> > 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.