Failure to communicate [LWN.net]

Failure to communicate

Posted Mar 27, 2006 0:19 UTC (Mon) by dormando (guest, #3997)
Parent article: Money trouble at OpenBSD

Most people miss the point, so I assume Theo could have worded it better.

OpenSSH is an "offshoot" of OpenBSD work. I don't think anyone bought OpenSSH initially?

I don't think anyone paid for PF.

I doubt some corporation funded OpenBGPD in specific.

Oh, and CARP too. There's also OpenCVS but it doesn't seem too popular.

Funding OpenBSD supports all of these endeavors, as well as new projects as they become necessary. Saying "I want my money to go into X" just ensures we won't be seeing anything new or interesting for a while. Part of that freedom thing... Understand this happens in this community too (Linus and GIT, Andrew and rsync/etc).

Donate to OpenBSD because you want OpenSSH to be better, and something else cool might come out of it too.

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Re: Failure to communicate

Posted Mar 27, 2006 21:40 UTC (Mon) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]

That's pretty misleading, OpenSSH/portable is relevant to a lot of people running a lot of OSes. pf isn't. BGP software isn't.
If you want to fund "make cool software I can use on Linux" that's fine, but OpenBSD isn't the place to send your money.
If you want fund portable/Linux-specific OpenSSH changes then OpenBSD isn't the place to send your money and frankly you'll probably be better off if theo goes bankrupt.

Re: Failure to communicate

Posted Mar 27, 2006 21:57 UTC (Mon) by dormando (guest, #3997) [Link]

http://www.ucarp.org/project/ucarp
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook...
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/network/pf.html

I don't suggest you donate to OpenBSD to get cool linux software, the world is bigger than that. Just as I wouldn't want to force Linus to do kernel work and never find the time/motivation to create Git, I wouldn't want to stifle others' works as well.

Another often poorly worded (and related) problem with OpenBSD is how they say "So go do it yourself" when posed with significant feature requests. If you want feature X and can pay for it, it's very efficient to commission someone in specific to create said feature and spend the time integrating it.

This is how OBSD got SMP support, and how linux gets a lot of its features. Companies contribute back because it's helpful to them in the long run, either financially (OSDL, etc) or via funded software contributions (IBM, etc).