Request for Funding our Electricity
Hi everyone. The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go that way. We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring basis. That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me for details if serious. Thanks.
Request for Funding our Electricity
I like the subscription idea. I'd love to have every release without actually doing the shopping every time. This could at least make a bit of safe money. I believe, making a company sending 20k$ every year to openbsd could be quite difficult. Why should they do this ? What do they get ? Why is that better than spending that money in new hardware or buying fancy whiteboards in managers office ? I know what they would get, but they dont. How do we make a company to know about the benefit of openbsd? They never heard of it. They wont ever use it because they dont get a 24/7 support contract from a big consulting company for it. They dont know about openbsd and most dont care. That might not be the opinion of most people on this list but it is the opinion of most people not on this list [the ones with money].
Request for Funding our Electricity
Pushing the subscription idea and cd set selling a litte bit further, what about a signed cd set or artwork from theo or a developer ( next hackathon ) . The time investment should be no problem and this could sell for ... 70$ or something. This is cool, no time effort, promotion easy possible ( undeadly etc)
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
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. --- Hi everyone. The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go that way. We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring basis. That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me for details if serious. Thanks.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on. If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not sustainable. On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Theo de Raadt wrote: > 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. > > --- > > Hi everyone. > > The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the > development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons > prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might > offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go > that way. > > We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical > expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be > happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring > basis. > > That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off > as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this > cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. > > We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting > reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also > do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. > > I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me > for details if serious. > > Thanks.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
And actually, if you're reading this, you can help by passing this on to people you know *off these lists*. When we post to these mailing lists saying these things we are asking for your help to get the word out to people who support open source projects. Those people are not necessarily here, and often, you (the people who use it and work with it) need to make the case to them that their support is important - far better that explanation comes from you rather than someone they don't know. -Bob On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Bob Beck wrote: >Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. > > In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to > cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be > involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. > > But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have > the funding to keep the lights on. > > If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be > greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant > funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be > able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being > able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not > sustainable. > > > > > On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Theo de Raadt > wrote: >> 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. >> >> --- >> >> Hi everyone. >> >> The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the >> development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons >> prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might >> offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go >> that way. >> >> We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical >> expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be >> happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring >> basis. >> >> That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off >> as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this >> cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. >> >> We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting >> reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also >> do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. >> >> I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me >> for details if serious. >> >> Thanks.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Bob Beck wrote: >Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. > > In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to > cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be > involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. > > But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have > the funding to keep the lights on. > > If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be > greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant > funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be > able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being > able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not > sustainable. There's an equation that has to be satisfied here. It has a demand side and a supply side. You demand a certain amount of electricity and someone has to supply the money to pay for it. I'm going to be blunt here, in an effort to be helpful (it's also not foreign to the OpenBSD style). I get the impression that the demand for electricity is viewed as a given: you use what you use and people need to step up and provide the money to pay for it. If I'm wrong, please say so. But if I'm right, the demand can be adjusted. Sometimes you need to eat cornflakes instead of caviar. For example, I've never understood why this project supports the old architectures it does, considering the associated costs. The recent discussion of a need for a replacement Vax for package-building illustrates that. Perhaps this is an opportunity to reassess the scope of the project and trim some things that can no longer be justified on a cost-benefit basis. If the choice is between shutting the project down and reducing its scope to something sustainable, it's a no-brainer. This project has made really significant contributions, both in the obvious area, security, but also to the art of managing and building complex software that is reliable. To have it go away rather than trim its sails in way that acknowledges reality would really be a shame. /Don Allen > > > > > On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Theo de Raadt > wrote: >> 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. >> >> --- >> >> Hi everyone. >> >> The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the >> development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons >> prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might >> offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go >> that way. >> >> We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical >> expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be >> happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring >> basis. >> >> That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off >> as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this >> cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. >> >> We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting >> reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also >> do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. >> >> I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me >> for details if serious. >> >> Thanks.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Bob Beck wrote: > >Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. > > > > In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to > > cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be > > involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. > > > > But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have > > the funding to keep the lights on. > > > > If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be > > greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant > > funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be > > able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being > > able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not > > sustainable. > > There's an equation that has to be satisfied here. It has a demand > side and a supply side. You demand a certain amount of electricity and > someone has to supply the money to pay for it. I'm going to be blunt > here, in an effort to be helpful (it's also not foreign to the OpenBSD > style). I get the impression that the demand for electricity is viewed > as a given: you use what you use and people need to step up and > provide the money to pay for it. If I'm wrong, please say so. But if > I'm right, the demand can be adjusted. Sometimes you need to eat > cornflakes instead of caviar. For example, I've never understood why > this project supports the old architectures it does, considering the > associated costs. The answer to that is not news. On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved. Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem. If you aren't in the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy. > The recent discussion of a need for a replacement > Vax for package-building illustrates that. The vaxes being asked for draw almost no power, but it supplies the same benefits as the other architectures. Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems. Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them. > Perhaps this is an opportunity to reassess the scope of the project > and trim some things that can no longer be justified on a cost-benefit > basis. And maybe we've been doing that assessment continually for two decades. > If the choice is between shutting the project down and reducing its > scope to something sustainable, it's a no-brainer. This project has > made really significant contributions, both in the obvious area, > security, but also to the art of managing and building complex > software that is reliable. To have it go away rather than trim its > sails in way that acknowledges reality would really be a shame. This project "has made"? How about "this project will continue to". I really love how we keep getting advice. Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale?
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
How about we hold a bake sale? On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 2:56 PM, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Bob Beck > wrote: > > >Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. > > > > > > In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to > > > cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be > > > involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. > > > > > > But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have > > > the funding to keep the lights on. > > > > > > If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be > > > greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant > > > funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be > > > able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being > > > able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not > > > sustainable. > > > > There's an equation that has to be satisfied here. It has a demand > > side and a supply side. You demand a certain amount of electricity and > > someone has to supply the money to pay for it. I'm going to be blunt > > here, in an effort to be helpful (it's also not foreign to the OpenBSD > > style). I get the impression that the demand for electricity is viewed > > as a given: you use what you use and people need to step up and > > provide the money to pay for it. If I'm wrong, please say so. But if > > I'm right, the demand can be adjusted. Sometimes you need to eat > > cornflakes instead of caviar. For example, I've never understood why > > this project supports the old architectures it does, considering the > > associated costs. > > The answer to that is not news. > > On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all > platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the > platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh > reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved. > > Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the > older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in > the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem. If you aren't in > the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy. > > > The recent discussion of a need for a replacement > > Vax for package-building illustrates that. > > The vaxes being asked for draw almost no power, but it supplies the > same benefits as the other architectures. > > Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems. > > Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the > developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other > areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them. > > > Perhaps this is an opportunity to reassess the scope of the project > > and trim some things that can no longer be justified on a cost-benefit > > basis. > > And maybe we've been doing that assessment continually for two > decades. > > > If the choice is between shutting the project down and reducing its > > scope to something sustainable, it's a no-brainer. This project has > > made really significant contributions, both in the obvious area, > > security, but also to the art of managing and building complex > > software that is reliable. To have it go away rather than trim its > > sails in way that acknowledges reality would really be a shame. > > This project "has made"? How about "this project will continue to". > > I really love how we keep getting advice. > > Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale?
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the > developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other > areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them. Darn' tootin'! > Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale? Make that a lo-carb bake sale.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Wed, January 15, 2014 00:03, Bob Beck wrote: >Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. > > In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to > cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be > involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. > > But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have > the funding to keep the lights on. > > If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be > greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant > funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be > able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being > able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not > sustainable. > Hi. Could we collect this sum on special bank account, to gather correct sum for covering electricity expenses? Or OpenBSD Foundation will pay a bill from it's funds? Simplier - should I send money to Foundation right now or should I wait info about direct-electricity-expenses-acccount? Unfortunately I can't send $20k, but if 200 community members send $100 each... I hope this will help to have another year for searching a company Theo was mentioning in his irst letter. > > > On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Theo de Raadt > wrote: >> 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. >> >> --- >> >> Hi everyone. >> >> The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the >> development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons >> prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might >> offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go >> that way. >> >> We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical >> expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be >> happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring >> basis. >> >> That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off >> as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this >> cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. >> >> We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting >> reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also >> do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. >> >> I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me >> for details if serious. >> >> Thanks.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Kiril, a dedicated one purpose bank account or officially directed donations are somewhat problematic to a canadian not for profit - Normally for expenses the foundation supports we simply re-imburse the individuals for their costs from our funds. As far as the suggested "donation" meter that's an idea we'd probably like to put up - as it gets that crowdsourcing type interest going. But in this case it would likely not be 20K, more like a 150K yearly goal would be best. On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 2:16 PM, Kirill Bychkov wrote: > On Wed, January 15, 2014 00:03, Bob Beck wrote: >>Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. >> >> In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to >> cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be >> involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. >> >> But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have >> the funding to keep the lights on. >> >> If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be >> greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant >> funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be >> able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being >> able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not >> sustainable. >> > > Hi. Could we collect this sum on special bank account, to gather correct sum > for covering electricity expenses? > Or OpenBSD Foundation will pay a bill from it's funds? > Simplier - should I send money to Foundation right now or should I wait info > about direct-electricity-expenses-acccount? Unfortunately I can't send $20k, > but if 200 community members send $100 each... > I hope this will help to have another year for searching a company Theo was > mentioning in his irst letter. > >> >> >> On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Theo de Raadt >> wrote: >>> 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. >>> >>> --- >>> >>> Hi everyone. >>> >>> The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the >>> development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons >>> prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might >>> offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go >>> that way. >>> >>> We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical >>> expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be >>> happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring >>> basis. >>> >>> That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off >>> as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this >>> cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. >>> >>> We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting >>> reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also >>> do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. >>> >>> I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me >>> for details if serious. >>> >>> Thanks.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 1/14/14, Theo de Raadt wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Bob Beck >> wrote: >> >Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. >> > >> > In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to >> > cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be >> > involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. >> > >> > But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have >> > the funding to keep the lights on. >> > >> > If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be >> > greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant >> > funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be >> > able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being >> > able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not >> > sustainable. >> >> There's an equation that has to be satisfied here. It has a demand >> side and a supply side. You demand a certain amount of electricity and >> someone has to supply the money to pay for it. I'm going to be blunt >> here, in an effort to be helpful (it's also not foreign to the OpenBSD >> style). I get the impression that the demand for electricity is viewed >> as a given: you use what you use and people need to step up and >> provide the money to pay for it. If I'm wrong, please say so. But if >> I'm right, the demand can be adjusted. Sometimes you need to eat >> cornflakes instead of caviar. For example, I've never understood why >> this project supports the old architectures it does, considering the >> associated costs. > > The answer to that is not news. > > On a regular basis, we find real and serious bugs which affect all > platforms, but they are incidentally made visible on one of the > platforms we run, following that they are fixed. It is a harsh > reality which static and dynamic analysis tools have not yet resolved. > > Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the > older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in > the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem. If you aren't in > the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy. > >> The recent discussion of a need for a replacement >> Vax for package-building illustrates that. > > The vaxes being asked for draw almost no power, but it supplies the > same benefits as the other architectures. > > Regarding shutting them down, there other social problems. > > Yes, we remove about 10 of the architectures. We'd slowly lose the > developers who like to work on those areas. They also work in other > areas, but ... I suspect they would another BSD that supports them. > >> Perhaps this is an opportunity to reassess the scope of the project >> and trim some things that can no longer be justified on a cost-benefit >> basis. > > And maybe we've been doing that assessment continually for two > decades. > >> If the choice is between shutting the project down and reducing its >> scope to something sustainable, it's a no-brainer. This project has >> made really significant contributions, both in the obvious area, >> security, but also to the art of managing and building complex >> software that is reliable. To have it go away rather than trim its >> sails in way that acknowledges reality would really be a shame. > > This project "has made"? How about "this project will continue to". > > I really love how we keep getting advice. I think you misunderstood the concept of supply and demand pointed out in the message you replied to. "We" are so used to leeching off the project, and for so long, that we feel entitled to /demand/ that you and your project /supply/ what we feel entitled to. Because of our dependence to this entitlement feeling, should anything threaten the supply of what you produce, must not be allowed. Even if "we" should need to go to our government representatives to address this threat! I can see it now: OBSD=OBama Software Distribution. It will be provided to everyone and anyone, whether or not they feel they need it. If anyone chooses to not use it, they still will be charged a "fee" for the CD set they don't need now, but /might/ need in the future. This program will be sustained by inflated CD prices (say $750 a copy), and by cutting bits of the project which will be deemed unnecessary, such as old and obsolete hardware support (VAX, Sparc, ...), stickers will be discontinued, OpenSSH will be removed from base; let's be honest about it, you really need encryption if you have something to hide (from the government). I understand they now have worked out all the glitches in their web-site, which will now host the new OBSD. Cheers, --patrick
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale? I will take this opportunity to suggest a probably bad idea but one that crossed my mind nonetheless. I have not actively kept up with this list so forgive me if this can't be done, or isn't in line with the community's values, but what about doing a Kickstarter campaign for each OpenBSD release? Varying levels of support could get the different levels of swag that are already distributed: CD/DVD distributions, t-shirts, stickers, etc... One could also just contribute $10-$20 to be a supporter, and receive nothing material. Nodejitsu recently raised $256k with their Scalenpm campaign. I would imagine there are enough people out there who care about OpenBSD too whereby a significant amount of money could be raised. -Erik -- Erik K. Mitchell erik.mitch...@gmail.com
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> > Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale? > > I will take this opportunity to suggest a probably bad idea but one > that crossed my mind nonetheless. > > I have not actively kept up with this list so forgive me if this can't > be done, or isn't in line with the community's values, but what about > doing a Kickstarter campaign for each OpenBSD release? Varying levels > of support could get the different levels of swag that are already > distributed: CD/DVD distributions, t-shirts, stickers, etc... The problem with this model is that once again - we are the ones who need to supply more; - we need to promising the goods; - we are the ones who need to invest; - we are supposed to do the extra work; - we are supposed to take time away from coding. Don't we do enough? Regarding the swag. The entire OpenBSD project now probably gets 1/4 of revenue out of CD, tshirt sales, but in this model we'd have to give much of that out to people who contribute, and it will probably be less. Remember to add shipping, now paid on this end, instead of by the buyer. > One could also just contribute $10-$20 to be a supporter, and receive > nothing material. $20? To break even with the above issues, call it $100 minimum. Does it still work? Is there evidence? And once this turn process on, if it doesn't work, are we even more dead in the water? > Nodejitsu recently raised $256k with their Scalenpm campaign. I would > imagine there are enough people out there who care about OpenBSD too > whereby a significant amount of money could be raised. Would that work every year? I doubt mindshare of this sort works repeatedly.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
There's a lot of reasons why I want to avoid this conversation, but since it's started, I'd say look at http://www.patreon.com/ for a crowdfunding model - much nicer than Kickstarters. (and a way to get people to formalize their buying of CD sets every release)
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 16:12, Erik Mitchell wrote: > I have not actively kept up with this list so forgive me if this can't > be done, or isn't in line with the community's values, but what about > doing a Kickstarter campaign for each OpenBSD release? Varying levels > of support could get the different levels of swag that are already > distributed: CD/DVD distributions, t-shirts, stickers, etc... > > One could also just contribute $10-$20 to be a supporter, and receive > nothing material. You can do all this (and more!) on the website today. And you get soonish delivery without having to wait until a thousand other people donate. And the project doesn't have to pay out a cut to yet another middleman.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 03:24:00PM -0700, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > I will take this opportunity to suggest a probably bad idea but one > > that crossed my mind nonetheless. > > > > I have not actively kept up with this list so forgive me if this can't > > be done, or isn't in line with the community's values, but what about > > doing a Kickstarter campaign for each OpenBSD release? Varying levels > > of support could get the different levels of swag that are already > > distributed: CD/DVD distributions, t-shirts, stickers, etc... > > The problem with this model is that once again > - we are the ones who need to supply more; > - we need to promising the goods; > - we are the ones who need to invest; > - we are supposed to do the extra work; > - we are supposed to take time away from coding. Who would back the KickStarter but be unwilling to donate directly to the project? The community is already here, the project already accepts donations. I don't see what KickStarter offers besides the hipster cred of running a KickStarter, and hipster cred doesn't pay electrical bills. Anyways, talk is cheap so I'm going to go make a donation now. If everyone reading this did the same this thread could die, and OpenBSD wouldn't.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
previously on this list Theo contributed: > The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the > development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons > prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might > offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go > that way. Especially if you have some land in Canada and manage to raise a significant bit extra, a Peltier energy harvesting system due to the difference in surface and sub-surface land temperature might be worth looking at to help balance the books longer term. The Aston Martin plant runs off one entirely but cost a fortune to drill a deep bore hole to get a large temperature difference, but then their building is huge and produces cars with enough power to run a town. Alternatively a small scale system building it into a wall to get the difference between the cold Canadian winter outside and warm inside might work well. -- ___ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd ___
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
For additional financial source, may I suggest that the project license some of their artworks? I think this has been asked for so many times before, maybe you should reconsider your stand on this. Of course Theo or the OpenBSD project as a whole, or the OBSD Foundation can define which artwork is licensed for what purpose and to whom or what organization. OpenBSD may be sitting too long on this potentially lucrative asset. We have to be clear that the objective is to keep the project sustainable. What do you think? Hope this helps. On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 7:02 AM, Ted Unangst wrote: > On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 16:12, Erik Mitchell wrote: > > > I have not actively kept up with this list so forgive me if this can't > > be done, or isn't in line with the community's values, but what about > > doing a Kickstarter campaign for each OpenBSD release? Varying levels > > of support could get the different levels of swag that are already > > distributed: CD/DVD distributions, t-shirts, stickers, etc... > > > > One could also just contribute $10-$20 to be a supporter, and receive > > nothing material. > > You can do all this (and more!) on the website today. And you get > soonish delivery without having to wait until a thousand other people > donate. And the project doesn't have to pay out a cut to yet another > middleman.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
>previously on this list Theo contributed: > >> The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the >> development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons >> prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might >> offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go >> that way. > >Especially if you have some land in Canada and manage to raise a >significant bit extra, a Peltier energy harvesting system due to >the difference in surface and sub-surface land temperature might be >worth looking at to help balance the books longer term. > >The Aston Martin plant runs off one entirely but cost a fortune to >drill a deep bore hole to get a large temperature difference, but then >their building is huge and produces cars with enough power to run a >town. > >Alternatively a small scale system building it into a wall to get the >difference between the cold Canadian winter outside and warm inside >might work well. That's a great idea. I'm going drag a subgroup of the developers away from software development and we'll start working on that instead. Right away. To fund the drilling, we'll hold a bake sale.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
No need to respond to this: just ideas if they're not already covered. I've just made my donation. For what it's worth - you can see the numbers on wikimedia's donations, from 2009. I wouldn't discount the $10 user base. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Staeiou/Protocol [see the graphs on fundraising below]. Other idea if not already taken care of - You could also get non-coding contributors to handle the CD & stickers etc, if you don't already have that happening. Then the fundraising arm wouldn't take away from coding time. Thanks Jason On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 9:24 AM, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > > Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale? > > > > I will take this opportunity to suggest a probably bad idea but one > > that crossed my mind nonetheless. > > > > I have not actively kept up with this list so forgive me if this can't > > be done, or isn't in line with the community's values, but what about > > doing a Kickstarter campaign for each OpenBSD release? Varying levels > > of support could get the different levels of swag that are already > > distributed: CD/DVD distributions, t-shirts, stickers, etc... > > The problem with this model is that once again > - we are the ones who need to supply more; > - we need to promising the goods; > - we are the ones who need to invest; > - we are supposed to do the extra work; > - we are supposed to take time away from coding. > > Don't we do enough? > > Regarding the swag. The entire OpenBSD project now probably gets 1/4 > of revenue out of CD, tshirt sales, but in this model we'd have to > give much of that out to people who contribute, and it will probably > be less. > > Remember to add shipping, now paid on this end, instead of by the buyer. > > > One could also just contribute $10-$20 to be a supporter, and receive > > nothing material. > > $20? To break even with the above issues, call it $100 minimum. Does > it still work? Is there evidence? > > And once this turn process on, if it doesn't work, are we even more dead > in the water? > > > Nodejitsu recently raised $256k with their Scalenpm campaign. I would > > imagine there are enough people out there who care about OpenBSD too > > whereby a significant amount of money could be raised. > > Would that work every year? > > I doubt mindshare of this sort works repeatedly.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 04:56:14PM -0600, Kent R. Spillner wrote: > Anyways, talk is cheap so I'm going to go make a donation now. If everyone > reading this did the same this thread could die, and OpenBSD wouldn't. I just did the same, $100 via the OpenBSD Foundation. Feels good. I'm super excited about the 5.5 release, which should be the most amazing in years. Options to pay with Paypal, credit card, check... http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html Who else has donated today? Nicolai
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Nicolai, and others, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all of those stepping up to the call for contributions. Every little bit helps. For those who ask, the OpenBSD Foundation is the best path for contributions. I hope some larger contributors will step up, to take a more long term view (like Google does). Rather than the "little people" funding our efforts. Many of the things we do in OpenBSD are often incorporated into products made by multi-million dollar companies. This is not a BSD vs GPL issue, it is about a plain lack of goodwill, something you cannot mandate via a license. A lack of goodwill is effectively badwill. There is a good list in the last paragraph of the OpenSSH web site. Maybe the community's activism can make inroads there which we have not been able to.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 04:56:14PM -0600, Kent R. Spillner wrote: > Anyways, talk is cheap so I'm going to go make a donation now. If everyone > reading this did the same this thread could die, and OpenBSD wouldn't. +1 $10 monthly recurring donation Predrag
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Perhaps it's time to slightly increase the cost of CD purchases. I know it's not a favorite thing to do, but necessary for sustainability. On 01/14/2014 07:30 PM, Jason Koch wrote: No need to respond to this: just ideas if they're not already covered. I've just made my donation. For what it's worth - you can see the numbers on wikimedia's donations, from 2009. I wouldn't discount the $10 user base. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Staeiou/Protocol [see the graphs on fundraising below]. Other idea if not already taken care of - You could also get non-coding contributors to handle the CD & stickers etc, if you don't already have that happening. Then the fundraising arm wouldn't take away from coding time. Thanks Jason On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 9:24 AM, Theo de Raadt wrote: Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale? I will take this opportunity to suggest a probably bad idea but one that crossed my mind nonetheless. I have not actively kept up with this list so forgive me if this can't be done, or isn't in line with the community's values, but what about doing a Kickstarter campaign for each OpenBSD release? Varying levels of support could get the different levels of swag that are already distributed: CD/DVD distributions, t-shirts, stickers, etc... The problem with this model is that once again - we are the ones who need to supply more; - we need to promising the goods; - we are the ones who need to invest; - we are supposed to do the extra work; - we are supposed to take time away from coding. Don't we do enough? Regarding the swag. The entire OpenBSD project now probably gets 1/4 of revenue out of CD, tshirt sales, but in this model we'd have to give much of that out to people who contribute, and it will probably be less. Remember to add shipping, now paid on this end, instead of by the buyer. One could also just contribute $10-$20 to be a supporter, and receive nothing material. $20? To break even with the above issues, call it $100 minimum. Does it still work? Is there evidence? And once this turn process on, if it doesn't work, are we even more dead in the water? Nodejitsu recently raised $256k with their Scalenpm campaign. I would imagine there are enough people out there who care about OpenBSD too whereby a significant amount of money could be raised. Would that work every year? I doubt mindshare of this sort works repeatedly.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 12:40 AM, Donald Allen wrote: > On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 3:03 PM, Bob Beck wrote: >>Just to bring this issue back to the forefront. >> >> In light of shrinking funding, we do need to look for a source to >> cover project expenses. If need be the OpenBSD Foundation can be >> involved in receiving donations to cover project electrical costs. >> >> But the fact is right now, OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have >> the funding to keep the lights on. >> >> If you or a company you know are able to assist us, it would be >> greatly appreciated, but right now we are looking at a significant >> funding shortfall for the upcoming year - Meaning the project won't be >> able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being >> able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not >> sustainable. > > There's an equation that has to be satisfied here. It has a demand > side and a supply side. You demand a certain amount of electricity and > someone has to supply the money to pay for it. I'm going to be blunt > here, in an effort to be helpful (it's also not foreign to the OpenBSD > style). I get the impression that the demand for electricity is viewed > as a given: you use what you use and people need to step up and > provide the money to pay for it. If I'm wrong, please say so. But if > I'm right, the demand can be adjusted. Sometimes you need to eat > cornflakes instead of caviar. For example, I've never understood why > this project supports the old architectures it does, considering the > associated costs. The recent discussion of a need for a replacement > Vax for package-building illustrates that. > > Perhaps this is an opportunity to reassess the scope of the project > and trim some things that can no longer be justified on a cost-benefit > basis. > > If the choice is between shutting the project down and reducing its > scope to something sustainable, it's a no-brainer. This project has > made really significant contributions, both in the obvious area, > security, but also to the art of managing and building complex > software that is reliable. To have it go away rather than trim its > sails in way that acknowledges reality would really be a shame. > > /Don Allen > I'm not involved deeply in OpenBSD, but you'd be surprised at the number of software that incorporates OpenBSD improvements that you and I use. If you run nsd or unbound: (from nsd changelog) Bugfixes: Fix for accept spinning reported by OpenBSD. OpenBSD security improvements are often submitted to other projects so that everybody can benefit: Fix bug where clear_remove() and clear_inodedeps() would not iterate over the entire pagedep and inodedep hash tables due to an off-by-one mistake in loops. Spotted by and diff from Pedro Martelletto. Sent upstream to Kirk and also fixed in FreeBSD. ok otto@ millert@ These are just 2 examples that I picked, but there are many more. OpenSSH wouldn't be reliable if it wasn't tested on HPPA and sparc64: (I'm pretty sure I saw a bunch of commits wrt to alignment issues that were discovered on HPPA or sparc64 for OpenSSH). If we "re-view the project", we end up with OpenBSD not being able to make continuous improvements to the whole world as well as it is doing right now. So let's do our best to allow the project to grow :-) ! >> >> >> >> >> On Fri, Dec 20, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Theo de Raadt >> wrote: >>> 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. >>> >>> --- >>> >>> Hi everyone. >>> >>> The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the >>> development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons >>> prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might >>> offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go >>> that way. >>> >>> We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical >>> expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be >>> happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring >>> basis. >>> >>> That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off >>> as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this >>> cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. >>> >>> We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting >>> reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also >>> do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. >>> >>> I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me >>> for details if serious. >>> >>> Thanks. >> > -- This message is strictly personal and the opinions expressed do not represent those of my employers, either past or present.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Hi, Loganaden Velvindron wrote: OpenSSH wouldn't be reliable if it wasn't tested on HPPA and sparc64: (I'm pretty sure I saw a bunch of commits wrt to alignment issues that were discovered on HPPA or sparc64 for OpenSSH). being myself a developer of several applications, I can only praise that. The quality of "Linux-x86" only software is quite evident lately. I have discovered in the past a lot of bugs in my own software by running it on different architectures and different operating systems. Even if we "love" our own BSD or Linux flavour... I once discovered a bug by testing on AIX/POWER... that affected any platform, but reproduced reliably only there. Sparc and PA-RISC discover a lot of bugs (I'd love to say for their superior architectures) due to alignments, stack treatment, structure handling. Often it is a burden, one has to fight with buggy compilers, strange bootloaders and aging hardware, but it has paid off more than once. This personal experience can surely be extended to other libraries and to whole operating system(s). Riccardo
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
It's been a while I want to buy Tshirts and sweatshirts but they never are available (right size for some, total availability for others). I mean if CD's and shirts do weight for a third of the the fundings... the store should be a little more "pro" (speaking about products availabilty) It's a fantastic project, made by great people. Keep the good work... I'm sure you will find some way for your fundings. Ps : Just found some shirts left on the german website (http://www.ixsoft.de/), is buying on it OK ? -Message d'origine- De : owner-m...@openbsd.org [mailto:owner-m...@openbsd.org] De la part de Theo de Raadt Envoyé : mercredi 15 janvier 2014 02:36 À : Nicolai Cc : misc@openbsd.org Objet : Re: Request for Funding our Electricity Nicolai, and others, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all of those stepping up to the call for contributions. Every little bit helps. For those who ask, the OpenBSD Foundation is the best path for contributions. I hope some larger contributors will step up, to take a more long term view (like Google does). Rather than the "little people" funding our efforts. Many of the things we do in OpenBSD are often incorporated into products made by multi-million dollar companies. This is not a BSD vs GPL issue, it is about a plain lack of goodwill, something you cannot mandate via a license. A lack of goodwill is effectively badwill. There is a good list in the last paragraph of the OpenSSH web site. Maybe the community's activism can make inroads there which we have not been able to.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Bob Beck wrote: > And actually, if you're reading this, you can help by passing this on > to people you know *off these lists*. Is it worth to post a "call for support" on the official website front-page (and the foundation one too)? Just to emphasize the need for electricity now. Luca
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 2014-01-15, Romain FABBRI - Alien Consulting wrote: > It's been a while I want to buy Tshirts and sweatshirts but they never are > available (right size for some, total availability for others). > I mean if CD's and shirts do weight for a third of the the fundings... the > store should be a little more "pro" (speaking about products availabilty) > > It's a fantastic project, made by great people. > Keep the good work... I'm sure you will find some way for your fundings. > > Ps : Just found some shirts left on the german website > (http://www.ixsoft.de/), is buying on it OK ? btw, if anyone spots a site that has any of the 5.3 t-shirts left in L, please drop me a mail offlist. ;)
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 04:56:14PM -0600, Kent R. Spillner wrote: > Anyways, talk is cheap so I'm going to go make a donation now. If everyone > reading this did the same this thread could die, and OpenBSD wouldn't. i've just spent a few dollars and I try to do it more often. Nevertheless, it is certainly a good idea to look for a company who can pay the electricity. However, I am not veryp optimistic that such a company can be found (in our world). Thanks for providing good software.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
How about to write a letter/email in the name of the OpenBSD Fundation to each company who use OpenBSD products ? I'm sure that the majority of theses company doesn't read undeadly.org and doesn't even know that we need support. Best regards De : Berger Steffan [berger...@wolfman.devio.us] Envoyé : mercredi 15 janvier 2014 13:13 À : misc@openbsd.org Objet : Re: Request for Funding our Electricity On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 04:56:14PM -0600, Kent R. Spillner wrote: > Anyways, talk is cheap so I'm going to go make a donation now. If everyone > reading this did the same this thread could die, and OpenBSD wouldn't. i've just spent a few dollars and I try to do it more often. Nevertheless, it is certainly a good idea to look for a company who can pay the electricity. However, I am not veryp optimistic that such a company can be found (in our world). Thanks for providing good software.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Yes, I believe so - and we'll be ramping that up shortly . but realisticly the need is for donations in general - electricity is one thing that the funding can be applied to. On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 3:27 AM, Luca Ferrari wrote: > On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 9:18 PM, Bob Beck wrote: >> And actually, if you're reading this, you can help by passing this on >> to people you know *off these lists*. > > Is it worth to post a "call for support" on the official website > front-page (and the foundation one too)? Just to emphasize the need > for electricity now. > > Luca
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Dear Theo, Don't we do enough? You already do too much. Regarding the swag. The entire OpenBSD project now probably gets 1/4 of revenue out of CD Why don't you do for the website software downloads what you do for the CDs? Make users pay the downloads from the official website as you make them pay for the CDs. No need to change the license. No need to care about parallel free downloads, they will be there soon for poor users or smart users than can type "openbsd download" in a search engine. Add lifetime of OpenBSD updates without extra payment (a mailing-list can announce them). Add 30 days money-back guarantee! (any reason qualifies). Add invoice. Would that work every year? Every day. I doubt mindshare of this sort works repeatedly. No doubt it will work but I guess I'm the only one on earth to know that. Of course, I already ear all possible arguments claiming it can't work, it won't be free/open software anymore etc. Openbsd won't just be gratis from the homepage, that's all. It works for me for more than three years for a very small software much worse, much smaller, less well known than the OpenBSD system. That's the buying of OpenBSD CDs that made me think about this business model. I'm lazy so I didn't want the hard stuff of building and sending CDs. Numerically it works 100 times (yes a hundred times) better than a permanent call for donation, that's what I measured, how surprising!, that is what I still benefit every day. You won't have to sell CDs or teeshirts anymore, just coding, paying electricity and coders. -- Au revoir, 09 51 84 42 42 Gilles Lamiral. France, Baulon (35580) 06 20 79 76 06
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 15 Jan 2014, at 16.35, Gilles LAMIRAL wrote: > Dear Theo, > >> Don't we do enough? > > You already do too much. I have long held the opinion that Theo is probably the best coder on this planet. That’s not any sort of ass-kissing, either, it’s my objective, unbiased opinion. And I know Henning personally, as in “live and worked together with him" - one hell of an expert. However, the dilemma that the project has found itself in now very clearly demonstrates that Theo is not a businessman and that there isn’t any other businessman at the helm, either. Imagining that people will suddenly start to pay for something that they have constantly been getting for free is absurd - their belief is that somebody else will surely step up first or somebody will fork in the name of fame. No business on this planet is going to allocate budget to paying OpenBSD’s electricity bills, let alone anything else, without 1) a detailed itemisation of the electrical bills, 2) a detailed justification of said line items, and 3) a satisfaction of their own business interest. It’s just not sexy for a philanthropist to support a relatively unheard of operating system when cancer is still left uncured. It’s not good to be removing coders from their tasks; the project needs a businessman or two. One who will handle the corporate feature requests and charge dearly for them. Things like routing technology and high-speed packet forwarding - things that can replace the exorbitant costs of maintaining cisco routers. This is the key. With the FBSD 10GB wire speed packet forwarding incorporated, OpenBSD would be ready to challenge Cisco in a very serious way. Completely free as always, but with paid support for this edge cases that make life what it is. Thanks Theo, Henning, and all of the rest of you. -mike
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
15 EUR donation Thanks devs for your great work! -- Matteo Filippetto http://www.op83.eu
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 15/01/14 08:25 AM, MJ wrote: > On 15 Jan 2014, at 16.35, Gilles LAMIRAL wrote: > >> Dear Theo, >> >>> Don't we do enough? >> >> You already do too much. > > I have long held the opinion that Theo is probably the best coder on this planet. Thats not any sort of ass-kissing, either, its my objective, unbiased opinion. And I know Henning personally, as in live and worked together with him" - one hell of an expert. > > However, the dilemma that the project has found itself in now very clearly demonstrates that Theo is not a businessman and that there isnt any other businessman at the helm, either. Imagining that people will suddenly start to pay for something that they have constantly been getting for free is absurd - their belief is that somebody else will surely step up first or somebody will fork in the name of fame. No business on this planet is going to allocate budget to paying OpenBSDs electricity bills, let alone anything else, without 1) a detailed itemisation of the electrical bills, 2) a detailed justification of said line items, and 3) a satisfaction of their own business interest. Its just not sexy for a philanthropist to support a relatively unheard of operating system when cancer is still left uncured. > > Its not good to be removing coders from their tasks; the project needs a businessman or two. One who will handle the corporate feature requests and charge dearly for them. Things like routing technology and high-speed packet forwarding - things that can replace the exorbitant costs of maintaining cisco routers. This is the key. With the FBSD 10GB wire speed packet forwarding incorporated, OpenBSD would be ready to challenge Cisco in a very serious way. Completely free as always, but with paid support for this edge cases that make life what it is. > > Thanks Theo, Henning, and all of the rest of you. > > > -mike > Hello I am not an expert in computers; but administrator; and i think that the previous view point is very logic. Building OpenBSD is an investment (no direct retribution), and the project is in need of something that give back or retributed the investment. The key, are the services; hosting, virtualization, etc. Remember that OpenBSD has been considered only for experts, and there are many no experts who would like to use OpenBSD. The other thing that could be applied is writing a manual (description of how to do every thing on OpenBSD; we have very good documentation), that could be sold every 6 month; writing the manual should be easy; every 6 month, the changes are few things. The other idea, is Members, every one of us could give five dollars per month to keep the privilege of using OpenBSD; receiving information, participating in the list, etc. OK, it has been written with the idea of help in mind. I am thankful for your effort. Thanks agrquinonez. [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 17:28:19 -0700 (MST) Theo de Raadt wrote: > That's a great idea. > > I'm going drag a subgroup of the developers away from software > development and we'll start working on that instead. > > Right away. > > To fund the drilling, we'll hold a bake sale. Fair enough just thought the Canadian weather was ideal for it but yeah even shallow thermal piles are quite expensive and the DIY peltier options would take time and all methods some research. If someones thinking of launching a crowd funding site, it might add a carbon reduction element to the funding plea though.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
previously on this list agrquinonez contributed: > The other idea, is Members, every one of us could give five dollars per > month to keep the privilege of using OpenBSD; receiving information, > participating in the list, etc. I think that would strangle the project and possibly prevent future donater's becoming involved and passionate. I would guess OpenBSD has a far higher percentage of users that donate or buy than debian but less corporate backing. -- ___ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd ___
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Theo, In situations like this, it might be a good idea to come down from your high horse (it's a mostly irrelevant OS anyway) and start treating people offering ideas - good or bad- with some f*cking respect. I fortunately read through the thread before NOT donating. That small donation wouldn't have amounted to much, but I am positive you being the leader of this project is the very reason no one wants to step up with serious funding. -Sia
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
2014/1/15 Sia Lang : > That small donation wouldn't have amounted to much, but I am positive you > being the leader of this project is the very reason no one wants to step up > with serious funding. Him being the leader is the very reason this project still exists. Best Martin
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 07:41:03PM +0100, Martin Schröder wrote: > Him being the leader is the very reason this project still exists. The thing about OpenBSD is that it has a very clear and strong focus. This comes from clear and strong leadership. Is Theo right on everything? Of course not. None of us are. However, he directs things in a direction that benefits all of us and OpenBSD has an absolutely clear focus and direction. Some other operating systems might be entertaining, an academic exercise, or a "just because" effort (anyone running Debian/kFreeBSD in production?) but OpenBSD is extremely powerful and useful. Nothing comes close in my opinion and there's a reason for that. OpenBSD doesn't have a huge democratic process that takes months or years to decide anything. Instead, real work gets done every single release and new and improved functionality is there every single time without a bunch of binary blobs. I'm doing whatever I can to help encourage corporate sponsorship and I would encourage everyone else to do the same. Now is not the time to comment on what you think of Theo's leadership. If you don't like it, use something else. That's the beauty of freedom. No one is forcing you to use OpenBSD. Let's limit the noise to things that could actually benefit OpenBSD rather than what we think might be wrong. Each of us should be looking at ways that *we* can help OpenBSD rather than pointing out what the developers could do in addition to all the volunteer coding they're already doing. Don't forget how valuable and expensive it would be to hire all of these amazing developers to do what they love doing. Bryan
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 01/15/14 19:41, Martin Schröder wrote: > 2014/1/15 Sia Lang : >> That small donation wouldn't have amounted to much, but I am positive you >> being the leader of this project is the very reason no one wants to step up >> with serious funding. > > Him being the leader is the very reason this project still exists. I agree on that. Theo is not only a good programmer he is also a business man and has successfully sold his product. Since everyone has ideas, I want to put up another small idea of mine. When people donate even if it's $15 it's worth something, and we who donate are all appreciative of any amount given by peers. So then if 20,000 dollars is 365 days for electricity how about OpenBSD chops everyones donation into a timeslot. Every package built with the ports system at that timeslot then displays whose time it was that finalised the package. So if my time was used it would say: # pkg_add somepackage ... This package's buildtime was generously donated by Peter J. Philipp. # or # pkg_add someotherpackage ... This package's buildtime was generously donated by Scary Corporation. # The programming for this is probably the least of worries, OpenBSD has after all a bunch of coders. The other aspect is that it's advertising, but it's not too intrusive in my view, and it does honor the little guy too as his timeslot may build X amount of packages. People want to feel that they get something back so perhaps cross-referencing can be done who did what packages buildtime and that can be tracked back. It's advertising that particular person, making them feel a bond towards the project and they will likely donate again, to relive that feel. It's just an idea, Cheers, -peter
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 15/01/14 10:31 AM, Kevin Chadwick wrote: > previously on this list agrquinonez contributed: > >> The other idea, is Members, every one of us could give five dollars per >> month to keep the privilege of using OpenBSD; receiving information, >> participating in the list, etc. > > I think that would strangle the project and possibly prevent future > donater's becoming involved and passionate. I would guess OpenBSD has a > far higher percentage of users that donate or buy than debian but less > corporate backing. > I am talking about Gentlemen, The people who are contributing voluntarily; people who think, that using OpenBSD is a privilege! Of course, that you have a better idea; where is it? [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 2:44 PM, Peter J. Philipp wrote: > On 01/15/14 19:41, Martin Schröder wrote: >> 2014/1/15 Sia Lang : >>> That small donation wouldn't have amounted to much, but I am positive you >>> being the leader of this project is the very reason no one wants to step up >>> with serious funding. >> >> Him being the leader is the very reason this project still exists. > > I agree on that. Theo is not only a good programmer he is also a > business man and has successfully sold his product. > > Since everyone has ideas, I want to put up another small idea of mine. > When people donate even if it's $15 it's worth something, and we who > donate are all appreciative of any amount given by peers. So then if > 20,000 dollars is 365 days for electricity how about OpenBSD chops > everyones donation into a timeslot. Every package built with the ports > system at that timeslot then displays whose time it was that finalised > the package. So if my time was used it would say: > > # pkg_add somepackage > ... > This package's buildtime was generously donated by Peter J. Philipp. until libre office takes ~30 $50 dollar donations, bombarding my terminal with names of insecure ppl > # > > or > > # pkg_add someotherpackage > ... > This package's buildtime was generously donated by Scary Corporation. > # > > The programming for this is probably the least of worries, OpenBSD has > after all a bunch of coders. The other aspect is that it's advertising, > but it's not too intrusive in my view, and it does honor the little guy > too as his timeslot may build X amount of packages. > > People want to feel that they get something back so perhaps > cross-referencing can be done who did what packages buildtime and that > can be tracked back. It's advertising that particular person, making > them feel a bond towards the project and they will likely donate again, > to relive that feel. > > It's just an idea, > > Cheers, > > -peter
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Hi guys, how about produce energy (solar energy, wind power generators, etc) ? Has anyone some idea if it is possible and its cost ? Maybe someone can donate this kind of material... On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 11:22:47AM -0800, agrquinonez wrote: * On 15/01/14 10:31 AM, Kevin Chadwick wrote: * > previously on this list agrquinonez contributed: * > * >> The other idea, is Members, every one of us could give five dollars per * >> month to keep the privilege of using OpenBSD; receiving information, * >> participating in the list, etc. * > * > I think that would strangle the project and possibly prevent future * > donater's becoming involved and passionate. I would guess OpenBSD has a * > far higher percentage of users that donate or buy than debian but less * > corporate backing. * > * * I am talking about Gentlemen, The people who are contributing * voluntarily; people who think, that using OpenBSD is a privilege! * Of course, that you have a better idea; where is it? * * [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc] * -- Sent by my Mutt "Vitam Impendere Vero"
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 01/14, Theo de Raadt wrote: > Nicolai, and others, > > I'd like to take the opportunity to thank all of those stepping up > to the call for contributions. Every little bit helps. > > For those who ask, the OpenBSD Foundation is the best path for > contributions. > > I hope some larger contributors will step up, to take a more long term > view (like Google does). Rather than the "little people" funding our > efforts. Many of the things we do in OpenBSD are often incorporated > into products made by multi-million dollar companies. > > This is not a BSD vs GPL issue, it is about a plain lack of goodwill, > something you cannot mandate via a license. A lack of goodwill is > effectively badwill. > > There is a good list in the last paragraph of the OpenSSH web site. > Maybe the community's activism can make inroads there which we have > not been able to. $10.00 montly donation to OpenBSD Foundation setup. On the other hand, I would definitely pay for a cupcake made by an OBSD developer. Thanks all for your work, gabe.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 06:25:53PM +0200, MJ wrote: > > On 15 Jan 2014, at 16.35, Gilles LAMIRAL wrote: > > > Dear Theo, > > > >> Don't we do enough? > > > > You already do too much. > > I have long held the opinion that Theo is probably the best coder on this > planet. That’s not any sort of ass-kissing, either, it’s my objective, > unbiased opinion. And I know Henning personally, as in “live and worked > together with him" - one hell of an expert. > > However, the dilemma that the project has found itself in now very clearly > demonstrates that Theo is not a businessman and that there isn’t any other > businessman at the helm, either. Imagining that people will suddenly start to > pay for something that they have constantly been getting for free is absurd - > their belief is that somebody else will surely step up first or somebody will > fork in the name of fame. No business on this planet is going to allocate > budget to paying OpenBSD’s electricity bills, let alone anything else, > without 1) a detailed itemisation of the electrical bills, 2) a detailed > justification of said line items, and 3) a satisfaction of their own business > interest. It’s just not sexy for a philanthropist to support a relatively > unheard of operating system when cancer is still left uncured. > > It’s not good to be removing coders from their tasks; the project needs a > businessman or two. One who will handle the corporate feature requests and > charge dearly for them. Things like routing technology and high-speed packet > forwarding - things that can replace the exorbitant costs of maintaining > cisco routers. This is the key. With the FBSD 10GB wire speed packet > forwarding incorporated, OpenBSD would be ready to challenge Cisco in a very > serious way. Completely free as always, but with paid support for this edge > cases that make life what it is. > I have my own business, that has had recent problems due to my recent health. This point is 100% correct. OpenBSD needs a method of acquiring funds beyond selling CD's, T-shirts, donations, etc. Let's face it, donations are exactly the same thing as a tip in a restaurant. Some tip, others don't. The CD's are too expensive for Joe/Jane Idiot who can barely run their current horrible operating system. (CD prices are fine for us, just not for them) The main problem I run into is that they are TERRIFIED of changing to something else! Installing an operating system by themselves? Never going to happen. The FAQ, while helpful, is the same thing as a windows pop-up that says "you are having a problem with the wifi system. Would you like to run troubleshooting?" which does nothing, of course. I could sell desktops and laptops here in Texas. Must be all in Spanish and ready to go without any serious teaching. Video calls to Mexico and further South are the main use here. Just need to work with existing computers running windows over there. Perhaps OpenBSD could sell a virus/malware/high security certification for the base operating system of computers running it? I think that would easily sell and sooth people fearful of viruses. The software is free, but people are only too happy to buy silly bullshit like that. There are many such things that can be sold without making any changes to the software licenses. After all, the certification guarantees that any security problems will absolutely be fixed within 6 months! Any price suggestions? Standard or Pro certifications? Chris Bennett
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Hello, It seems that my idea was not read and in my opinion the discussion turns in a wrong way. I don't believe that donations and/or a kind of rent will solve our problem in long-term (as Theo says in a previous mail). I'm pretty sure that the majority of companies doesn't read undeadly.org and didn't notice that we have a financial/electrical issue. I suggest to write a letter to theses companies who are known to using OpenBSD or other product-related like OpenSSH. In this letter we can explain (as the first post from Theo) our issue. I'm sure they can give us an hand if they know our problem. And in my opinion, ONLY a company can give us a long-term solution. Sorry I'm not a native english-speaker and I can't help to write a letter like that but I'm sure that's realistic solution. Another solution is to approach the *BSD community. FreeBSD are bigger than us and how they'll solve these kind of problem ? I don't know but if we join our effort we could find a solution. Best regards ! Fabien Franchini
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 06:25:53PM +0200, MJ wrote: > > I have long held the opinion that Theo is probably the best coder on this > planet. That?s not any sort of ass-kissing, either, it?s my objective, > unbiased opinion. And I know Henning personally, as in ?live and worked > together with him" - one hell of an expert. > > However, the dilemma that the project has found itself in now very clearly > demonstrates that Theo is not a businessman and that there isn?t any other > businessman at the helm, either. Imagining that people will suddenly start to > pay for something that they have constantly been getting for free is absurd - > their belief is that somebody else will surely step up first or somebody will > fork in the name of fame. No business on this planet is going to allocate > budget to paying OpenBSD?s electricity bills, let alone anything else, > without 1) a detailed itemisation of the electrical bills, 2) a detailed > justification of said line items, and 3) a satisfaction of their own business > interest. It?s just not sexy for a philanthropist to support a relatively > unheard of operating system when cancer is still left uncured. Define sexy. Some people will say it's having flash running full speed on their web browser while streaming 3 youtube videos. For me it's being able to trust my operating system to behave in a way that keeps me in the loop and able to fix it. As for the legalese, some people said "You'll never get anywhere without a protocol number for CARP!", yet some ciscos support CARP nowadays. > > It?s not good to be removing coders from their tasks; the project needs a > businessman or two. One who will handle the corporate feature requests and > charge dearly for them. Things like routing technology and high-speed packet > forwarding - things that can replace the exorbitant costs of maintaining > cisco routers. This is the key. With the FBSD 10GB wire speed packet > forwarding incorporated, OpenBSD would be ready to challenge Cisco in a very > serious way. Completely free as always, but with paid support for this edge > cases that make life what it is. > I don't know what is your background with corporate IT, but my experience is that most of the time what the suits are looking for is the assurance they will have resources to fix arising issues, or in layman terms, a tech support to yell at. I do not see OpenBSD providing such a support. However there are quite a few companies that provide such service for their OpenBSD-based appliances. Does that mean OpenBSD roadmap should be based on what will sell with these companies? The answer (which is "no") has already be given many times on misc@, and I will let Theo add another layer of p[ao]int if he deems it necessary. Lastly, you suggest having a businessman in the project. That is, someone who gets a commit bit by doing something else than coding. It's not even about what this says to the world or the example it sets. It is just plain rude towards the developers. I am not downplaying the skills of businessmen; but you simply can't just say that contributing code the OpenBSD way is the same as selling the product, however tough that may be. This is not a race; this is about doing things right. regards, -- Vincent
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
How about a $10 tax on top-posters. A little more seriously, you might get some professional help from a university or charity "development officer". These people raise money for a living. Ask some for some advice. One of the issues will be: financial statements for the organization. It's not really transparent about what revenue OBSD gets or where it goes. Obviously, there are some privacy issues. (Who feeds Theo and what does he eat?) Is the $20k per year electrical bill a big or small part of the overall costs? (Actually I don't expect an answer to this, not here anyway. Be aware that big $$ comes with big questions.) The request was made for funding by a corp. I'm just a lurker with some small corporate experience. Here are some opinions: OBSD doesn't fit into some corps because it is not 1) auditable, in that commercial products do not measure it for defects, compliance, or anything really. This renders it unusable: in Canada, for NI 51-xxx compliance, or PCI compliance, or in US DoD environments for STIG. 2) not visible, in that it is complete off the radar of "IT weekly" or suchlike websites. If you don't see it, you wont try it. 3) not valued for the contribution that OBSD makes to upstream and competitive products. This is already well explained. Corps are not going to part with money (just) for this reason. So, if the corps wont pay, and the market is, aside from some astute ISPs, not really corporate driven, how can OBSD expect to gain some revenue from a big corp? My suggestion is we need to have lots of corps interested in order to get 5% of them to pay your way. Yes, this is prescriptive. Yes I'm aware I can expect a big pushback for telling developers you "are supposed to do the extra work". Don't. Instead, tell me if this prescription is correct and/or wrong, or what is a bigger opportunity to gain corp support. --J
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> El 20/12/2013, a las 18:08, Theo de Raadt escribió: > > 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. > > --- > > Hi everyone. > > The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the > development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons > prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might > offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go > that way. > > We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical > expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be > happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring > basis. > > That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off > as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this > cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. > > We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting > reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also > do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. > > I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me > for details if serious. > > Thanks. Well, we know that energy prices will continue to increase, not decrease, so this will be harder in the future. Whit this in mind, why not look for a strategy to save up on energy costs. Something like this: Through the history of openbsd there have been architectures in which more bugs have been found and some in which fewer bugs have appeared. Then maybe the number of bugs for an architecture can be matched to the power-on-time for the machines for that architecture. For example, if 1% of the total number of bugs in the history of openbsd have appeared on architecture x, then it's likely that it will continue to be so, then all the machines for that architecture should be powered on just 1% of the time. Then perform that analysis on all architectures to make a more better use of energy. And that's it.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
>Through the history of openbsd there have been architectures in which more >bugs have been found and some in which fewer bugs have appeared. That is not true. >Then maybe the number of bugs for an architecture can be matched to the >power-on-time for the machines for that architecture. Maybe. Probably need them on to prove or disprove the point. >For example, if 1% of the total number of bugs in the history of openbsd have >appeared on architecture x, then it's likely that it will continue to be so, >then all the machines for that architecture should be powered on just 1% of >the time. Another great advantage here is that all the pesky developers who love those machines will go away, and we'll only need to run on the best architectures (which of course, are big endian). >Then perform that analysis on all architectures to make a more better use of >energy. And that's it. It's so simple. Why didn't I think of it.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Virtual machines/emus and canadian cross builds should be able to reduce the amount of iron, no? On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Theo de Raadt wrote: > >Through the history of openbsd there have been architectures in which > more bugs have been found and some in which fewer bugs have appeared. > > That is not true. > > >Then maybe the number of bugs for an architecture can be matched to the > power-on-time for the machines for that architecture. > > Maybe. Probably need them on to prove or disprove the point. > > >For example, if 1% of the total number of bugs in the history of openbsd > have appeared on architecture x, then it's likely that it will continue to > be so, then all the machines for that architecture should be powered on > just 1% of the time. > > Another great advantage here is that all the pesky developers who love > those machines will go away, and we'll only need to run on the best > architectures (which of course, are big endian). > > >Then perform that analysis on all architectures to make a more better use > of energy. And that's it. > > It's so simple. Why didn't I think of it.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
hmm, on Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 08:14:24PM +0100, Peter J. Philipp said that > # pkg_add somepackage > ... > This package's buildtime was generously donated by Peter J. Philipp. > # ads in openbsd? you must be out of your mind. what next, adblock for openbsd? -f -- why do they call it a tv set when you only get one?
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 1:10 PM, Sia Lang wrote: > Virtual machines/emus and canadian cross builds should be able to reduce > the amount of iron, no? > I don't think virtual machines are the solution: I see them as another buggy ecosystem on which developers will try to debug their code. A lot of people on this thread are suggesting to remove/reduce platforms OpenBSD supports, and it seems to me it is pretty clear the project will not do that (and I appreciate the decision). We have to deal with supporting OpenBSD, not trying to shrink the project. Luca
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 09:55:04PM +, Franchini Fabien wrote:
> [...]
> I suggest to write a letter to theses companies who are known to using OpenBSD
> or other product-related like OpenSSH. In this letter we can explain (as the
> first
> post from Theo) our issue. I'm sure they can give us an hand if they know our
> problem. And in my opinion, ONLY a company can give us a long-term solution.
> [...]
Maybe to inject a further point into this discussion... One of these
companies is Apple. They replaced ipfw with pf in recent releases of
Darwin (see [0]).
Since, with Darwin being Open Source, they seem not entirely against
spending resources on Open Source Software, and they profit in no small
margin from the OpenBSD project and its "satellites" like OpenSSH, they
might be a good recipient for a polite letter in request of help. Not
the least because they could use their assistance in their marketing
("Look how cool we are, we are paying them their electricity!").
> [...]
> Sorry I'm not a native english-speaker and I can't help to write a letter
> like that
> but I'm sure that's realistic solution.
> [...]
Same for me. Still, if this is not entirely off the table, I'd be
willing to draft something.
> [...]
> Another solution is to approach the *BSD community. FreeBSD are bigger
> than us and how they'll solve these kind of problem ?
> [...]
Fewer architectures, more corporate backing, I'd say.
[0]:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/darwin/reference/manpages/man8/ipfw.8.html
--
Gregor Best
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
The installer or man page asks for donations, how about the ssh login banner or initial output which might get perhaps 100s of thousands more eyefall? -- ___ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd ___
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Rather than raising prices on CD's/T-Shirts, how about allowing for subscriptions? I've bought CD's and shirts in the past, but don't do so regularly simply as it's not something I think/remember to do at every release. However, I'd gladly signup to purchase a CD and T-Shirt every release on an ongoing basis.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 1/16/14, Kevin Chadwick wrote: > The installer or man page asks for donations, how about the ssh login > banner or initial output which might get perhaps 100s of thousands more > eyefall? I see where this is headed: In app purchases! e.g., after couple of failed attempts/insults by sudo, it prompts you to purchase your 'access' for only $1.99! (: --patrick > > -- > ___ > > 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work > together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a > universal interface' > > (Doug McIlroy) > > In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd > ___
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructure Why do not you do such a campaign? Wow.. new website and infrastructure for GnuPG. Result: more then 24k USD in three weeks. So where OpenBSD/OpenSSH are worse than GnuPG? Guys, your problem is not the OpenBSD foundation, but the total lack of good marketing. Best regards, Daniel
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Daniel Cegiełka wrote: http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructure Why do not you do such a campaign? I think Theo has answered this previously. His point was that he doesn't want to spend his time year after year running campaigns. Being neither a politician nor a diplomat nor a grantmaster, he wants a sustainable model. -- Jack Woehr # "We commonly say we have no time when, Box 51, Golden CO 80402 # of course, we have all that there is." http://www.softwoehr.com # - James Mason, _The Art of Chess_, 1905
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Thu, 16 Jan 2014 09:09:09 -0800 patrick keshishian wrote: > > The installer or man page asks for donations, how about the ssh login > > banner or initial output which might get perhaps 100s of thousands more > > eyefall? > > I see where this is headed: In app purchases! e.g., after > couple of failed attempts/insults by sudo, it prompts you > to purchase your 'access' for only $1.99! I can't see that happening when the code is OpenBSD's myself. I primarily meant client usage but server access from other clients too. This way you may get Windows, Linux, Android, hosting companies and OSX users etc.. So you use the client and it has a carefully considered one-liner like Keep ssh as secure and fast as possible. Why not donate today at www. or the sympathy vote OpenSSH has one of the lowest donation to user ratios of all open source software and the environment in which it was born within is currently under threat. Please support this critical piece of software at www. You could even have it show up once in 10 times or something. Just a thought from figuring it was one of the easiest tools OpenBSD has to reach out to many many people. Bad side is may take years to hit hosting companies that have Ubuntu LTS etc. but the initial shock factor may cause a winfall.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
2014/1/16 Jack Woehr : > Daniel Cegiełka wrote: >> >> http://goteo.org/project/gnupg-new-website-and-infrastructure >> >> Why do not you do such a campaign? > > > I think Theo has answered this previously. His point was that he doesn't > want to spend his time year after year > running campaigns. Being neither a politician nor a diplomat nor a > grantmaster, he wants a sustainable model. I agree that in the long term stable funding is needed. Today, however, we are faced with shut down risk. Another example: Google will pay even more than $3000 for finding an error in OpenSSH (Core infrastructure network services) - do they know about your problems? http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/going-beyond-vulnerability-rewards.html Daniel
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:58 AM, Daniel Cegiełka wrote: > Another example: Google will pay even more than $3000 for finding an > error in OpenSSH (Core infrastructure network services) - do they know > about your problems? > > http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2013/10/going-beyond-vulnerability-rewards.html > > Daniel > Yes, we're aware of that program. However it still comes down to a bounty for bugfixes or change of some sort. so it's not a source of sustainable funding, unless we were to do something like introduce an annual quota of bugs and convincing looking churn for the sake of "finding them" every year. Would you want to depend upon software in your infrastructure that we were doing that to?
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 09:05:24AM -0800, Han Hwei Woo wrote: > Rather than raising prices on CD's/T-Shirts, how about allowing for > subscriptions? I've bought CD's and shirts in the past, but don't do so > regularly simply as it's not something I think/remember to do at every > release. However, I'd gladly signup to purchase a CD and T-Shirt every > release on an ongoing basis. Adding subscriptions is an interesting idea and something I would sign up for. Seems like they would - provide a source of sustainable/recurring income - falls within good taste and controlled by the project (not kickstarter, not ads in motd, etc.) - fits within an existing source of revenue (purchasing stuff on the site) An unknown is how much something like this would take away from real development; and whether it would be worth doing. I'm not an OS/kernel developer but have been creating web applications forever. I am willing to help with this or any other tasks so the OS hackers can continue to make OpenBSD, OpenSSH (and the rest of the family) the best tools out there. Jeff
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 16 Jan 2014, at 19.45, Jack Woehr wrote: > > I think Theo has answered this previously. His point was that he doesn't want > to spend his time year after year > running campaigns. Being neither a politician nor a diplomat nor a > grantmaster, he wants a sustainable model. There’s a person who writes excellent documentation for OpenBSD, isn’t he an English language professor? Excellent documentation is one of the key features of OpenBSD, hands down, i.e. he is an extremely valuable project member even if he doesn’t commit executable code to version control. With this in mind, wouldn’t there be room in core for a person dedicated to fund-raising, i.e. a person with a strong vote? I really do want to see OpenBSD survive, but expenses are a reality as we now see. Being the project leader means also addressing the issue of funding in a feasible manner, even if addressing simply means delegation to a person who has both the competence as well as motivation to perform such a role. Fact is, if I were capable of funding the electricity bill then I would do it in a heartbeat, but it would definitely require transparency as has been stated earlier in this conversation. Wikipedia runs these sort of fundraisers every year and they do it in a very obtrusive way, but they haven’t yet run out of money. Time to face reality. -mike
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
+1 for the subscription idea. Not that it completely solves the problem at hand. But a great (IMHO) idea. -- Josh Smith KD8HRX Email/jabber: juice...@gmail.com Phone: 304.237.9369(c) Sent from my iPhone. > On Jan 16, 2014, at 2:34 PM, Jan Lambertz wrote: > > I like the subscription idea. I'd love to have every release without > actually doing the shopping every time. This could at least make a bit of > safe money. > > I believe, making a company sending 20k$ every year to openbsd could be > quite difficult. > Why should they do this ? > What do they get ? > Why is that better than spending that money in new hardware or buying fancy > whiteboards in managers office ? > > I know what they would get, but they dont. How do we make a company to know > about the benefit of openbsd? They never heard of it. They wont ever use it > because they dont get a 24/7 support contract from a big consulting company > for it. > They dont know about openbsd and most dont care. > That might not be the opinion of most people on this list but it is the > opinion of most people not on this list [the ones with money].
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Bob Beck wrote: so it's not a source of sustainable funding, unless we were to do something like introduce an annual quota of bugs http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1995-11-13/ -- Jack Woehr # "We commonly say we have no time when, Box 51, Golden CO 80402 # of course, we have all that there is." http://www.softwoehr.com # - James Mason, _The Art of Chess_, 1905
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Then maybe the number of bugs for an architecture can bematched to the power-on-time for the machines for that architecture. So your solution is to replace requiring financial donations to requiring more hardware donations? Cold boots are by far the biggest cause of hardware failure, this risk is far too high for some of the older machines that consequently have more expensive and harder to find parts. Besides, how are you going to find bugs on powered-off machines?
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
>> Then maybe the number of bugs for an architecture can bematched to >> the power-on-time for the machines for that architecture. > >So your solution is to replace requiring financial donations to >requiring more hardware donations? Cold boots are by far the biggest >cause of hardware failure, this risk is far too high for some of the >older machines that consequently have more expensive and harder to find >parts. To clarify the situation: the machines are on all the time. And as much as possible, they are always building something, whether it be ports or builds, hoping that some of the address space randomization or such will spot bugs. Also, if a new change goes into the source tree which creates a problem, we want to spot it as soon as possible, before the developers involved have become distracted in other directions. > Besides, how are you going to find bugs on powered-off machines? No kidding.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Just my $0.02 worth. OpenBSD asked for help. Why everything we see is change this, change that, etc. Like they don't know what they are doing for the last 20 years! Either we can help or we can't. But please stop trying to tell everyone how to do what they do best for the last 20 years like they have no clue what they do... If you sadly really think a bake sale will help. Then do it yourself and then send the profit to the project. Or do what ever else you can to help and so be it. I fell so sad at the reaction of the community when the project is asking for help and that's what they get. And more shameful in between these sad emails I still see some asking when this or that will be supported by the project as well... What a shame... Do what you can to help and stop telling others what to do please. Talk to your company, friends, what ever for trying to help as well, or come with an original idea and just do it. If you think company should get letters from the project to help the project, then write them yourself and try to make the case as I am sure they all use something that came form OpenBSD in one way or an other, but please stop telling the guys there what they should do! They do plenty already! Best regards, Daniel
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 01:10:05PM +0100, Sia Lang wrote: > Virtual machines/emus and canadian cross builds should be able to reduce > the amount of iron, no? Just a side note to the people talking about emulators. Obviously, you're not tried to install OpenBSD on emulators. Basically, everything is broken except amd64 and i386. Feel free to create guides to teaching us how to install each platform supported on some emulator. > > > On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 12:53 PM, Theo de Raadt > wrote: > > > >Through the history of openbsd there have been architectures in which > > more bugs have been found and some in which fewer bugs have appeared. > > > > That is not true. > > > > >Then maybe the number of bugs for an architecture can be matched to the > > power-on-time for the machines for that architecture. > > > > Maybe. Probably need them on to prove or disprove the point. > > > > >For example, if 1% of the total number of bugs in the history of openbsd > > have appeared on architecture x, then it's likely that it will continue to > > be so, then all the machines for that architecture should be powered on > > just 1% of the time. > > > > Another great advantage here is that all the pesky developers who love > > those machines will go away, and we'll only need to run on the best > > architectures (which of course, are big endian). > > > > >Then perform that analysis on all architectures to make a more better use > > of energy. And that's it. > > > > It's so simple. Why didn't I think of it. > -- Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado http://juanfra.info
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Gregor Best wrote:
On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 09:55:04PM +, Franchini Fabien wrote:
[...]
I suggest to write a letter to theses companies who are known to using OpenBSD
or other product-related like OpenSSH. In this letter we can explain (as the
first
post from Theo) our issue. I'm sure they can give us an hand if they know our
problem. And in my opinion, ONLY a company can give us a long-term solution.
[...]
Maybe to inject a further point into this discussion... One of these
companies is Apple. They replaced ipfw with pf in recent releases of
Darwin (see [0]).
Since, with Darwin being Open Source, they seem not entirely against
spending resources on Open Source Software, and they profit in no small
margin from the OpenBSD project and its "satellites" like OpenSSH, they
might be a good recipient for a polite letter in request of help. Not
the least because they could use their assistance in their marketing
("Look how cool we are, we are paying them their electricity!").
Any large company will want something in return, mostly more money than
they gave you, whether direct or indirectly. OpenBSD staying alive
doesn't affect their bottom line, if we disappear they could always just
use one of the (albeit far less secure) alternatives. If we start asking
money for our code, that is what they'll do. I, for one, would rather
allow corporations to use my code for free without credit than to spend
long nights protecting my systems from the malware spewing from their
compromised machines.
If something like this is to survive, we'll need to provide a carrot,
rather than a stick. What I mean by this is that we need to give them a
reason why giving us money will be in their best interests, like
pointing out that by using our code, they are saving money by having to
produce and distribute less patches. Or perhaps offer to improve our
code in their favor, eg make it more efficient on their hardware in
exchange for hardware, money or both. To take the Apple example, we
could offer to make pf more OS-X friendly in exchange for a small
consideration, saving them money because it would require less time on
their part to adapt it.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
I've set up a small recurring donation for now. I'd like to throw out some ideas and questions if I may: * Anyone selling an OpenBSD-based solution to business customers might want to imagine the OS has some sort of 'license fee', increase the quote for their work accordingly, and pass along the sum in donations. * Please could we get a newer picture than rack2009.jpg? I assume much has already changed; I don't see a loongson build machine for example. Would the picture be anywhere near representative of where the CAN$20k electricity costs arise? * Is there any easy means on-hand to measure power consumption, maybe reading stats from the UPSes, or using plug-in meters such as those made by CurrentCost; would anything like that be worth putting on the hardware wishlist? * Could potential energy savings be roughly worked out, and maybe mentioned in the hardware wishlist somehow? Would a Sun Fire T1000 be able to replace some number of older sparc boxes for example? And as SSDs become larger, would a pair of them be able to replace some number of power-hungry 10k RPM disks? Such things are all the more valuable as donations if they have a lower operating cost than what they replaced. Regards, -- Steven Chamberlain ste...@pyro.eu.org
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On 2014-01-16, Sia Lang wrote: > Virtual machines/emus and canadian cross builds should be able to reduce > the amount of iron, no? Try following http://www.openbsd.org/vax-simh.html. Then observe your cpu usage figures and, if you are able to measure it, the power consumption. If you make it as far as installing the OS and checking out source, xenocara and ports trees over CVS without getting bored and doing something more interesting instead, I'll be surprised...
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
I have a suggestion for every one of us that has mailed in an idea in response to a solicitaion for money... Send money. Just do it right now, write a cheque. Send it, send it now. Do that a couple of times a year. Buy a cd twice a year, get at least one t-shirt with each order. Were we told how much the monthly electron bill is? I can step up my contribution a bit. Could we save money by converting to steam, maybe we could remove support for coff binary's cause they are , you know, bad or old or something. Or perhaps running the build farm on raspberry pi's. I understand Linux has a cross compiler and that way we could all just shut up and chip in some dough. Steven Chamberlain wrote: I've set up a small recurring donation for now. I'd like to throw out some ideas and questions if I may: * Anyone selling an OpenBSD-based solution to business customers might want to imagine the OS has some sort of 'license fee', increase the quote for their work accordingly, and pass along the sum in donations. * Please could we get a newer picture than rack2009.jpg? I assume much has already changed; I don't see a loongson build machine for example. Would the picture be anywhere near representative of where the CAN$20k electricity costs arise? * Is there any easy means on-hand to measure power consumption, maybe reading stats from the UPSes, or using plug-in meters such as those made by CurrentCost; would anything like that be worth putting on the hardware wishlist? * Could potential energy savings be roughly worked out, and maybe mentioned in the hardware wishlist somehow? Would a Sun Fire T1000 be able to replace some number of older sparc boxes for example? And as SSDs become larger, would a pair of them be able to replace some number of power-hungry 10k RPM disks? Such things are all the more valuable as donations if they have a lower operating cost than what they replaced. Regards,
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:25 PM, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado wrote: > Just a side note to the people talking about emulators. Obviously, > you're not tried to install OpenBSD on emulators. Basically, everything > is broken except amd64 and i386. > except amd64 and i386?!
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Am 01/16/14 18:05, schrieb Han Hwei Woo: > Rather than raising prices on CD's/T-Shirts, how about allowing for > subscriptions? I've bought CD's and shirts in the past, but don't do so > regularly simply as it's not something I think/remember to do at every > release. However, I'd gladly signup to purchase a CD and T-Shirt every > release on an ongoing basis. +1 for help on compensating my brain shortcomings. Bye + OpenThanks(tm), Marcus
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
previously on this list Dag Richards contributed: > I have a suggestion for every one of us that has mailed in an idea in > response to a solicitaion for money... > > Send money. I also plan to open a ticket and will have to find time to send a short letter to the management of my hosting providers asking if they donate to Linux and if so do they donate to OpenBSD as OpenSSH is developed primarily by OpenBSD devs and not Linux. I can almost guarantee there are companies out there donating to Linux thinking they are also supporting SSH by doing so. -- ___ 'Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface' (Doug McIlroy) In Other Words - Don't design like polkit or systemd ___
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Le 2013-12-21 01:08, Theo de Raadt a écrit : 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. --- Hi everyone. The OpenBSD project uses a lot of electricity for running the development and build machines. A number of logistical reasons prevents us from moving the machines to another location which might offer space/power for free, so let's not allow the conversation to go that way. We are looking for a Canadian company who will take on our electrical expenses -- on their books, rather than on our books. We would be happiest to find someone who will do this on an annual recurring basis. That way the various OpenBSD efforts can be supported, yet written off as an off-site operations cost by such a company. If we reduce this cost, it will leave more money for other parts of the project. We think that a Canadian company is the best choice for accounting reasons. If a company in some other jurisdiction feels they can also do this successfully, we'd be very happy to hear from them as well. I am not going to disclose the actual numbers here. Please contact me for details if serious. Thanks. Hello, I think this could be great if OpenBSD had somewhere on their website a goal/objectif about the money to rise, and the % of advancement of it. The FreeBSD Foundation is doing this, I think this is very effective as you know if they really lack some founds or if they are near their objective. I tried this method for one little project of mine involving some costs (~ 400 € / year), after yelling every year "please give some money, this doesn't run for free"... I put a visual show of my needs, then I got 40% of my funds the day I put the advancement image of the fundraising. Thank you everyone for doing what you do for OpenBSD :) Kind Regards
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
I agree this is a very good idea, instant feedback and gratification. Nevertheless, I've just now donated CAD 100.- and invite everybody else to do the same. Kind regards Lars
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Kevin Lyda wrote: Regarding the "less architecture support to save electricity" argument, I'm not sure one follows the other. Computing power has grown to a point that emulators are perfectly valid - particularly for older systems. I think a push to package and maintain emulators for many of these older architectures would be beneficial in many ways. There's some amount of this already - there are instructions for the simh simulator for the VAX arch for instance. The obvious benefits I couldd see would be: 1) You could spin up builds on them w/ little to no effect on electricity usage. 2) Even if the OpenBSD foundation's arch X machine dies, there would still be infrastructure to maintain the port. 3) It would widen the possible number of developers if people could spin up older architectures in an emulator. 4) It would make OpenBSD a valuable tool for accessing older media and documenting older architectures. I know emulators are not perfect, so a physical machine would be superior. But if there was some encouragement for emulators for archs I think those would be useful benefits. Even if emulators did work, you still have a couple of problems: *Instructions are executed as they should, not how they actually work *instructions will, at best, take a two instructions on the host if the architectures and endianness match; if not: The instruction has to matched against a lookup table and if there is a single equivalent instruction to do the same thing and you have the same endianness, that is three processors cycles. If its different endianness, then you now have between 32 and 128 more instructions (convert to the host endianness then back for 16 to 64-bit archs) Now if there isn't an equivalent instructions (welcome to the difference between CISC and RISC machines) you are probably going to have to run two all the way up to a couple dozen instructions to emulate just one, plus you still have the same problem with endianness like before *assuming all the above works, you are still tripling the effort in debugging because now you have to determine if the bug is in the emulated environment, the emulator itself, or the host OS. *Even if the above still works perfectly, you will still miss all the bugs caused by memory alignment (the host will fix any of that), which are the most common we find or the host ends up adding new ones. But all this is ignoring the real purpose of running on real hardware which is that the same code runs on all the boxes, so if one of them outputs something unexpected from the other machines, we know something is wrong. The only way to reduce our power for the older archs is if someone were able to re-build the entire system on more power-efficient, bug-compatible chips Support for multiple archs brings interest and exposes bad code in ways limited arch support does not. Exactly Dropping that to save electricity is not a valid reason with today's compute power. Anyway, it's been a long time since I did stuff with OpenBSD, but I think it would be a shame to drop such support. So I'll back up my words with some cash. And if I get a roundtuit, perhaps some code or docs as well. Please continue to do this. Cash, code and correct docs help OpenBSD, dreaming doesn't. Kevin And now to paraphrase Theo: Shut up, donate, and hack.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 8:23 PM, Christopher Ahrens wrote: > *Instructions are executed as they should, not how they actually work That's a bug to be filed against an emulator. And it's easier to do that *now* when the older hardware is around to test for bug compatibility. And it's not full emulator if it doesn't emulate the bugs. > *instructions will, at best, take a two instructions on the host if > the architectures and endianness match; if not: > The instruction has to matched against a lookup table and if there > is a single equivalent instruction to do the same thing and you have > the same endianness, that is three processors cycles. If its > different endianness, then you now have between 32 and 128 more > instructions (convert to the host endianness then back for 16 to > 64-bit archs) All true, but kind of meaningless for faster newer machines. Following Moore's law, a current machine is likely at least 256 times faster than a 12 year old machine. And nearly every older architecture has a machine that is 12 years old. If supporting older architectures for the full lifespan of that arch you're going to get to a point where all the hardware versions of that machine are in production. You'll eventually have a choice between an emulator or nothing. The last machine of arch X running OpenBSD will not be running on the OpenBSD Foundation racks. And note I'm talking about emulators, not architecture optimised virtual machines. They're probably not ideal for coding device drivers (and even that's not completely true), but they're fine for doing userland and higher level kernel development. You'll find endianess, alignment, cross-arch pointer and int/float size bugs with an emulator just as easily as you can with hardware. The two remote bugs that were found in OpenBSD were both ones that were high enough up the stack that they could be debugged / hacked at on an emulator. And as machines get faster/cheaper you'd have the option of running a small network and run network fuzz testing within a single machine. And I must admit the resistance to this is weird. My point was that the "use less electricity means less ports" argument was wrong. That emulators provide a way forward with all architectures that *increases* developer interest (unlike removing them with reduces it). I'm not saying switch to all emulators all the time for all development *today*, I'm saying think about going that direction now when it's easier (hw bug compatibility testing, etc). It's a lot easier to ask for $X/year if there's a plan for X to reduce. Emulators are hardly some radical view - this is exactly what OpenBSD supports and advertises for the oldest hardware it supports. Am I really saying something new by pointing out to all older archs, "this is your future"? > Please continue to do this. Cash, code and correct docs help OpenBSD, > dreaming doesn't. Yelling at the forward march of time doesn't help either. Diodes don't live forever. Kevin -- Kevin Lyda Galway, Ireland US Citizen overseas? We can vote. Register now: http://www.votefromabroad.org/
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Kevin Lyda [ke...@ie.suberic.net] wrote: > > It's a lot easier to ask for $X/year if there's a plan for X to reduce. > Yeah, right. That's how things work, right? Your family spends less each year, your work spends less each year, your government, they certainly spend less each year. And OpenBSD, OpenBSD spends less each year. Just like everyone else!!!
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 12:23 PM, Christopher Ahrens wrote: > Kevin Lyda wrote: > >> Regarding the "less architecture support to save electricity" >> argument, I'm not sure one follows the other. Computing power has >> grown to a point that emulators are perfectly valid - particularly for >> older systems. >> >> I think a push to package and maintain emulators for many of these >> older architectures would be beneficial in many ways. There's some >> amount of this already - there are instructions for the simh simulator >> for the VAX arch for instance. The obvious benefits I couldd see would >> be: >> >> 1) You could spin up builds on them w/ little to no effect on electricity >> usage. >> 2) Even if the OpenBSD foundation's arch X machine dies, there would >> still be infrastructure to maintain the port. >> 3) It would widen the possible number of developers if people could >> spin up older architectures in an emulator. >> 4) It would make OpenBSD a valuable tool for accessing older media and >> documenting older architectures. >> >> I know emulators are not perfect, so a physical machine would be >> superior. But if there was some encouragement for emulators for archs >> I think those would be useful benefits. >> >> > > Even if emulators did work, you still have a couple of problems: > > *Instructions are executed as they should, not how they actually work > *instructions will, at best, take a two instructions on the host if > the architectures and endianness match; if not: > The instruction has to matched against a lookup table and if there > is a single equivalent instruction to do the same thing and you have > the same endianness, that is three processors cycles. If its > different endianness, then you now have between 32 and 128 more > instructions (convert to the host endianness then back for 16 to > 64-bit archs) > Now if there isn't an equivalent instructions (welcome to the > difference between CISC and RISC machines) you are probably going to > have to run two all the way up to a couple dozen instructions to > emulate just one, plus you still have the same problem with > endianness like before > *assuming all the above works, you are still tripling the effort in > debugging because now you have to determine if the bug is in the > emulated environment, the emulator itself, or the host OS. > *Even if the above still works perfectly, you will still miss all the > bugs caused by memory alignment (the host will fix any of that), which > are the most common we find or the host ends up adding new ones. > > But all this is ignoring the real purpose of running on real hardware > which is that the same code runs on all the boxes, so if one of them > outputs something unexpected from the other machines, we know something > is wrong. > > The only way to reduce our power for the older archs is if someone were > able to re-build the entire system on more power-efficient, > bug-compatible chips > > Support for multiple archs brings interest and exposes bad code in >> ways limited arch support does not. >> > > Exactly > > Dropping that to save electricity >> is not a valid reason with today's compute power. >> >> Anyway, it's been a long time since I did stuff with OpenBSD, but I >> think it would be a shame to drop such support. So I'll back up my >> words with some cash. And if I get a roundtuit, perhaps some code or >> docs as well. >> > > Please continue to do this. Cash, code and correct docs help OpenBSD, > dreaming doesn't. > > >> Kevin >> >> > > And now to paraphrase Theo: > Shut up, donate, and hack. > > >Please continue to do this. Cash, code and correct docs help OpenBSD, dreaming doesn't. I've donated $20 a month in perpetuity via http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/donations.html. The community needs less than 99 other donors willing to admit that OpenBSD is worth more than a pizza. This doesn't even begin to make up for the benefit I've received from the project, but it is a start. A small suggested change to the OpenBSD.org page header- put a donate button and a small message under the header picture. "We need X financial maintainers @ $20 a month." I completely forgot that I could donate until I saw this thread come up on reddit.com/r/programming, and it didn't even occur to me that I should be donating monthly until I read the thread. Sometimes, you just have to be that obvious to people, and it may be easier to ask for a few new donors every so often than to be beholden to a single large donor.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
>That's a bug to be filed against an emulator. And it's easier to do >that *now* when the older hardware is around to test for bug >compatibility. And it's not full emulator if it doesn't emulate the >bugs. We are an operating system project. We have a full set of tasks ahead of ourselves. We are not people writing or improving emulators. In our experience, all of them are subtly erroneous in their behavior. At best. Members of our group have experience with just about all of them. > And I must admit the resistance to this is weird. I am going to make a guess here. You've never relied on the emulators yourselves. Yet you are acting like a know-it-all. You sure have advice for us, don't you. You feel you can tell a group with our success what processes we are supposed to do move to. You are very out of place. Imagine you told us a lot about your life, and we gave you advice.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
Am Fri, 17 Jan 2014 16:08:07 +0100 schrieb Lars Peter Cleary : > I agree this is a very good idea, instant feedback and gratification. > > Nevertheless, I've just now donated CAD 100.- and invite everybody > else to do the same. > > Kind regards > Lars > Yepp - let's face it: Until some bigger company decides to join in and supports the project 'we the users' have to take responsibility and donate some extra money right now! The developers already donate a lot more - time, efforts and know-how. Besides donating a little amount each month on a subscription basis I just donated EUR 120,- additionally. It is a darn good investment! Cheers, STEFAN
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
>And it's not full emulator if it doesn't emulate the > bugs. It's almost bedtime in Europe. Do you mind if I tell you a bedtime story? Years ago, a (back then) successful company selling high-end Unix-based workstations, having been designing its own systems and core components for years, started designing a new generation of workstations. As part of their design, they created a dedicated memory controller, which turned out to fit their hardware so well that it was reused on four other workstation motherboard designs. That memory controller had, among many registers, an arbitration register, used to configure the relative priority of onboard devices, as well as expansion slots, to acquire the data bus. Proper setting of this register is necessary to allow on-board devices and expansion slots to correctly perform DMA, while still allowing cache writeback to run and whatnot. The proper value for that register had to be decided at runtime. The recommended logic was to rely upon the minimal initialization done by the firmware, and then clear some bits and set some others depending upon what on-board devices would be present on the particular motherboard artwork, and what would be found in the various expansion slots. However, it turned out that, on the first few revisions of the memory controller, reading from this particular register was not reliable at all. Sometimes, one would read the correct value, and sometimes, one would read a completely wrong value, depending upon the recent activity occuring on the data bus. The hardware engineers could not figure out what exactly caused this. Most importantly, they could not figure out a reliable workaround to get the correct value out of this register. So they asked the software guys for help. And the company's homemade SVR4-based Unix grew a complex logic to decide, once and for all, which value to write to the register, without having to rely upon the previous value. And they told the hardware guys that it was ok not to worry about this issue anymore. OpenBSD runs on these systems, but we are not lucky enough to have all the necessary hardware documentation, and, for some of the bits in this register, we simply don't know when to set them, and when not to set them. Instead, the OpenBSD kernel still reads that register, several times, and has an ugly heuristic to decide when the value read is likely to be correct. And then we only flip the bits we know for certain we can tinker with. It's the best we can do. Assuming someone would write an emulator for that particular system: - if the ``unreliable read'' behaviour is not emulated, according to your logic, it's a bug in the emulator, which has to be fixed. - if the behaviour is emulated, how can we know it is correctly emulated, since even the designers of the chip did not spend enough time tracking down the exact conditions leading to the misbehaviour (and which bogus value would be put on the data bus). You may argue that, since the kernel has a workaround for this issue, this is a moot point. But if some developer has a better idea for the kernel heuristic, how can the new code be tested, if not on the real hardware? Miod
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 11:32:41PM +, Miod Vallat wrote: > >And it's not full emulator if it doesn't emulate the > > bugs. > > It's almost bedtime in Europe. Do you mind if I tell you a bedtime > story? > > Years ago, a (back then) successful company selling high-end Unix-based > workstations, having been designing its own systems and core components > for years, started designing a new generation of workstations. > Assuming someone would write an emulator for that particular system: > - if the ``unreliable read'' behaviour is not emulated, according to > your logic, it's a bug in the emulator, which has to be fixed. > - if the behaviour is emulated, how can we know it is correctly > emulated, since even the designers of the chip did not spend enough > time tracking down the exact conditions leading to the misbehaviour > (and which bogus value would be put on the data bus). > > You may argue that, since the kernel has a workaround for this issue, > this is a moot point. But if some developer has a better idea for the > kernel heuristic, how can the new code be tested, if not on the real > hardware? > The problem with this story is that the purported reasons for supporting old architectures is to shake out bugs. How do the bugs get shaken out? By exercising shared, core functionality in distinctive ways. Idiosyncracies such as the above are not the type of thing that helps shake out core bugs. So there are two ways to resolve this discrepency: either it simply makes more sense to shift to emulated environments for older hardware; or one of the primary reasons also includes actually running on creaky, old hardware--the coolness factor. I suspect the coolness factor looms large. And there's nothing wrong with that. OTOH, there's a strong case to be made for simply inventing crazy architectures out of whole cloth and writing an emulator for them.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> > You may argue that, since the kernel has a workaround for this issue, > > this is a moot point. But if some developer has a better idea for the > > kernel heuristic, how can the new code be tested, if not on the real > > hardware? > > > > The problem with this story is that the purported reasons for supporting old > architectures is to shake out bugs. How do the bugs get shaken out? By > exercising shared, core functionality in distinctive ways. > > Idiosyncracies such as the above are not the type of thing that helps shake > out core bugs. You've missed the point. These idiosyncracies must be stepped over, so that we can have working platforms different from x86, to then go discover the core bugs! Luckily we have people in our group who support such other architectures in our tree, to give us this capability. Let's face it. OpenBSD has this as a bug reducing mechanism available, and most other systems do not anymore, having decided to chase only the market-chosen architectures. It is a true many-eyes "machined" solution. What other community has users who commonly run upstream software on 64-bit big-endian strict alignment platform with register windows adjusting the frames in odd ways, or 32-bit big-endian ones with mutex alignment requirements, or a pile of other requirements. Quite frankly, I am not alone in being sick of people who don't use emulators, stepping in to tell we should use emulators. Finally, we have people who want to work on those architectures. You prefer they quit? You think their experience and the time they spend will be better spent somewhere else, that they will continue to be valuable additions in some other role? First you are wrong, and secondly, who gave you the moral authority to try to reassign their time? Why is there this effort to convince us to do less?
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> OTOH, there's a strong case to be made for simply inventing crazy > architectures out of whole cloth and writing an emulator for them. I am looking forward to seeing yours. How long do I have to wait?
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 07:33:01PM -0700, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > > You may argue that, since the kernel has a workaround for this issue, > > > this is a moot point. But if some developer has a better idea for the > > > kernel heuristic, how can the new code be tested, if not on the real > > > hardware? > > > > > > > The problem with this story is that the purported reasons for supporting old > > architectures is to shake out bugs. How do the bugs get shaken out? By > > exercising shared, core functionality in distinctive ways. > > > > Idiosyncracies such as the above are not the type of thing that helps shake > > out core bugs. > > You've missed the point. > > These idiosyncracies must be stepped over, so that we can have working > platforms different from x86, to then go discover the core bugs! > > Luckily we have people in our group who support such other > architectures in our tree, to give us this capability. > > Let's face it. OpenBSD has this as a bug reducing mechanism > available, and most other systems do not anymore, having decided to > chase only the market-chosen architectures. It is a true many-eyes > "machined" solution. > > What other community has users who commonly run upstream software on > 64-bit big-endian strict alignment platform with register windows > adjusting the frames in odd ways, or 32-bit big-endian ones with mutex > alignment requirements, or a pile of other requirements. > > Quite frankly, I am not alone in being sick of people who don't use > emulators, stepping in to tell we should use emulators. I do use emulators, specifically for ARM, because it's just easier for me. And one of my co-workers is a contributor to the Hercules emulator. > Finally, we have people who want to work on those architectures. You > prefer they quit? No, I don't prefer they quit. I donate to OpenBSD because you guys do the hard work. And the golden rule of open source is that he who does the work gets to make the decisions about how he's going to go about doing that work. So, please don't misunderstand me. I'm not questioning why you guys use so much power with old hardware. I'm not writing the code, so it's not my place to question. And while emulators might, arguably, be more efficient in some abstract sense, what matters is how the work is being done today. And if you say using real hardware is easier for your workflow, so be it. And, FWIW, I love the idea of a CD subscription service. I often end up forgetting to buy a CD. I upgrade most of my systems remotely (with a 13 year track record of never losing a machine--thanks!), so I never have to actually use the CD.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
> I do use emulators, specifically for ARM, because it's just easier for me. > And one of my co-workers is a contributor to the Hercules emulator. Then you know it is not sufficient for our needs, yet we keep getting the same message from some people. The emulators are too slow, or they need to be run on super fast xeons and suddenly draw even more power. The suggestion is totally out of touch. > > Finally, we have people who want to work on those architectures. You > > prefer they quit? > > No, I don't prefer they quit. But you've instructed us to power the machines off and move to emulators. > So, please don't misunderstand me. I'm not questioning why you guys use so > much power with old hardware. It is not a lot of power; that is a myth. The power bill is around $1500/month, to run 2.5 racks of equipment with really good air conditioning. Relative to this, 1 full rack in a Calgary datacenter is over $1000/month. Considering this is 2.5 racks the current operation is VERY COST EFFECTIVE RELATIVE TO THE ALTERNATIVES. Has anyone come up with an offer for 3 free racks in Calgary? NO. Even if someone would, would it make sense? NO. > I'm not writing the code, so it's not my place to question. You said it yourself, it is not your place to question. Yet, you that is precisely what you are doing. > And, FWIW, I love the idea of a CD subscription service. I often end up > forgetting to buy a CD. I upgrade most of my systems remotely (with a 13 > year track record of never losing a machine--thanks!), so I never have to > actually use the CD. Why do you need a subscription? You can go order the ones you are missing (right now), and even save postage since a whole bunch fill arrive at once. There is no need to setup the additional overhead of managing subscriptions, for people like you. Wow, so many crazy suggstions.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 08:38:05PM -0700, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > I do use emulators, specifically for ARM, because it's just easier for me. > > And one of my co-workers is a contributor to the Hercules emulator. > > Then you know it is not sufficient for our needs, yet we keep getting > the same message from some people. The emulators are too slow, or they > need to be run on super fast xeons and suddenly draw even more power. > The suggestion is totally out of touch. I don't know that personally. I do believe that the particular anecdote I replied to is an insufficient premise to support the avowed need mentioned in your ruBSD talk, namely the ability to stress core services like memory management in diverse ways. But I'm content taking your word for it. And I'm not trying to argue with you. Obviously the issue is far more complex than an interview and anecdote let on. > > > Finally, we have people who want to work on those architectures. You > > > prefer they quit? > > > > No, I don't prefer they quit. > > But you've instructed us to power the machines off and move to emulators. I never argued any such thing. > > So, please don't misunderstand me. I'm not questioning why you guys use so > > much power with old hardware. > > It is not a lot of power; that is a myth. It is a lot of power considering that my modern, 4-core Haswell Xeon 1U servers draw less than 50W at maximum load. I used to run OpenBSD on Sparc and Alpha, and they drew more power than that at idle. But that's beside the point, because I'm not attacking OpenBSD's infrastructure setup. > > I'm not writing the code, so it's not my place to question. > > You said it yourself, it is not your place to question. Yet, you that > is precisely what you are doing. I disagree. I merely made a point about an anecdote. I apologize if my quip about "coolness factor" struck a nerve. > > And, FWIW, I love the idea of a CD subscription service. I often end up > > forgetting to buy a CD. I upgrade most of my systems remotely (with a 13 > > year track record of never losing a machine--thanks!), so I never have to > > actually use the CD. > > Why do you need a subscription? You can go order the ones you are > missing (right now), and even save postage since a whole bunch fill > arrive at once. There is no need to setup the additional overhead of > managing subscriptions, for people like you. > > Wow, so many crazy suggstions. I never suggested a CD service. Somebody else suggested it and I thought--apparently erroneously--that it received a favorable comment from someone on the OpenBSD team. In any event I just discovered the monthly donation subscription on the Foundation website and have signed up for a $20 monthly donation. So the CD subscription is less of a useful idea than it initially appeared.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 08:10:02PM -0800, William Ahern wrote: [...] Compared to your suggestions, Die Hard 2-5 didn't contain any plot holes and made perfect sense. You are not arguing, but obviously, emulators are so much better. With just a couple of modern Xeon machines (these are free, obviously), writing or patching up a couple of emulators (with performant JIT backends, of course), we could easily halve(!) our power bill. How to emulate a bunch of +-1GHz SMP RISC machines or even just a 200MHz sparc at native speed is, of course, left as a finger exercise to the developers, while they also improve OpenBSD as per usual. Just stop, please.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 07:33:01PM -0700, Theo de Raadt wrote: > > What other community has users who commonly run upstream software on > 64-bit big-endian strict alignment platform with register windows > adjusting the frames in odd ways, or 32-bit big-endian ones with mutex > alignment requirements, or a pile of other requirements. > NetBSD does but they also went down the path of making cross compilation easy so you can build all of NetBSD for, say, arm in about 20 minutes on a modern x86 machine. > Quite frankly, I am not alone in being sick of people who don't use > emulators, stepping in to tell we should use emulators. > maybe doing a google search for "netbsd anita" will provide some hints on what can be done with emulators. They are valuable for some things even if it isn't as a build environment. -- Brett Lymn This email has been sent on behalf of one of the following companies within the BAE Systems Australia group of companies: BAE Systems Australia Limited - Australian Company Number 008 423 005 BAE Systems Australia Defence Pty Limited - Australian Company Number 006 870 846 BAE Systems Australia Logistics Pty Limited - Australian Company Number 086 228 864 Our registered office is Evans Building, Taranaki Road, Edinburgh Parks, Edinburgh, South Australia, 5111. If the identity of the sending company is not clear from the content of this email please contact the sender. This email and any attachments may contain confidential and legally privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not copy or disclose its content, but please reply to this email immediately and highlight the error to the sender and then immediately delete the message.
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
I do not doubt that emulators can be useful for some things. Indeed, I use them myself when real hardware isn't available. but emulators have limits -- invariably they are written to emulate certain things accurately (albeit imperfectly, because all programmers make mistakes) while other things deemed less important are emulated less accurately, or simply substituted with ideal mathematical constructs. lately, I've been running a PDP-11 emulator that doesn't even bother to simulate memory errors -- every byte of memory in the simulated system is error-free, and therefore parity error traps are never generated (and the parity trap handler in the operating system is therefore never exercised). you are not going to track down a cache coherency bug using an emulator that doesn't attempt to emulate cache *incoherency*. really, in order to know whether emulation is going to be useful, you need to consult an expert in the particular part of the system you're trying to emulate. this means, if you're looking for bugs in an operating system, you need to talk to people who write operating systems, because they are the experts on the hardware behaviors that actually matter. some things that an emulator faithfully reproduces probably aren't that important to an operating system, while other things the emulator doesn't bother to accurately simulate may be critically important. how can we tell the difference? if only we had someone with years of experience doing this type of work who could tell us whether emulation is adequate in this situation or not. -ken
Re: Request for Funding our Electricity
On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 7:53 AM, Brett Lymn wrote: > On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 07:33:01PM -0700, Theo de Raadt wrote: >> >> What other community has users who commonly run upstream software on >> 64-bit big-endian strict alignment platform with register windows >> adjusting the frames in odd ways, or 32-bit big-endian ones with mutex >> alignment requirements, or a pile of other requirements. >> > > NetBSD does but they also went down the path of making cross compilation > easy so you can build all of NetBSD for, say, arm in about 20 minutes on > a modern x86 machine. NetBSD doesn't test their system on all the machines they claim to support. OpenBSD does. If you have a very old or exotic machine, you're lucky if NetBSD boots at all, and if it does boot, you're lucky if it doesn't hardlock in the first minute of operation. OpenBSD is not like this, the hardware claimed supported is actually supported. All the people suggesting emulators remember this. -- Aram Hăvărneanu
