LWN: Comments on "Funding Qubes OS"

Funding Qubes OS

swilmet — Wed, 07 Dec 2016 21:29:33 +0000

There is Liberapay and Snowdrift for recurrent donations. On the Snowdrift wiki, there is a long list that compares crowdfunding platforms.

Funding Qubes OS

paulj — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 01:42:04 +0000

Signed-off-by... It needs to die. At best it's just a meaningless bit of noise on commit messages, adding bureaucracy and friction. In some cases though, this inexplicit "many things to different people" pseudo-legalism, actively harms by muddying the waters of what people think is understood between them.

SOB was invented by Linus purely to solve a *social* problem. Namely, that there were people clamouring for all kinds of complicated legal bureaucracy in the earlier days of the SCO lawsuit, and Linus wanted to put a sock in them, and end that debate. It was a sop, a minimal bit of bureaucracy, very indirectly (and not at all generally obviously) referring to a bit of text stating anyone using it was attesting that "they were the author, or maybe not but thought they knew the author (though need not say who), or maybe not but they thought it was all kosher anyway". It was legalesey enough to stop those advocating for contributor agreements and background checks from arguing much more.

The damn thing unfortunately has been cargo-culted to lots of other projects, despite being even less meaningful than the "CE" conformity mark, AFAICT from how actual lawyers view it. Worse, whatever meaning it could have is often undermined. I have seen:

- Integrators knock back patches for lack of a SOB, and request the patch be resent with a SOB line - without any further explanation to the submitters (who likely must be unaware of its significance) that doing so is expected to indicate the submitter is asserting something.

- Integrators add SOB lines for _other_ contributors, on patches where the contributor did not give a SOB.

- Members of projects advocating for the need for SOB lines, but not actually being aware that there was a separate "Developer Certificate of Origin" text elsewhere that /some/ might view the SOB as attesting to.

- The documentation in 'git' (e.g. 'man git commit') for the SOB flag, did not even mention the DCO for a _long_ time. It was updated the other year I think, after I raised this problem.

This wart isn't just useless, it's harmful. Let it die...

Funding Qubes OS

gasche — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 14:34:39 +0000

The blog post encourages the community to donate (promising that the money will be used to fund the development of the open-source edition) but, besides Bitcoin, they support donation through Open Collective, a crowdfunding platform. I didn't know about Open Collective before, and I like their insistence on transparency, but the website takes 10% in fees (see their FAQ) in addition to the money transfer fees. That seems excessive to me: I don't trust Open Collective enough to give them 10% of the money I would feel comfortable giving to Qubes OS -- I would be interested in donating a few dollars a month. Are there not crowd-funding platforms that have no fees beside money transfer fees, typically in the 2% + a third of dollar, or at least fees similar to the money transfer fees?

Why not ARM64?

linuxrocks123 — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 09:00:56 +0000

If you're ready to shell out a LOT of money -- for a LOT of computer, though -- this may work for you: https://www.raptorengineering.com/TALOS/prerelease.php

Why not ARM64?

alison — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 05:48:11 +0000

Watching Joanna Rutkowska's talk videos from various conferences, we learn that she is unhappy with the state of security on x86 due to problems with the SMI and asssociated BIOS code. In her talks, she mentions that she cannot base her work on an architecture that doesn't support an IOMMU. AFAIK, ARM64 arches support IOMMU. Why doesn't ITL move its basis of development to ARM64? Or perhaps work with Andrew 'bunnie' Huang, creator of the Novena i.MX6 laptop, to create a truly secure QubesOS ARM64 one? I'd sign up for the crowdfunding campaign right now.