Mark Schneider wrote:
Thanks for your suggestions Ryan.
On 18.01.2014 02:59, Ryan Kirk wrote:
What is the point of a Swiss bank account? Especially with FATCA?
OpenBSD has a nonprofit foundation behind it which looks a lot better
than funneling money through tax havens.
Swiss bank accounts are the most safe worldwide.
Some donating people want to stay anonymous so it is neccessary to ofer
them such posibility.
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.
The NSA was able to bug Merkle's phone, I don't think they have a
problem with Swiss bank accounts. Besides, who many people out there
would be embarrassed by donating to OpenBSD? If they are trying to
stay anonymous, they could always use BitCoin; setting up a Swiss
account will only cause MI6/FSB/NSA/CIA to follow Theo and the rest of
the foundation so close they know what they ate for breakfast...
Beside that, do you even know what the fees are on numbered accounts?
Silence and anonymity isn't cheap.
OpenBSD would have no problem receiving donations if it became
something most of its developers and users don't want it to become.
Linux or FreeBSD have shown the way to users and incone via various
models (paid support, enterprise features, long-term releases,
automation tools, trying to be everything to everyone, etc). While it
is admirable that OpenBSD has eschewed corporate sponsorship so that
it has the freedom to be autonomous, the price for that is, of course,
money.
The main disadvantage of the current distribution model of OpenBSD is
(from my point of view) the limited availability of the same iso images
as in the distributed CD set. Most of other *BSD or Linux distribution
offer downloads of current iso images.
Image downloads are of course less secure as the "man in the middle"
could modify the image and fake the signatures.
Installations over the network are also not as secure as installing
offline from original CD or DVD image. As brand new hardware doesn't
have CD/DVD drive anymore an installation from a USB stick (with ROM
memory .. not flash due to security concerns) seems to be required.
Do have any idea how much that would cost? A CD is like $0.05 per unit,
a read-only flash drive would cost at least $50.00 per unit with a long
delay attached to production. There is a reason no one does this.
Just buy the CD and copy the file set to your own flash disk.
Financial aspects of the current distribution model are another very
important topic.
Let say the swiss OpenBSD user pays for the CD set 50 CHF (swiss
francs). The price includes 8% VAT (= CHF 3.60)
The german OpenBSD user has to pay 19% VAT. If the price would be 40
Euro (EUR) the VAT is EUR 6.39.
Myself I prefer to donate than to pay unnecessary VAT or other handling
costs.
My conclusion and suggestion is to sell the CD media kit for the lowest
possible price (production costs plus additional charges like shipment
and custom costs, VAT etc) and ask users to donate $ 20 to $ 50 instead.
Another possibility is to enable downloads of original iso images for
people who donate yearly let say at least $20, 30 or more. My preffered
way is to donate once for few years in advance to assure continous
development of OpenBSD and cover operating costs of the required server
infrastructure.
What would anyone get out of this that they couldn't with the -release
images? Unless you are planning on producing your own and robbing the
project of one of its sources of income.
Instead of concentrating on users, it might be more worthwhile to
focus a campaign on pressuring vendors of enterprise *nix OS's that
bundle OpenSSH without contributing a nickel to the cause. This would
be most effectively done by buyers in large corporate environments,
but this is also the most unlikely group to care. Has any thought been
given to media relations? A story in Wired about the world's most
underappreciated developers of some of the most critical software
could do enormous good. Rumors of an impending implosion could work
wonders on those Fortune 500 enterprise *nix vendors who would much
rather donate a hundred grand or so rather than spend many times that
to develop a critical component in-house.
Big companies will donate regulary as they want continuos support and
maintenace for OpenBSD.
Why? That logic only works if we are the only provider of an ssh
server, which we aren't and the license doesn't require anything of them
