Crippling server 'leccy bill risks sinking OpenBSD Foundation The project behind OpenBSD risks going dark after receiving a crippling server electricity bill which it needs help to pay off. The OpenBSD Foundation has revealed it needs to stump up $20,000 in the second appeal for help it has issued since December. It seems the first appeal didn't net it enough to settle the bill in full …
"It's good to know they are around, just in case I need something like that. I suggest others do the same."
Never tried a BSD so just bought a CD-ROM set. Not sure if UK reseller has pre-paid for stock (so no immediate benefit). Uses jwm as default environment, which is notable in itself...
LInux Weekly news nearly shut down, because they didn't think that lots of readers around the world would pay them a few tenners per annum. Luckily they gave it a try, and the money rolled in.
I'd suggest that OpenBSD sets up a contributions site. It's probably easier to get 400 people to pledge and pay $50, than one to pay $20,000.
That would be because OS X uses various FreeBSD components along with the Mach "microkernel" and the Apple I/O Kit API in Darwin. It doesn't use OpenBSD, except for components that OpenBSD shares with FreeBSD and NetBSD. And there are several.
Bear with me here, BSD's history is fairly confusing thanks a number of factors (like its licensing) plus the famous lawsuit, but i'll try to flesh it out, as best I know it anyway. All of the BSDs do share components and code, but the code Apple used in OS X was mostly from FreeBSD (Windows wound up using some of the same code in their networking stack, as did Linux developers but they relicensed the code into GPL 2 since BSD's license is extremely permissive).
OpenBSD forked from NetBSD, which was forked from 386BSD. FreeBSD was formed from a 386BSD patchkit and 4.3BSD-Lite. They're very similar, but they did and do have different developers and different philosophies.
While BSDs may look similar to the user and offer similar APIs, they are not that similar on code level. Ever tried to port a driver from NetBSD to FreeBSD?
In any case each and every linux distribution uses the following bits of code from OpenBSD foundation: openssh, a number of foundation internet services - telnet, tftp, etc, the internet services control subsystem - inetd. 20k is pocket change for RedHat or Ubuntu. As they use this code extensively, they probably should shell out a few quid.
"OpenBSD is included in a number of popular third party packages that include SQL Lite, BIND, Sendmail and the Lynx web browser."
Err, you mean the other way around? OpenBSD includes those packages (by default), they do not include OpenBSD.
Not that those packages are specific to OpenBSD. It's a bit like saying "Windows is included in Skype" when what you mean to say is "Windows includes Skype".
It's too bad there isn't some company out there that benefits extensively from OpenBSD and is currently sitting on a massive pile of cash.
Surely such a company could easily donate $20,000, would benefit by ensuring the stability of the architecture underlying their systems, and may even be able to write most of it off as a charitable deduction.
Ah well, no such beast exists, obviously.
Between the seemingly struggling OpenBSD foundation and the seemingly flourishing FreeBSD foundation whom seem to have gotten four donations of $50,000 or more in 2013. NetApp alone has donated $100k+ the past three years in a row to FreeBSD.
I hope OpenBSD makes it, though my usage of it is limited to firewalls (not fond of BSD user space, much like BSD folks hate linux user space). I think pf is awesome (after having gone through ipfwadm, ipchains, iptables, ipf, and I think one more firewalling tool on FreeBSD 12-14 years ago). I know pf has been ported to FreeBSD, though haven't needed to move from OpenBSD for this purpose.
I had to re-install my home Soekris firewall recently as the CF card died, and tried to install Debian k/FreeBSD to get pf, but after 30 mins of fighting it I could not get it to PXE boot, so went back to OpenBSD again. I did manage to get a beta of Debian k/FreeBSD installed to Sokeris a few years ago, don't remember what I did to get it to work though, it was really slow at the time so I stuck to OpenBSD.
Linux for the rest of my systems though. Linux has infiltrated pretty much all of the enterprise gear I have at work short of my Citrix Netscalers which are FreeBSD (F5 uses Linux though, I like F5 too). I was sort of surprised not to see Citrix on the FreeBSD donations page given their usage of the platform.
FreeBSD atlanta-netscaler 6.3-NETSCALER-9.3 FreeBSD 6.3-NETSCALER-9.3 #0: Wed Jul 3 14:58:06 PDT 2013
Not exactly a recent release of FBSD (2008).
Oh and side note I believe we have OpenBSD to thank for OpenSSH which of course is used very widely, there are a couple other major products they re-wrote from scratch due to licensing, the names escape me at the moment though (maybe pf could be considered one? a re-write of ipf? I seem to recall licensing issues with ipf back in the day)
Have you tried asking ibiblio.org to host OpenBSD?
"The OpenBSD Foundation is based in Canada, and, according to de Raadt, 'a number of logistical reasons prevent us moving the machines to another location which might offer space/power for free.'"
This is a run on effect where in the mad dash to renewable energy generation, public utilities are paying private renewable generation firms a guaranteed percentage of their stated capacity even if they don't produce a milliwatt of power. If a solar farm has a stated output of 10Mw at full capacity, the producers are guaranteed $CAN 445.00 a day producing little or no electricity. My advice is for OpenBSD to look for charitable donations from these suppliers. It's my tax money that they will be paid with, no the producers.
And just what would those logistical reasons be? Care to share them with folks that might donate money? I'd like a little more information than "we need some money! gimmie!" which is about all that this boils down to.
For $20K I'd put them in the back of my car (if I had one) and drive them somewhere willing to host them for free/cheaper.
If I was donating, I'd want to know they'd explored all the avenues and weren't wasting the money. This fails to convince me that they've done so.
How do Debian and other folk pay their light bills? I haven't heard them begging for money recently. What are they doing differently?
"For $20K I'd put them in the back of my car (if I had one) and drive them somewhere willing to host them for free/cheaper."
From reading around t'web I suspect you might need a somewhat larger vehicle to move the servers to another location. I also gather that the legacy machines in use to test builds on obscure architectures might not fit in the usual racks found in many data centres. I also gather it is the build servers that sit in Mr Van Raadt's basement rather than the servers that distribute isos. Producing a release every 6 months with a base/core that has audited code must mean a lot of building.
I take your other point though: this project looks like it needs some transparency and a bit of volunteer time from people who know about communications with end users/community members.
EDIT: In the UK the local police would be visiting to check Mr Van Raadt's basement for possible cannabis production because of the very high electricity use for a domestic address. I'd love a video of the subsequent events....
De Raadt, not Van Raadt. The former means "the", the latter "of"/"from" (in Dutch which I presume is the origin of his name).
I know all those pesky Germanic words must sound the same to you half-Norman French speaking natives but some of us poor foreigners, do care <sniff>
I'll just get my coat now, thanks...
>Norman French speaking natives but some of us poor foreigners, do care <sniff>
That would be French, German, Anglo-Saxon, Latin n Greek (plus quite a few other inputs). Why we call it English is a bit of a puzzle. Anyway, English is formally a Germanic language.
If we are going to get anal, feel free to explain why you misused a comma (before "do care") and viciously abused an innocent hyphen. I think you meant: half Norman/French - which is a fair description of those folk that popped over in 1066 and gave the "natives" a kicking, rather than the modern locals.
Mind you, I'd love to be able to be pretty fluent in another language rather than simply get by in three and embarrass myself in many others, so perhaps I'll hold your coat.
Cheers
Jon
English derives from anglish which is what the Angles spoke. Although a minority compared with the Saxons Jutes Welsh Cumbrian's etc they occupied a central position and provided crucial trade links with the rest of the Germanic tribes in Europe. So their German/Danish dialect formed became the common language.
The Normans were a small minority, albeit as the source of power, more influential on the language than most.
Of the top 100 English words today, I believe something like 70% are from the Angles and Saxons and the rest mainly Norse (though recent research suggests Norse is more significant, particularly grammatically).
American is rather different as it is highly coloured by East European languages, more modern German and Yiddish as well as big dollops of Spanish and some archaic, pseudo-religious forms of English that were somewhat concocted or archaic in England even in the 1700s.
> In the UK the local police would be visiting to check Mr Van Raadt's basement for
> possible cannabis production because of the very high electricity use for a domestic
> address.
That happens In the U.S. too. I'm never sure how tolerant the Canucks are of cannabis.
Anyway, I might suspect they're running the servers as a cover for growing pot, But then if they were growing pot – and selling it – they probably wouldn't have trouble paying their bill.
In 2014, you can do most of your development in VMs, distribute your code from the cloud or BitTorrent, and have people all over the internet help you test on old or oddball architectures. What year is OpenBSD living in? Sounds like they need to go green! Or require a little more help from people that want their room warmers supported.
You *are* aware of the fact that if you host stuff 'in the cloud' — in this instance, and particularly, VM servers — they *charge* you for that? Over a period of time, that mounts up. In fact, if you're running a full-time server infrastructure that is fairly stable and doesn't need to flex up/down in size and it's life expectancy is more than a year or two, then long-term use of the cloud for VM server hosting is typically more expensive than running your own kit. Seriously. Google it.
It is true that it would be impractical to move the servers to the United States. However, in Canada there are plenty of places where both space and power are cheap, because hydroelectric power is widely used in Canada, and Canada is sparsely populated in its colder areas.
Of course, if they move to Labrador, they will face high sales taxes, but Northern Ontario should do. Especially given that Sault Ste. Marie is considered to be a city in "Northern Ontario", despite the fact that if you look for it on a map, you'll find it adjacent to the border with the U.S., which is, of course, the southern edge of the province.
Before you think that Canadians (or at least Ontarians; people in Western Canada find this as strange as you would) have all gone daft, the major population centres of Ontario, Toronto and Ottawa, are both located south of the 49th Parallel, as they are on a peninsula jutting into the Great Lakes, which also mark the end of that particular parallel of latitude performing the function of demarcating our border with the United States.
I looked in to this quite closely. The reason openbsd need so many machines is so they can support many different architectures. most those architectures are obsolete, but they maintain and run servers because the different processors running with different speeds and features and other subtle differences often show up security bugs such as in openssh (but also other components/apps). Once the test suites find an issue in say openssh on vax or spac it is often proven that it exists on other architectures but doesnt show up easily. So the fixes end up befitting everyone who runs openssh, including most the linux distros.
the problem is that the openbsd guys are an old school stubborn lot and you cant convince them more small donations from outsiders would work. They want to charge more for open bsd cds (which i reckon many possible donators would not even want) or some large corporate to come forth (and they arnt). They dont want to put a donation meter on their site so you know people are donating and your money is well spent and they dont want to do anything differently. If you try to politely suggest that small donations would work and suggest some more modern concepts to attack the donations it is very likely you'll get turned away by an ill considered rude answer. Good luck openBSD... I respect your code but the way your going, your going to need it.....
It's interesting that most commenters think this is a sound way forward. $20,000 in electricity? What on earth are they thinking? @andro's description beggars belief. If someone still needs ancient VAX support, let them pay for it.
But why are these guy hosting all the kit themselves? I'm sure there are many organizations that would find a home for some of the kit as they will have spare capacity and/or not notice the difference. If its an old bit of IBM kit, IBM would probably host it, DEC talk to HP. After all, these are the sort of companies that benefit.
But I'll bet some grumpy old fart doesn't want to let go of some old gear she or he has been curating for years. Donations don't seem like a sustainable approach. How about sponsorship? Convert all that inaccessible geek machinery into a museum of functioning kit so sponsors can display their name alongside illustrious names from the past while entertaining and educating the public.
This is a time to give someone angling lessons. Handouts are a poor way to sustain a project if it's thought to be important.
OpenBSD are giving fish away to BEEELLIONS of people, for free.
As for your snarky remarks about old kit, in the real world there are applications that just can't run on a tablet; support for older kit is not only welcome but necessary (very extensive backward compat is part of the reasons why projects like this exist in the first place).
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