OpenBSD Journal

Urgent Request for Funding OpenBSD HQ's Electricity

Contributed by pitrh on from the do pufferfish dream of electric eels dept.

OpenBSD supports a wide range of hardware architectures, and for practical and logistical reasons there are few places in the world that have them all in one place except OpenBSD headquarters, see eg this picture, which shows a subset of the machines involved in building OpenBSD releases.

But keeping all this hardware running involves a considerable electricity bill, and Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) is asking for help, preferably in the form of a company willing to specifically sponsor the project's electricity bill.

See the message to openbsd-misc titled Request for Funding our Electricity for details, and if you are in a position to move on this, please do whatever it takes.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Noryungi (noryungi) noryungi@yahoo.com on

    Quick question: I have supported (and donated) to OpenBSD before.

    Should we (meaning: regular users) donate now to the project, and pass on the information to relevant companies around us?

    For instance, I could donate a couple hundred Euros to OpenBSD right now.

    While this may not raise the CAD$ 20,000 it may provide a nice boost to OpenBSD finances and give a bit of a respite to Theo.

    All comments/suggestions - especially from people close to Theo - would be greatly appreciated.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (79.194.205.178) on

      > All comments/suggestions - especially from people close to Theo - would be greatly appreciated.
      >

      From the man himself[1]:

      "[T]he OpenBSD Foundation is the best path for contributions."

      [1]http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=138974990608900&w=2

  2. By cabonamigo@gmail.com (187.36.3.123) cabonamigo@gmail.com on http://www.codex.wiki.br

    Perhaps, we should also try to reduce bills by producing usable energy ourselves.

    I am not an engineer (did not graduate), but there are so much hardware ready to buy, that can accomplish such task.

    A site such as alibaba.com is a great place to find such hardware and some of the systems are so cheap.

    The word is "power systems".

    I don't have a clue about how is the weather in Calgary, but there are also other types of power systems and even hybrid ones using wind.

    There are also "on grid" and "off grid" solutions, I believe it is best to start with the "on grid" ones first.

    OpenBSD besides being an excellent UNIX system, could be also a sustainable, "green" and environmentally friendly OS and an example to be followed.

    Prices vary wildly, but it is always a good thing to have choices and the power systems range from US$ 110,00 - to the sky and beyond.

    So this what I could think to start mitigating this kind of problem.

    Best Regards

    Carlos



    Comments
    1. By anon (anon) on

      > Perhaps, we should also try to reduce bills by producing usable energy ourselves.

      Sounds good: produce some energy yourself, save money on your own electricity bill, and donate the saving!

      > I don't have a clue about how is the weather in Calgary, but there are also other types of power systems and even hybrid ones using wind.

      Calgary is in Alberta. From what I see it's unseasonably warm right now, but in general, Alberta's two most notable natural resources are oil and cold.

  3. By Dirk (62.128.1.62) dirk@fake.mx on

    Hey there,

    because of i am some kind of broke i cant donate Money
    directly. But i just wanted to suggest that it might
    would be possible to get them donations over something
    like kickstarter or some other crowdfounding plattforms?
    Would that be an idear or would this go gainst the ideology
    of the Project?


    kind regards,

    Dirk

    Comments
    1. By Noryungi (noryungi) on

      It does not go "against" the "ideology" of the project - it's just that Kickstarter requires donators to be rewarded in some way or other - T-Shirt or otherwise - and that it's way too much work.

      Please see Theo's answer here: http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=138973837906139&w=2

  4. By francis (67.142.175.26) francislaplante@hotmail.com on

    Would the OpenBSD crew be able to provide computer security consulting services in exchange for free electricity?

    Comments
    1. By Marc Espie (espie) on

      > Would the OpenBSD crew be able to provide computer security consulting services in exchange for free electricity?

      Sure thing. Here's the bill for all the stupid bugs we fixed and gave back upstream over the last year.

      Oh, you're not using OpenBSD ? I bet you have at least 10 buffer overflows, 5 race conditions, and 2 sql injections in the code base you're running...

      and probably one iptable/pam configuration error that leaves your machine wide open if you happen to use these tools.

      Come on, troll, be real.

      Comments
      1. By francis (67.142.175.26) francislaplante@hotmail.com on

        > Come on, troll, be real.
        Not trolling. It is easier for companies to justify consulting services than paying offsite electricity bills.

  5. By Noy (61.171.16.52) a@icqcu.com on

    The security application and service are expense in market.
    If you concentrate your attention on security services, such as SSH etc, you had already make millions of money.
    Look at pfSense and m0n0wall ...
    I think users don't need more BSDs, but need security applications.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (cnst) on

      > The security application and service are expense in market.
      > If you concentrate your attention on security services, such as SSH etc, you had already make millions of money.
      > Look at pfSense and m0n0wall ...
      > I think users don't need more BSDs, but need security applications.

      www.openssh.com

      >>>> Please take note of our Who uses it page, which list just some of the vendors who incorporate OpenSSH into their own products -- as a critically important security / access feature -- instead of writing their own SSH implementation or purchasing one from another vendor. This list specifically includes companies like Cisco, Juniper, Apple, Red Hat, and Novell; but probably includes almost all router, switch or unix-like operating system vendors. In the 10 years since the inception of the OpenSSH project, these companies have contributed not even a dime of thanks in support of the OpenSSH project (despite numerous requests).

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