When they're all volunteers why do they need cash?
Is OpenBSD Charityware?
The cash-strapped OpenBSD Foundation has raised $100,000, potentially saving it from the brink of oblivion. The Foundation has had pledges of "around" $100,000 from individuals and organisations following its appeal to cover a $20,000 server electricity bill. The group claimed 1,704 donations “large and small.” The Reg …
You've forgotten to take into account the hosting costs, which include space, power and bandwidth costs, and may also include a rental on the hardware for their servers and rental of an office space.
They also appear to host developer events, which are unlikely to be free to arrange.
Taking this into account, I do wonder how they managed to clock up a $20,000 power bill. How many servers are they running?
Mind you, the picture at the foot of their home page makes it look like their test servers are in someone's garage!
They were offered free hosting and gave some vague response of "the logistics make that impossible". It sounds like they've got a pretty shitty hosting facility currently, but for unknown reasons don't want to move. What kind of hosting facility lets them get $20k behind on their bill? To me it smells like someone involved in the organization is providing the hosting for a fee.
It's more likely that "free hosting" means "a few virtual private servers" which is nothing compared to the stacks of hardware they have now. More to the point, what they've got now probably falls apart if you blow on it gently. Moving to a hosting provider other than a colo that would let them simply dump their existing boxes directly would probably take months of trying to unsnarl the complex setups that tie the whole thing together.
If the thing is hosted in someone's garage - as was suggested above - perhaps the whole thing is tightly integrated with someone's personal network. I.E. some of the equipment in question is actually running on the dude's personal storage, or reliant on it for backups. Maybe he feels he needs LAN-class network access to move files around, or gods only know what else.
My point here is that what prevents folks from moving stuff in a situation like this is rarely outright financial cost. Nobody would begrudge the OpenBSD gang from paying a dude a salary if he needed one to keep the lights on. The "don't move the servers" think most likely has more to do with workflow disruptions and/or configuration nightmares involved in such a thing than it does anything else.
Don't assume malice when simpler explanations are more likely.
I'm sure last time I deployed a Citrix NetScaler virtual appliance I remember it running an OpenBSD base. I also remember it cost ££££.
I would think Citrix had more than $20k in profit lying around as a result of this product anyway!
I do realise that most of these mega-corps already support many open source projects both technically and financially but surely they're are worth a bit more to them than is usually the case.
Can you point me in the direction of anything that shows OpenBSD being the base for Citrix NetScaler? I've built firewalls/routers/web-filters/gateways using OpenBSD for several years now, it being the very best tool for the job, in my opinion.
I'd be very interested to read about it being used in such high end kit. I believe Checkpoint's Firewall 1 was built on an OpenBSD base, also.
The Citrix Netscaler runs FreeBSD:
> shell
Copyright (c) 1992-2008 The FreeBSD Project.
Copyright (c) 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Nokia had IPSO which was also a heavily modified version of FreeBSD, that ran the FW1 software.
Checkpoint's Secure Platform is Red Hat based with the FW1 RPMs included on the install disc.
Checkpoint bought Nokia's Security division a few years ago, and combined the best bits from Secure Platform and IPSO together resulting in an OS called Gaia which is a Linux core and all the IPSO management, routing and configuration logic from IPSO.
Would it be possible (or desirable) for someone like Google/Amazon to donate some of their massive cloudy server resources for OpenBSD to use? They probably need live/real servers for performance testing but they might be able to do lots of other things in the 'cloud'.
If you look at the picture of their build racks, almost all of the boxes there are not PCs, they build for many architectures...
alpha
amd64/i386
arm
HPPA
88k
PowerPC(Mac)
various 68k machines
sparc
sparc64
vax
etc. etc.
I'd imagine running all of that old crud at once is what their main crises is.
OpenBSD intentionally doesn't play well on a virtual platform, mainly for security reasons. It's the same in reverse, OpenBSD makes a terrible host for VMs.
Get OpenBSD on bare metal, configure it right and you've got one hell of a secure, stable server. A lot of that security is thanks to its comparably simplified architecture. Putting it into a virtual environment where it doesn't have direct control of physical hardware is maybe seen as just the top of a long, very slippery downward slope away from the project's fundamental principles.
You probably mean BSD OS's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_systems