
Top OpenBSD Donors - ttflee
http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html
======
riobard
Background: Smartisan is an Android phone maker in China. Smartisan fans pay
for admission tickets to attend Smartisan's new product release events, and
Smartisan donates the ticket sales to an open source project. So far they've
donated to OpenSSL ($160k), OpenBSD (CA$280k), and OpenResty (pending
approval).

Edit: IIRC, Smartisan's first donation to OpenSSL happened right after
HeartBleed.

~~~
buovjaga
They donated $320k in two batches to OpenSSL in 2014. Is the $160k you mention
for this year? Do you have a source for the exact amount? The PR News wire bit
does not mention the exact sums per org.

~~~
riobard
I went back and checked the video for the latest release event in October
2016. Smartisan collected about 2 million RMB (Chinese Yuan) in ticket sales.
They also donated another 1 million RMB originally for Smartisan Open Source
Foundation (its own charity arm). So that's about 3 million RMB in total
donated to OpenSSL and OpenBSD.

For its December 2015 event, Smartisan tried to donate ticket sales to
OpenResty, but OpenResty could not legally accept the donation due to
complicated Chinese laws governing non-profit organizations. So the money is
still in Smartisan's bank account and pending regulatory approval.

For its 2014 event, Smartisan donated 1 million RMB to OpenSSL.

~~~
buovjaga
> For its 2014 event, Smartisan donated 1 million RMB to OpenSSL.

They donated 2 million RMB, see [https://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-
announce/2014-Dece...](https://mta.openssl.org/pipermail/openssl-
announce/2014-December/000001.html)

~~~
riobard
My bad. I only knew one of the donations. Anyway, I'm asking a friend at
Smartisan and see if their PR could release a detailed list of past donations.

------
vcistan-refugee
Surprise surprise, no donations from any of the big VC firms, including YC.
Freeloaders.

~~~
witty_username
If you're serious, then how is open source software "free" if there is an
expectation of donations?

~~~
toyg
We should all strive for "Free as in freedom, not as in beer".

~~~
greenokapi
Oh here we go...

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sandebert
Smartisan (the phone maker) is placed in the top level, called "Iridium". It's
defined as $100,000 and above.

That level of donation used to be defined as $100,000 to $250,000. [0] The
removal of the top limit could in theory mean that Smartisan actually donated
more than $250,000.

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20161114061632/http://www.openbs...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161114061632/http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html)

~~~
ben_bai
$280,000 !

~~~
aerique
Well, that works :-)

Never heard of Smartisan, checking out their phones now.

~~~
jiyinyiyong
If you know Chinese, I will suggest you watching the videos of the release
events. That's a very popular event in China since the speech skills.

~~~
tribaal
I don't understand much Chinese, but here is a video of one of those events in
case you want to see what jiyinyiyong is talking about:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hPpeKPDoDg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hPpeKPDoDg)

It seems to be quite entertaining, by judging from the number of laughs/minute
:)

------
dorianm
So Google donated to OpenBSD from 2012 to 2015 but not in 2016 (or less than
$5000), interesting.

They seem to be their only long term recurrent donor.

Edit: Actually they are just part of the Core Infrastructure Initiative now
[https://www.coreinfrastructure.org](https://www.coreinfrastructure.org)

~~~
brynet
They still have time, as do anyone else.. 2016 isn't over. :-)

[http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html)

------
k_sze
DuckDuckGo also gave more than any of Microsoft, HP Enterprise, or Yandex.

~~~
qwertyuiop924
...Does that in any way _surprise_ you?

DDG has a program dedicated to donating money to open-source projects: they do
it every year. MS, HP, and Yandex might also do so, but they don't have to
same kind of dedication.

------
throw2016
Its strange to see negativity to genuine support for open source projects.
Instead of inventing conspiracy theories to try to explain away and diminish
the donations perhaps it might be better to focus on the positive.

And maybe be try to understand why all the billion dollar companies so popular
here rely on open source but do not seem to accomplish much beyond token
gestures and posturing. Clearly Smartisan shows if there is a will you can do
a lot. Maybe there is something to learn here that can lead to a positive
change.

I think its beginning to look more and more like HN should stick strictly to
VC and new tech stores. There is no social or moral dimension here to process
any other information.

------
toyg
Considering few people here seems to have heard about Smartisan before this
thread, I think we can agree that this sort of donation works very well for
publicity among geeks.

------
aMayn
Perhaps they're simply grateful for OpenSSH and for all that it enables?

~~~
icebraining
Or maybe they're just mistaken...? (I'm kidding)

 _In celebration of this milestone, Smartisan will donate approximately 3
million RMB from sales of tickets of this year 's and last year's launch
events to OpenSSL Software Foundation and the OpenBSD Foundation, two Android
open source service organizations._

[http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smartisan-
technology...](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/smartisan-technology-
introduces-smartisan-os-31-including-revolutionary-open-source-
features-300349051.html)

~~~
ben_bai
Well, there is a lot of code from *BSD in Android, for example libc.

OpenBSD:
[https://github.com/android/platform_bionic/search?q=openbsd](https://github.com/android/platform_bionic/search?q=openbsd)

------
huan9huan
Thanks to Yonghao,Luo, a great guy!

------
this-dang-guy
Reminded me that I forgot to donate to them this quarter :)

------
znpy
I wonder if their Smartisan OS is OpenBSD-based

~~~
eb0la
Sadly not; but I would buy an OpenBSD phone... if anyone wants to make it,
please call me!

~~~
pawadu
Sign me up too!

But to be honest, the problem with Android is not the Linux kernel but the
fact that most phones were never designed to be continuously updated.

~~~
the_trapper
Actually Linux is a very poor choice when a product depends on out of tree
binary blobs to operate. The lack of stable driver ABIs and APIs are a real
problem for long term maintenance. I'm really surprised that the BSDs aren't a
much bigger player in the embedded space.

~~~
protomyth
Wasn't the original Danger developed phones based on NetBSD?

------
amelius
I expected Apple here, though I'm not sure what version of BSD they forked for
OSX.

~~~
toyg
Apple did not "fork" anything, and certainly not OpenBSD. Their core OS
(Darwin) was developed by NEXTStep. It reused chunks of the original BSD (from
which FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD were all forked at one point or another)
mostly for I/O interfaces, but the actual kernel architecture is very
different.

AFAIK Apple are are not involved in OpenBSD at any level, nor do they donate
to any OSS project; they just maintain a few selected ones.

~~~
DashRattlesnake
> Apple did not "fork" anything, and certainly not OpenBSD. Their core OS
> (Darwin) was developed by NEXTStep. It reused chunks of the original BSD
> (from which FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD were all forked at one point or
> another) mostly for I/O interfaces, but the actual kernel architecture is
> very different.

That's wrong. Apple pulled in and integrated a lot of code from FreeBSD itself
to modernize NeXTStep.

[https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths](https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths):

> most userland utilities and the C library on OS X are derived from FreeBSD
> versions

> The XNU kernel used on OS X includes a few subsystems from (older versions
> of) FreeBSD, but is mostly an independent implementation.

~~~
toyg
I don't see where what you state contradicts what I said.

