Contributed by grey on from the good fund raising ideas, until OpenBSD bake sales appear dept.
In response to Theo's notice of slow CD sales, the usual flood of revenue schemes were renewed on the OpenBSD mailing list. One of the few good ideas has been for someone to offer an Enterprise offering of OpenBSD for those companies willing to spend extra, but want something to show for their investment (printed manuals, vendor support, etc). In response to this, I'm now offering up the following business software/support bundles:
The OpenBSD Enterprise Bundle
The official OpenBSD CD-ROM release, combined with one month (8 hours) of our enterprise, all-encompassing support.
The OpenBSD Small Business Bundle
The official OpenBSD CD-ROM release, combined with one month (4 hours) of Installation-only support.
All proceeds (total minus CD/shipping costs) will be donated directly to the OpenBSD project. This will hopefully address the ongoing demand that commercial users have requested, while opening up an untapped stream of donations for the developers.
For more details, please visit http://www.dixongroup.net/?q=openbsd.
It's nice to see not just ideas, but actual attempts at finding more creative ways to get money toward the project. It looks like OpenBSD and Jason will benefit from this arrangement. Of course, undeadly loves to hear about commercial products and support services using OpenBSD, particularly if you are taking additional steps to provide support back to the project.
(Comments are closed)
By Anonymous Coward (66.207.218.19) on
Comments
By tedu (66.93.171.98) on
By Daniel Hartmeier (62.65.145.30) on
By Chas (147.154.235.52) on
Put up a paypal list for specific desired donations.
Theo recently asked for hard drives. If he had found a reasonably-priced supplier and listed a URL, he probably would have received a ton more than he did (he requested SCSI-1 drives for $250, which I thought was overpriced).
New Features and Enhancements should also be listed with dollar amounts. For example, I'd probably give a couple of hundred dollars towards SMP support on my Sparc 20.
If the OpenBSD developers want money, they should put up a donations page with EXACTLY what they want and why, not just a general "send us money and buy our CDs."
I would love to be able to say that I directly funded greylisting and i386 W^X. I can't with the way things are structured now.
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By truk (24.46.36.183) on
The project needs the flexibility to spend monetary donations as they see fit. Which should come first, paying the electric bill or getting you SMP on your Sparc 20?
You’re free to make a suggestion when making the donation. Mine say "For XXXX, or Beer" ;) I don't expect anyone to honor my suggestion. Well maybe the beer part.
By Anonymous Coward (65.163.76.106) on
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By Chas (12.217.90.112) on
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By Anonymous Coward (195.217.242.33) on
I bet you would
By grey (207.215.223.2) on
By tedu (66.93.171.98) on
for better or worse, the openbsd project is not a store you walk into and say, "here's a hundred dollars. i'll take an smp sparc support and a journaled filesystem." you don't get to tell the red cross what size bandaids to buy.
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By jsnikeri (12.221.88.177) on
By Kevin R (209.89.223.95) on
By Johannes (131.130.1.143) on
I am just curious :-)
Regards,
johannes
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By Jason Dixon (192.43.161.9) jason_NO_SPAM_@_NO_SPAM_dixongroup.net on http://www.dixongroup.net/?q=openbsd
Mind you, I hope that many of these customers will choose to retain me on a long-term basis. But that's hopeful thinking. :)
-J.
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By Matthias Kilian (80.134.225.178) on
That could force you to set up a complete support call center :-)
Kili
By Chas (12.217.90.112) ` on
I would like a UNIX-like system that I can drop and forget for 5 years or more.
With OpenBSD's current support policy, I MUST upgrade every year to continue to receive patches (and not even binary patches at that).
I will pay you $100/year to support 3.5 for 5 years. Will you take?
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By Jason Dixon (68.65.108.126) jason_NO_SPAM@dixongroup_NO_SPAM.net on http://www.dixongroup.net
And this doesn't even touch on other aspects of "support" that are typically necessary (log analysis, backups, etc). Unless this isn't something you're looking for.
Hmm... what type of "support" are you really looking for anyways? Perhaps I'm assuming too much.
-J.
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By Kevin R (209.89.223.95) on
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By Anonymous Coward (141.39.2.1) on
what most ppl don't grok however is that this costs money, ie
$100/hr is the minimum.
although i guess an experienced sysadmin wouldn't need more the 2hrs
per release for possible backporting of important fixes to and compiling and providing them as binary package.
i mean, what's the deal, look what is affected, make there, install to a fake scratch directory, tgz that up and install it in the target machine(s).
i'd say 4-6hrs should easily suffice per year, but $100, as the OP suggested is a bit low
By Chas (12.217.90.112) on
And yes, I'm willing to pay for such a service. How exactly is such a thing impossible?
If it weren't for the avalanche of patches, I would be tempted by cAos or White Box. They will be supported (and spewing patches) long after 3.5 is dust.
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By Anonymous Coward (141.39.2.1) on
how much is RHAS or SLES costing for this sort of support?
technically this is no real problem backporting /usr/src and ports
fixes back to a given release and maintain this tree and provide
binary packages/patches.
the problem is only the commitment and this could be solved via
a fixed payment/contract.
this sort of specialized contract is much more easier than for the openbsd team to take care of older releases as they have to make sure all things work on all platforms etc etc., if i'd have a customer with a fixed platform or even better i could also advise which h/w to use i could very well easily provide this kind of service for $$$.
By mike (217.162.138.166) on
seriously though, I have an as/400 that run 5 years straight æs an internal db server until the company went bust... it cost 80k upfront.
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By Anonymous Coward (81.139.14.32) on
By Peter Dembinski (217.96.175.71) pdemb@illx.org on http://illx.org/~pdemb
By Jimmy (140.226.4.26) on
Comments
By Jason Dixon (68.65.108.126) jason_NO_SPAM@dixongroup_NO_SPAM.net on http://www.dixongroup.net
-J.
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By Anonymous Coward (12.168.98.157) on