of the reasons few open source developers are interested in this kind of "donation" is because it's not really a donation. It is a contract job. The person doing the work has to pay income taxes on your "donation".

        Yes, that's true, and in the process, the person doing the work also gets money to put food on the table.

        Actually, my organization did this not too long ago with NMIS. NMIS is a nice tool for doing network monitoring, but we wanted to be able to restrict who can look at what, and who can make changes to NMIS's configuration. Out of the box, NMIS has some extremely basic authentication ability, but it's not very robust at all, and authorization ability is virtually non-existent. Fortunately, being Free Software, it can be freely modified to have those abilities.

        We thus contracted with a local PERL hacker to add support for better (i. e. decent) authentication and authorization. Of course, the changes have been submitted back upstream. :-) There are plenty of Free Software hackers out there whose jobs might've gotten offshored to India or China or somewhere else, and we've found that many of them are *glad* to do this kind of work for us.

        I've always believed that it's better to "purchase something of value" than to just "give money". I'd rather employ a Free Software hacker whenever I can, since software development is difficult to learn how to do well, and thereby keep said hacker in the business doing production coding. We need these folks to stay actively hacking. It's also, BTW, far easier to justify to the Powers That Count Beans ("Give money away? Hell, NO! Oh, wait, you're buying something? Well...OK, we'll let you do that.").

    3. By tedu (69.12.168.114) on

      many developers already have jobs, so taking on more work (with a deadline even) isn't always convenient. but it's certainly a cool approach.

    4. By Ben (208.27.203.127) mouring@nospam.eviladmin.org on http://eviladmin.org

      I'm sure you can find someone to pay to build the feature you want. The issue is then getting it approved. So no one directly related to the OpenSSH project nor OpenBSD project may be willing to do it because they may not want to support it outside the tree.

      - Ben

      Comments

      1. By Nate (65.95.124.5) on

        Or you could just make them rue the day they didn't make the feature and bam! Feature's suddenly being done.

  17. By Anonymous Coward (128.171.90.200) on

    Now all we need is Minimo running flawlessly on the Zaurus

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (86.143.242.6) on

      when will this happen?

      > Now all we need is Minimo running flawlessly on the Zaurus

  18. By Karl-Heinz H (201.130.65.62) on

    Mozilla Fundation Rocks... hope that google donate too .. and suse, redhat..etc..

  19. By Joe Price (63.87.178.215) on

    Dope! I'm gonna donate some more myself! I've been prodding management at my company to donate as well considering we have at least a dozen OpenBSD machines.

    Go FireFox! and of course OpenBSD!

  20. By Anonymous Coward (69.70.207.240) on

    I'm making a donation now too; I don't have the cash but my credit cards do... I'm not a developer, so this is my way of contributing to the ongoing development. These hackathons always end up with something new and/or just plain awesome!

    Thanks Mozilla, OpenBSD and all!

  21. By Constantine (217.12.147.5) mureninc@gmail.com on http://www.linux.org.ru/jump-message.jsp?msgid=1337464

    wow, this is really cool! I was reading about mozilla.com making all of this money from Firefox on our local Unix and Open Systems web-site, and kinda thinking of 'why doesn't mozilla donate some of this money for OpenSSH?'... Well, guess what, they now did. :) Deja vu?

  22. By Anonymous Coward (62.252.32.11) on

    If there were an easier way of upgrading to new releases remotely, I definitely would donate more and buy releases more often.
    But since there's not, and there's no compelling reason to upgrade, I really can't be bothered.

    Sorry guys. I like OpenBSD, but it's not worth 100USD/year to me.

    Comments

    1. By cnst (217.12.147.5) on

      > If there were an easier way of upgrading to new releases remotely, I definitely would donate more and buy releases more often.
      > But since there's not, and there's no compelling reason to upgrade, I really can't be bothered.
      >
      > Sorry guys. I like OpenBSD, but it's not worth 100USD/year to me.

      What problems do you have? I've intalled OpenBSD from scratch remotely with no problems at all.

      I was running 3.6, and I download bsd.rd from -current into /bsd.rd, rebooted and installed it flawlessly via a serial cable! No need for CDs or anything, that's pretty awesome! What else do you need?

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