> > A number of you may have noticed the recent flurry of activity,
> >leading to stuff like bigmem being turned on.. Some more good stuff is
> >coming soon (my amd64 at my house is using 7 gigabyes of memory for
> >buffer cache, and I'm doing builds without touching disks..). Some
> >really cool stuff is being worked on and is coming to a source tree
> >near you soon.
> >
> > However, I'd like to take the opportunity to remind you all, that
> >the project does depend on CD and shirt sales to keep it alive. Yes
> >you may not use a CD all the time, but the latest one is pretty cool.
> >
> > So, short answer? go buy a CD. pre-orders are a little slow this
> >release, and we need to see some more activity in that area.
>
> This may tie in to something I've noticed -- it's less than two weeks to
> the official release date of 4.9 but there's no sign that the CDs are
> shipping yet. While there's no obligation for them to arrive before
> that date, usually we hear earlier than this that they're shipping. Is
> there some delay?
Wow -- watch out, or you will kill the message. I note you are inside
North America. Packages inside North America can make it to their
destination in 3 days, 4 days tops. It is April 18. What are you
talking about? Your CD order will arrive around the release time.
Probably before, as is usual, though noone ever promised that!
As well, I know that other distributors (including Liam in England)
will soon have CDs ready so that there can be a 'coordinated release'.
People on the other continents need to get a chance to be the first at
bragging.
Let's backtrack. Bob is bringing up an important point (he mentioned
it publically after I mentioned it privately to him earlier, so I know
where this comes from).
Year on year, when it comes to money that keeps the project going,
nothing much has changed in this project. I think people should
contrast our track record of 'good product' to our 'inability to sell
out'. Unlike everyone else in the "open source industry", we continue
to operate on donations and CD sales ("money)".
We have kept "donations" and "money" seperated. Donations fund the
things they can easily fund, and "money" funds the things they can
fund easily; we all know there are business/taxation rules to be
followed. The donations primarily fund the hackathons (5-6 a year
these days) and travel assistance for the less fortunate developers to
those hackathons. Great things come from those donations, from those
hackathons we are all running code that came out of them. None of us
can contest that.
But without CD and tshirt sales, other parts of the project are in
trouble -- the things that are more difficult to fund out of
"donations". And there is a further relationship: If not enough CDs
are sold in a release, there may be no further CDs made after that.
If there are no CDs made or sold, I don't know what will happen. I
doubt donations could help us ever again "bootstrap" a CD release
process again. I don't know where various aspects of the project
would go. Of course everyone knows that part of the CD sales become
my salary (keeping me away from working for companies writing non-free
software perhaps, though I doubt I am employable). But that is only
fair. All of you eat, too. I spend more time in front a keyboard
than most of you...
If things went bad financially, I don't know how I would cope with
such a big change. I doubt the user community has a plan for that,
either. If you are receiving this mail you are using OpenBSD or the
other things that our developer community have made, so please be
considerate and help us continue. The donations are one thing, and
thank you -- but please remember that the sales component has to be
there too.
I am only a part of the CD sales money. CD sales money keeps the
electrons flowing through cvs.openbsd.org. Trust me, it is critical.
> Not that I have any particular standing, but FWIW, y'all please order a
> CD set if you haven't already done so. OpenBSD has served me well for
> quite a few years, and I'd really like to see it continue -- and
> continue to improve.
Exactly -- let us continue doing this.
