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OpenBSD foundation raised around ~380 thousand IIRC. By creating OpenSSH and the fact all fortune 500 companies use it, I would say every year, the foundation

• olddustytrail 2y ago
  They could easily raise a few million if they bothered working on sales, but they don't.
  • dbtc 2y ago
    a) they shouldn't have to b) part of what makes it great is that they don't
  • hoppp 2y ago
    Its not really a for profit project and I prefer it stays that way. Projects that raise money tend to get "corrupted" by the greed. Not that there is anything wrong with raising money, but the ideology behind openBSD don't really fit if they go for profit
  • renewiltord 2y ago
    They have a sales team of online enthusiasts who work for free. Unfortunately, they got what they paid for.
    • fc417fc802 2y ago
      > Unfortunately, they got what they paid for. Industry wide adoption?
      • renewiltord 2y ago
        We’re happy; they’re happy. But the sales team works on commission.
      • nobankai 2y ago
        [flagged]
• deadbabe 2y ago
  When you give freely and generously to the community you should do so with no expectation of getting anything in return. Sometimes that expectation is fulfilled.
  • pjmlp 2y ago
    I would really like that the supermarket, my landlord, electricity and water company would equally be so generous.
    • saagarjha 2y ago
      Sounds like you're in favor of UBI.
      • pjmlp 2y ago
        As European we are lucky to already enjoy minimum wage and unions, across many countries, still money has to flow from somewhere, namely taxes. Yet people still need to work somehow, and UBI is more of an ideal that will never happen in capitalism society driven by profits of few shareholders at the expense of everyone else. Now the current trend is replacing people with self service machines, they aren't getting UBI, they are being shown the street.
  • noisy_boy 2y ago
    They are not talking about OpenBSD's expectations, it's about the ethics (!) of the companies using things on the back of the generosity without giving back.
    • zx8080 2y ago
      Ethics does not belong to capitalism. Money is the central part of it, not ethics.
      • all2 2y ago
        Any system of economics may be abused. A moral people could operate communism successfully. Unfortunately, most people are not even remotely moral. Pragmatically moral (in plain view, but not behind closed doors), for sure, but innately good -- definitely not.
• lnxg33k1 2y ago
  Capitalism is based on the exploitation of workers who are directly hired by a company, now imagine if a company would pay someone who it doesn't have to
  • genewitch 2y ago
    I'd change "workers" to "persons with little capital".
  • LtWorf 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • throwaway72063 2y ago
    Any example of exploitation in the capitalist tech industry, and what job under any other system is not exploitative by comparison?
• slome 2y ago
  The openbsd foundation raised around 5 million, half of which has been spent. Curiously they aren't as transparent as they once were. You mention nvidia support, others are hopeful for a better filesystem and wifi as well.
  • brynet 2y ago
    > The openbsd foundation raised around 5 million, half of which has been spent. Citation needed, they've raised nowhere near that amount. https://github.com/bob-beck/foundation-web/commit/483266ceceeb9137cc850069003949147744956a https://github.com/bob-beck/foundation-web/commit/483266cece... https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2024.html https://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2024.html
    • thegeekpirate 2y ago
      Not OP, but they've raised $4,974,668 since 2014 (done by adding up all the thermometers at https://github.com/bob-beck/foundation-web https://github.com/bob-beck/foundation-web), and I'm excluding anything prior. That's certainly what they meant ;)
      • brynet 2y ago
        Thanks, very misleading..
  • brynet 2y ago
    > .. wifi as well. OpenBSD has supported 11ac for several years, and has the iwx(4) driver for modern Intel WiFi cards. There's also support for Broadcom FullMAC, bwfm(4), which is on e.g: Apple Silicon machines. HaikuOS also has a port of OpenBSD's iwm/iwx drivers. FreeBSD just recently announced they've started porting the OpenBSD iwx driver.. from Haiku. https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/laptop-support-and-usability-project-update-first-monthly-report-community-initiatives/ https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/laptop-support-and-usabil...
• nickpsecurity 2y ago
  The license says use it however you want with nothing in return. They usually get nothing in return. It's a license best used when you want maximum uptake by users, including proprietary products. It's also good for people who enjoy knowing others enjoy using what they build. Whereas, it's one of the worst licenses if a supplier wants money. Lets assume goals like OpenBSD's. If one also wants money, they can make the software paid, free for many categories of users, source-available, and derivatives (mods) allowed. The paid part can be regular payments or one-time per release. Probably an exception to mods allowed saying they can't backport paid features from new versions to old versions but independent creation is allowed. From there, companies will pay to support it or they'll determine it has no market value. There are proprietary, source-available RTOS's on the market for real-time and secure use. One source said, but I haven't verified, that INTEGRITY RTOS royalty-free was around $17,000 minimum per product or company. Another said LynxOS with communications middleware was around $50,000. A number of small vendors exist showing one can generate sales if their product is marketable. Tons of companies selling firewalls, load balancers, etc like OpenBSD is often used in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_real-time_operating_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_real-time_operat... So, if money is important, they can change their terms to demand money some or all of the time. If the license says "free giveaway!," expect most people to treat it that way. I imagine quite a few of the developers have exactly that expectation. They are motivated by the joy of writing great code, not money.
• alexvitkov 2y ago
  Your second paragraph is explaining perfectly why open source doesn't work and how its economics don't add up. I would also add that it indirectly kills the vast majority of programming jobs - nobody is ever going to get paid to create a JPEG decoder as everyone can just use libjpeg. Nobody is ever get paid to write a new kernel as everyone can just use Linux. Very few people are going to get paid to work on a new database as you can just use Postgres... Once there's a good enough open source solution in a field, in the long run it will out-compete commercial offerings, even it's overall a worse package, as it's some guy's free time project and is created on a $0 budget. Programmers work for free, end users get a worse product, companies make trillions.
  • tredre3 2y ago
    > Nobody is ever get paid to write a new kernel as everyone can just use Linux Not that it negates your point in any way, but lots of people are paid lots of money to write Zircon (Google Fuschia's kernel) which is intended to replace Linux in many scenarios.
    • LtWorf 2y ago
      So they are paid to write a useless toy. While people who write the useful code are not paid.
      • surajrmal 2y ago
        If people didn't do the work for free in open source, then companies who need that functionality would in fact be forced to pay for it, although it may not necessarily be open source in turn. It's hard to complain about the state of open source because people choose to put themselves in these predicaments. If you need money to sustain the project, asking for donations is not really an adequate plan.
        • LtWorf 2y ago
          Why do companies prefer to waste money on useless projects rather than donate to projects they actually depend on?
• tonyhart7 2y ago
  "hardware vendors should open up their source" this doesn't make sense, how can you expect hardware companies to do this, where the moat???
  • mrweasel 2y ago
    It's not as bad as it used to be, but one moat some companies had was "excellent support for Linux/Unix/BSD". Until CUDA no one in their right mind would buy Nvidia for their Linux workstation, just like you'd avoid certain Broadcom wireless chips. Hardware companies need their devices supported by as many operating systems as possible, especially if those devices can be used in servers, desktops less so. Apple is pretty much the exception.
    • tonyhart7 2y ago
      having support for linux != open source their shit You can still support linux while still having closed source
  • surajrmal 2y ago
    Source code is often still very confusing without accompanying documentation. A weird cryptic series of register writes with random values makes it difficult to really understand what's going on.
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  It's not the foundation that does the work but developers. With that kind of budget, the foundation is just administrative support. They aren't employing a lot of developers. Many developers are employed of course. Partially by those same fortune 500 companies that you mention. Open source is a pragmatic arrangement where developers embedded in the industry can collaborate and share code; often explicitly supported by the companies they work for. It has worked very well for decades and there's no urgent reason to change anything. For example, Damien Miller, who puts in a lot of time on OpenSSH, is employed by Google. Employing key contributors is how the industry supports OSS.
  • KerrAvon 2y ago
    Yes. What’s interesting is that this corporate software engineering socialism isn’t new with modern open source. It dates back to the earliest operating systems for IBM mainframes. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_Operating_System
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • jorvi 2y ago
    > For example, Damien Miller, who puts in a lot of time on OpenSSH, is employed by Google. Employing key contributors is how the industry supports OSS. Yeah that's just confirmation bias. How often do we read about key open source libraries that are being maintained by one random dude in his free time, said dude's free time dries up, and suddenly everyone is in panic mode on how to get funding to him. It'd be much nicer if every tech company above X amount of yearly revenue would be required to kick in 1.0% (0.1%? 2.5%?) of their profit into a foundation. That foundation then would put out bounties or contracts for open source project maintainers. The priority (= monetary value) of these would be decided on by a mix of community voting, open source expert panel, and commercial interest, split ⅓/⅓/⅓.
    • jillesvangurp 2y ago
      There's a long tail of stuff that isn't paid indeed but I don't think this is confirmation bias. I maintain a few things myself actually. The thing is, I'm not actually expecting to get paid.I think you are underestimating just how many OSS developers have steady jobs and over estimating the urgency of the issue. I don't think the crisis you are outlining actually exists. But I'm sure there are individuals who'd like to get paid more for whatever they are doing.
• _flux 2y ago
  > By creating OpenSSH and the fact all fortune 500 companies use it It was a fork of Tatu Ylönen's SSH, so I think it would be more accurate to call it forking, not creating. Of course, they've created a lot of new code as well since 1999.
  • alecco 2y ago
    From a fork of an old version that was still open source, the OpenBSD team audited every single line and rewrote most of it, AFAIR. https://www.openssh.com/history.html https://www.openssh.com/history.html
• lynx97 2y ago
  [flagged]
• traceroute66 2y ago
  > It is time these companies really give back. I'm not going to sit here shilling for the corporates, but at the same time I think you need to put yourself in their shoes. The stance you are taking is essentially the same as if a chugger stops me in the street and asks me to sign up to regular donations to $charity because "its only $1 a month". To which the inevitable answer is "sure, and there are a gazillion other charities, so I'm supposed to give $1 to all of them because its 'only' $1 a month" ? I will choose which charities and how much to donate to on my terms, thank you very much. And its the same with corporates and open-source. Your favourite pet-project might be OpenBSD and you might think $evilCorp should give more to them ? But what about all the gazillion other pieces a typical $evilCorp will use ? OpenSSL ? curl ? ping ? traceroute ? In your idealistic world a corporate would give $1m to each of them I guess ? The fact is the corporate lawyers know you've released your software on open terms. I'm sure they would be happy to buy an OpenBSD license ... but OpenBSD made their bed, as it says on their website "OpenBSD policy is simple — OpenBSD strives to provide code that can be freely used, copied, modified, and distributed by anyone and for any purpose. " And before you say "well, they could donate instead of buying licenses" ... let's just say you would be naïve. Buying licenses is a "simple" standardised procurement exercise in most corporates. Meanwhile giving donations typically is a far more bespoke process involving far more administrative burden. And the smaller the recipient of the donation, the more admin burden required. As others have pointed out $evilCorp does contribute indirectly to open-source. Many of the core maintainers and contributors to open-source are employed by $evilCorp and file their PRs to the open-source projects on their employer's dime, often whilst sitting in their employer's offices, using their employer's computers and infrastructure.
  • formerly_proven 2y ago
    E-Corp typically has support contracts with vendors like Red Hat which in turn employ developers.
  • danlitt 2y ago
    > I will choose which charities and how much to donate to on my terms, thank you very much. Indeed. The observation is that generally for most corporations the charities are "nobody" and the amounts are "$0". If you, an individual, behave this way then you're a bad person. The argument is merely that the corporate "people" are also being bad people. > In your idealistic world a corporate would give $1m to each of them I guess? Why make this ridiculous strawman? If we said "some reasonable amount, distributed among their dependencies" why is that unreasonable? Do we have to draw out the whole picture before these people even attempt to consider what a reasonable contribution could be? > The fact is the corporate lawyers know you've released your software on open terms. Yes, and corporate parasites will therefore extract the maximum value while providing the minimum in return. History repeats itself. > Buying licenses is a "simple" standardised procurement exercise in most corporates. If you think about this for a few seconds you will realise it is not a good excuse. If ping/openssl/whatever had a "recommended contribution" listed on their "corporate licensing" page, then there is no administrative burden required whatsoever. You just pay whatever they ask, same as a license. You think the price is too high? Make up one. So why is there a high administrative burden? Simply, because corporates themselves place a high value on "paying the bare legal minimum". In other words, they over-value the virtue of being cheap and unsociable. If your reaction to this is "that's just how business is", then good for you: according to your understanding, business is antisocial, and should be discouraged.
• ekianjo 2y ago
  The beauty of FOSS is that it does not ask for anything in return (the 4 freedoms). That's exactly why things get adopted in the first place. Because you are free to use them as you see fit, which is why Fortune 500 companies use them in the first place.
• globular-toast 2y ago
  > It is time these companies really give back. Our system rewards those who take as much as they can and give as little as they can. The tradeoff here is that each entity having a certain amount of freedom makes us happier since we can be different and choose to allocate our resources in different ways. But asking corporations to give back when they don't have to is like asking your neighbours to pay more tax because the roads need repairing. You can't appeal to individuals, so the solution is simply to raise the bar on what that minimum is. The way to do that with software is to use copyleft licences. Support copyleft projects in any way you can and reject permissively licensed projects where possible. If we had stuck with copyleft we'd be so much better off.
• voidfunc 2y ago
  > It is time these companies really give back. There's no reason for them to do so while maintainers continue to be willing to work for free and governments take a lax stand on security breaches.