On Sun, 19 Jan 2014, Mark Schneider wrote: > Swiss bank accounts are the most safe worldwide. Some donating people > want to stay anonymous so it is neccessary to ofer them such posibility.
OpenBSD has donors that sometimes don't want their names listed publicly, but I don't think there are any would be donors who need to remain absolutely secret for fear of being found out. OpenBSD is an entirely legal project, and there is scarcely any endeavor that attempts to be more transparent than OpenBSD. The software produced is intended to be a tool of perfection. Good guys, bad guys, citizens or spies, governments and secret agencies they control, are all able to use it -- just like a hammer or wrench. It has no political agenda except pushing the idea that good software is better for all the world than bad software. Of course, individuals within the OpenBSD developer or user community tend to be pretty sharp, and if there is a law against that I have never yet heard it proclaimed. They also have as many different political visions as a rainbow has colours. If some chose to be controversial and others chose to be apolitical, that is entirely their choice. If through shear envy some centre of power seeks to ban contributions to OpenBSD, then we will all have plenty of time to re-adjust. That can be dealt with if such an unlikely even ever happens. So Swiss banks accounts, even in the good/bad old days when they were absolutely inviolable, aren't really needed for the foreseeable future. More over, confiscating accounts that are close to being overdrawn wouldn't net enough to matter, nor would they be very interesting for Swiss bank managers to add to their portfolio. If OpenBSD had a horde of cash to hide, it wouldn't have to be asking for more.... :-) > Further it is rather difficult (in particular for foreign secret service > agancies) to monitor payments and/or to block money of nonprofit > fundations when the account is just in a neutral country like Switzerland. All donations to OpenBSD, through the various channels, are open for inspection upon request of Canadian tax authorities, if only to ascertain that they are true gifts, and not fee for service or something like that. Why would secret agencies feel the need to compete with Canada Revenue? Austin
