OpenBSD Looking At Funding Shortfall In 2014

Freshly Exhumed writes "Today the OpenBSD mailing list carried a plea from Theo de Raadt for much needed financial aid for the OpenBSD foundation: 'I am resending this request for funding our electricity bills because it is not yet resolved. We really need even more funding beyond that, because otherwise all of this is simply unsustainable. This request is the smallest we can make.' Bob Beck, of the OpenBSD Foundation, added: 'the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on.'" The electricity bill in question is $20,000 a year for build servers located in Canada.

Re:Ask Apple

[SpottedKuh]

The firewall in OS X, pf, is also from OpenBSD.

Re:Ask Apple

[Colonel Fahlt]

ipfw was replaced by pf in 10.7 Lion. Their man pages sometimes lag, I think. For 10.9, see: ipfw.8 [apple.com] pf.conf.5 [apple.com]

Re:Ask Apple

[Anrego]

They actually have a pretty reasonable reason for this.

Theo responds (in his usual patient and understanding manner) later in the linked thread when someone suggests trimming some of these old machines with these reasons, but the basic gist is:

Having such a diversity of platforms makes errors more apparent (some bugs which while they might impact all platforms might only be obvious one one platform for whatever reason) and the interest of some devs might be tied to these weird architectures.

Photo of OpenBSD Build Server Racks

[Freshly Exhumed]

Here's a link to a photo on OpenBSD Journal of the build server racks and all the great (some quite old) machines being used:

http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg [openbsd.org]

Lots of memories looking at some of those machines... I'd be a bit concerned about the longevity of some of those.

Re:very key reasons this is an issue.

[Grishnakh]

Did you miss the part where the servers are in Canada? NSA has no reach here unless they want to act illegally.

Wrong. US law explicitly allows the NSA to hack into anything outside the US they want to, so it's perfectly legal for them to access those servers in Canada.

You're probably thinking about Canadian law, but that's irrelevant. According to the US Government, US law trumps all other jurisdictions' laws.