On Mon, 18 Apr 2011, Theo de Raadt wrote:
>> > 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.
My apologies if my reply had any such effect; it certainly wasn't
intended to do that.
> 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 I said, I believe that OpenBSD's only obligation is to get the
pre-order CD sets to us by the release date (and even that isn't
absolute, given that shit happens). I was just interested in / curious
about why the pre-order process seemed to be working a bit differently
from the way it usually has.
>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.
Thanks for the explanation.
Dave
>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.
>
--
Dave Anderson
<d...@daveanderson.com>
