
Romanian saves OpenBSD? - mappu
http://www.thedrinkingrecord.com/2014/01/19/romanian-billionaire-saves-openbsd/
======
vincie
Haven't used OBSD in years, but I do use OpenSSH all the time. There are lots
of stuff lurking in my OS of choice, NetBSD, that came from OBSD. So I would
like to thank Mircea Popescu for his generosity. I can only muster $A50 I'm
afraid.

Edit: suckful spelling

Just went to try to donate. Can't seem to do it at the donation page. Can't
seem to enter my Australian address in any of the US and Canada links. I am
certain my CC issuer will decline it. What gives?

~~~
yan
Nitpick, OpenBSD came out of Theo's disagreements with the NetBSD team, not
the other way around.

~~~
schwarze_pest
lies...

[http://quigon.bsws.de/papers/2009/eurobsdcon-
faster_packets/...](http://quigon.bsws.de/papers/2009/eurobsdcon-
faster_packets/mgp00003.html)

~~~
brohee
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Paul_Thomann](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Paul_Thomann)

Henning's humor isn't THAT inaccessible...

~~~
gonzo
Yeah, I know who GP Thomann is (was). We sold the RE/search books at
Fringeware.

But I'll bet 8 of 10 on HN do not. Moreover, some percentage of HN won't
understand that OpenBSD forked from NetBSD, and the rest of the 'joke' stream
will be lost.

And... I was responding to "lies".

~~~
schwarze_pest
I thought "lies..." was unambiguous. My bad. Next time... well, no jokes next
time.

------
micahgoulart
Ah, the irony of OpenBSD paying for its computers racking up a huge
electricity bill using money made by computers racking up huge electricity
bills.

~~~
altano
There's very little that isn't true of these days.

------
mappu
Source was slashdot:
[http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/14/01/20/0348247](http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/14/01/20/0348247)

A few people asking about the 'billionaire' citation, he is the man behind
[http://mpex.co/](http://mpex.co/) , an options exchange (css, who needs it?)
and he apparently has a net worth of over 700k BTC (
[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321265.msg3449849#ms...](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321265.msg3449849#msg3449849)
)

~~~
thaumaturgy
Hmm. This seems a bit premature. There's nothing yet on OpenBSD-Misc. And,
even if this does go through -- not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but
what OpenBSD was looking for was an ongoing, long-term commitment from
someone, probably a business, to simply inherit the electric bill, and this
would not be that.

It's a little strange that a copy of some IRC logs are all that's needed now
to make news.

~~~
edwintorok
List of contributors seems to have been updated:
[http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html)

------
canadev
What is the relationship between OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD?

And why would one choose one of those over Linux?

Edit: Here's a link I just found:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sys...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems)

And one more: [https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-
bsd/compa...](https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/explaining-
bsd/comparing-bsd-and-linux.html)

~~~
dredmorbius
All the BSDs emerged from the BSD (Berkeley Standard Distribution) Unix
tradition. All offer a generally monolithic "cathedral" style development
approach to the OS as a whole (kernel, libraries, utilities, applications),
rather than the more piecemeal "bazaar" style favored by most GNU/Linux
distros.

The BSDs in general have fragmented rather less than GNU/Linux development
has, though the latter have also captured a far larger deployment base, by
most estimates. Adding Android to the mix, Linux competes with any end-user
platform. BSD is also the root of many proprietary Unix variants, an
intentional characteristic of its licensing model.

FreeBSD in general is aimed at the server and desktop niche with a particular
expertise in networking. FreeBSD originated in the "UNIX Wars" of the early
1990s during which AT&T attempted to assert its trademark and copyright over
the increasingly popular BSD and 386BSD ("1-800-ITS-UNIX") operating systems.
That case was a landmark, with AT&T substantially failing to assert its
claims. The ruling was largely sealed, but much of it was subsequently
unsealed during the SCO v. IBM trial, greatly damaging SCO's case (also based
on copyright claims over UNIX). Arguably the uncertainty generated by the
lawsuit provided a toehold for Linux to gain in early critical popularity,
though the openness of its development model also likely contributed to this.

NetBSD forked from FreeBSD with the aim of providing as broad a range of
hardware support as possible, though arguably some GNU/Linux distros such as
Debian have trumped it.

OpenBSD forked from NetBSD with the aim of providing a very high security
platform. OpenBSD lags in many high-performance and scalability
characteristics, but offers an exceptionally robust security profile and
default deployment security characteristics. The project website has long
bragged about its security record (presently "Only two remote holes in the
default install, in a heck of a long time!"). Notable OpenBSD projects include
the pf firewall suite and OpenSSH. There's also been a project to remove all
GPL'd code from the OpenBSD release, though attempts by the original pf author
to write a specific _exclusion_ into his license for use in GPLd projects
(which the BSD license otherwise allows) resulted in _that_ codebase being
removed and the suite rewritten from the ground up. Theo's ideological purity
is different from Stallman's in bent, but no less strong in my opinion.

There are a few even smaller distros (notably DragonflyBSD), I'm less familiar
with these.

Underlying all of the BSDs is the BSD license, which is "permissive",
requiring only that the license text be included in derivative works -- those
works themselves need not carry source distribution obligations as most of the
GNU licenses (GPL, LGPL, GPLV2, GPLV3) do. The result (intentional) is that
the BSDs are used in a wide range of proprietary products, not merely
dedicated servers. I've found BSD in routers, load balancers, printers, fax
machines, settops, and other devices, usually identifiable by nmap
fingerprinting scans.

~~~
_delirium
_All offer a generally monolithic "cathedral" style development approach to
the OS as a whole (kernel, libraries, utilities, applications), rather than
the more piecemeal "bazaar" style favored by most GNU/Linux distros._

This has gotten a bit less true, though not entirely. The classic Unix model
really did develop the _entire_ system in the unified development model:
kernel, userland, servers, major application software, etc. You could then
also install third-party packages for specific application software (e.g.
Matlab), but it wasn't the norm, and didn't handle core functionality.

But some components have gotten to be big enough that they're entire projects
in themselves, usually cross-platform and not integrated with any one OS's
development. Some of these are adopted into the BSD core respositories and
customized so they form part of the integrated offering, but a number are just
left in ports and run mostly unmodified. Webserving is one example: when used
as a webserver, the BSDs, just like Linux, depend for a core part of the
functionality on Apache or nginx. A few of the commercial unixes do follow the
more traditional "everything included" model, e.g. Oracle and IBM have in-
house customized versions of Apache as Oracle HTTP Server and IBM HTTP Server
respectively. But the free BSDs generally run this kind of software un- or
very lightly modified. The compiler is another example; the BSDs all ship
basically a stock GCC or LLVM, rather than having an in-house compiler
developed with the system, like the old commercial Unixes did.

Windows Server might be the purest descendent of the old Unix cathedral model,
shipping integrated, Microsoft-developed software for all core functionality:
kernel, userland, windowing system, webserver, compiler, etc. GNU also had
such ambitions at one point, which explains some of their integration-oriented
policies (some of which are disliked, and some of which have been dropped).
For example, a unified style of command-line options (now packaged into
getopt), a standard in-house-developed configuration/scripting/extension
language that all applications were supposed to use (Guile), a unified
compiler suite handling all languages (GCC), etc.

~~~
weland
> But some components have gotten to be big enough that they're entire
> projects in themselves, usually cross-platform and not integrated with any
> one OS's development. Some of these are adopted into the BSD core
> respositories and customized so they form part of the integrated offering,
> but a number are just left in ports and run mostly unmodified.

I think this is pretty much what OP was trying to say, but his choice of words
didn't make it obvious. The major difference between *BSD (OpenBSD is
particularly picky about this) and Linux is that the "base" system is supposed
to be fully-functional and well-integrated, from kernel to userspace, whereas
Linux is "just" the kernel.

There are good uses to both models. I found the latter to be very useful in
embedded systems, where you often need that kind of flexibility. I found the
latter to be, frankly, a lot more useful on the desktop. To this day, I have
to consult my notes every time I need to set up wireless on a Linux box
without wicd or NetworkManager. The fact that a system with OpenBSD's
reputation actually gets to do that easier is a good testimony to the merits
of well-integrated userspace tools.

------
Fuxy
I doubt he'd be willing to keep it up for more then a year but that still is a
lot of help.

Personally i think the way OpenBSD asked for help was kind of wrong.

They just completely ignored the little each community member can pitch in and
went for the big companies.

That's how it seems at least from their announcement.

~~~
cbhl
Frankly, relying on each little community member results in the kinds of
banners and full-page modals you see on the English-language Wikipedia every
year.

I'm not entirely convinced that's a better alternative.

~~~
tommorris
You press 'X' on Wikipedia fundraising banners and they go away for the
duration of the fundraising period.

Problem solved.

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

~~~
_ak
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.

~~~
eksith
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](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.

~~~
_ak
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.

------
brandonhsiao
Have to agree about IRC. If your product is something hackers--especially
"hobbyist" hackers--use, IRC is still a great way to get feedback. Back when I
ran robot game [1], IRC was basically the de facto way to request features and
report bugs.

[1] robotgame.org/robotgame.net

~~~
corin_
IRC _is_ still great, however I disliked this line:

> _This episode just goes to show that IRC even in the 2010 's continues to be
> one of the most expressive, influential, and effective communications
> mediums on the Internet._

Because this story on its own really doesn't show that at all. "Group A needed
money, told people about it, and a rich person gave them money" could just as
well happen on HN, Twitter, etc.

------
brynet
Bob Beck (beck@) has announced the Foundation has received over $100,000 in
donations from users / companies in the past week.

[http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=139024400731106&w=2](http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-
misc&m=139024400731106&w=2)

A campaign page for 2014 has been setup to help the project throughout the
year. It includes a fancy progress bar.

[http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2014.html)

------
Kuytu
Does anyone have an idea how they are spending $20 000 on electricity?

~~~
tobiasu
I've written some stuff about that in the other thread you got linked to, but
I would like to add something:

A single rack costs $1900/month in Calgary, and has insufficient power (15A)
for dense packing.

So a commercial rack already costs more than OpenBSD needs in electricity, but
OpenBSD has about 3 racks worth of gear.

------
dobbsbob
OpenBSD code winds up in everything including Android like dlmalloc and
calloc, then there is openNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenBGPD...

------
purple_horse
Thank God, I was dreading having to consider moving my firewalls to Linux.

------
adamnemecek
Billionaire?

~~~
pankkake
In the sense that he has more than one billion USD in bitcoins. (No one can
own a billion bitcoins.)

~~~
josephagoss
No way he has 1,000,000 BTC. Perhaps 200,000.

At the moment Satoshi is still the only Bitcoin Billionaire with several
people waiting on btc = $2,500 until they join the billionaire club.

I'm guessing you're the Pankkake from Bitcointalk?

~~~
hueving
How would you know that? Someone could easily spread the coins across many
addresses.

~~~
josephagoss
A lot of people on the Bitcointalk forums have made educated guesses, the fact
is he still works on his business and charges for subscription to his blog, I
doubt he has amassed the largest stash of Bitcoins in the world.

~~~
pankkake
"the fact is he still works on his business" a lot of billionnaires still work
on their businesses, if not most. This hasn't been the norm of Bitcoin - most
people getting rich just went away with the coins, which is pretty bad. His
estimation accounts for the assets he owns, same method as for the fiat
billionnaires.

For the other question, there is only one pankkake.

------
blahbl4hblahtoo
"the Microsofts, Apples, and Oracles of the world that happily vacuum up their
code may not be the there in their time of need"...

What about the Linux distro's that didn't lift a finger but continue to ship
OpenSSH? Its that kind of attitude that make working with the OS community
hard. Someone will bad mouth your involvement even when you are doing the
right thing in other area's.

Did anyone even approach those companies? How about Unbuntu or Redhat? Are
they supposed to read people's fucking minds?

I'm glad that OpenBSD got it's bills paid...but this guy's blog post might as
well read..."Hey, some European guy paid OpenBSD's bills. Alright! Oh yeah,
Fuck Microsoft (or Apple) because they didn't help." What the fuck?

Just for the record...I gave. I wonder how much they raised besides the
bitcoin rich guy's contribution.

~~~
sentenza
You should definitely differentiate between Linux distros and companies that
make their money with a distro.

Because unlike RedHat and Ubuntu, practically all the other Linux distros out
there have little cash and little manpower to spare. The developers of those
distros might contribute to keeping OpenSSH alive, should OpenBSD go under,
but they are unlikely to tax their own, scarce resources to keep OpenBSD as
such alive.

~~~
blahbl4hblahtoo
You are right. Thanks for the clarification.

