Romanian Bitcoin Entrepreneur Steps In To Pay OpenBSD Shortfall 209
New submitter MrBingoBoingo writes "Recently it was announced here on Slashdot that OpenBSD was facing an impending shortfall that jeopardized its continued existence. A sponsorship to save OpenBSD has been announced, and it wasn't one of the usual culprits that saved OpenBSD, but a Romanian Bitcoin billionaire."
Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Informative)
It's still better than someone who gave nothing but cheap hot air.
Re:Serious Questions about OpenBSD infrastructure (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Perhaps... (Score:3, Informative)
Re: lol @ Romanian "btc billionaire" (Score:5, Informative)
Romanian != Roma.
Romania is a country whose inhabitants are called, in English, Romanians. The name of the country (and therefore the people) comes from Rome. The Roman Empire. THAT Rome. Romanian--like French, Spanish, and Italian--is a romance language descended directly from Latin. Some even argue that it's the Romance language that today most closely resembles Latin!
Roma, on the other hand, is a name for a minority population of people that most probably emigrated from South Asia over a thousand years ago. AKA gypsies. The word Roma comes from some Roma dialect and has no connection to Romania or Roman other than as homonyms. Good example of a false congate--they sound alike, but there is no connection.
Admittedly, the conflation is a common mistake to make, especially since there is a very large (comparatively speaking) Roma population in Romania.
Re:Perhaps... (Score:5, Informative)
This assumes that 20,000$ worth of bitcoins can be converted to real money.
This assumption is correct.
Re:Perhaps... (Score:5, Informative)
The point is, there are no BUYERS. It will not happen. No one is going to pay $20k of REAL money for bitcoins.
I don't know WTF are you talking about but converting bitcoins to 20k USD is non-issue on most existing exchanges like coinbase, bitstamp, mtgox or btc-e. Just go and see their daily trade volume.
Re:Perhaps... (Score:4, Informative)
OpenBSD already accepts Bitcoin donations:
http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html [openbsdfoundation.org]
Just sent 50 CAD worth, easy peasy. They get converted on the fly to the local currency by BitPay.
Are you from 2010?
keeping developers honest (Score:2, Informative)
From what I understand, the build servers are absolutely archaic beasts that had they been replaced long ago would not have led to such astronomically high bills. /p>
There are a variety of of build serves. There are ones for SPARC (and SPARC64), MacPPC, SGI/MIPS, VAX, etc.:
http://openbsd.org/plat.html
One of the reasons why this is done is help expose bugs. Some issues are only exposed on non-mainstream architectures, and if everyone only uses certain CPUs, then they won't be found (as easily). Back in the early 1990s, not many people used DEC Alpha, but by supporting it (both in the BSD and Linux world), it kept kernel developers "honest" when it came to supporting things besides 32-bit Intel. When AMD64 came along (and then Intel's uptake of it), the code was a lot cleaner and able to better support it with a minimal of fuss (Linus has himself so stated).
Similarly if you supported RISC-y processors like 68K, MIPS, and SPARC, you would be better prepared for when ARM came along in the mainstream. Similarly support for big- and little-endian CPUs, and CPUs that are bi-endian, keeps kernel folks honest for things like alignment issues.
This is why I also think that userland developers should developers should try running their software on non-Linux systems in at least a perfunctory fashion. When Debian made the switch from Bash to dash for /bin/sh it broken a lot of things. If developers had tried some simply tests of their software on (say) a BSD, they would have learned quite quickly that they had used Bash-ism and needed to either change their code, or simply explicitly used a shebang of /bin/bash.
The computer world is not homegenous, and any developer (kernel or userland) who thinks otherwise limits themselves unnecessary and is asking for pain when their assumptions are proven false when reality changes (like the rise of amd64 and ARM, and with Debian's change of /bin/sh).