>Respectfully I find that a bit offensive. Ask me for a donation if you >want. But do not expect me to by an object to be manufactured, shipped >1/3 of the way around the globe and then I'll through it in the trash. >Not cool at all.
Then find another way to ensure that OpenBSD persists in the future. Come on, the web pages regarding donations are more than clear about how things work. Refer to http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html. There is a Foundation following government imposed rules. There is a Project, which is not a corporation, so that the Foundation can help it. There is a clear separation. Then there is a guy in Calgary who has no other job because herding roughly 100 people into making a high-quality release every 6 month (on the clock) doesn't allow time for another job. It sounds like you can put sentences together to form paragraphs, so I bet you and others can figure this out. If you want this almost 20 year old thing to be sustained further, find a way of your own that you think will sustain it. Otherwise it sounds like you are digging for excuses. The Foundation is doing a great job these days covering most of the costs of the project (see their web pages for a list of what they have funded over the last 3 years). But the Foundation does not cover my time. And I will not spend my time begging. Nor would most of you. >OpenBSD is, it seems, very cool and worth supporting. I am >investigating using the mechanism detailed in >http://www.openbsd.org/bank-donation.html... That is a mechanism that funds the Project directly. I dig into this to cover expenses for the Project that the Foundation does not cover, in particular when they occur in Europe (obviously). Does anyone find fault with this? >Looking at https://https.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/order there seems to be no >difference in CDs and T'Shirts in so far as where the money goes. I do >understand from conversations I have had that there is a difference. Well OBVIOUSLY CDs accumulate more revenue than T-shirts, so recently we've not made any T-shirts because it isn't worth it, the setup costs and overheads are higher than the number sold. If you guys don't buy enough of them, then we don't do the setup. Other than that, there is no difference to you, expect that I would guess you don't buy any, and you don't fund the Project or the Foundation, and all of this is idle chatter. >Lastly: IMO It is time to change. CDs are no longer useful. I have >OpenBSD on a VPS so stickers are a waste of time too. Thanks for the advice. Does your advice change anything? NO! It changes NOTHING. That is the kind of advice that comes off close to telling us to give up and die. >I would like to donate some money, but it is not easy. Not easy? That statement is totally false. You found the web page. And the Foundation takes paypal, even off a credit card. Not easy? >I would like to know for sure >that the money goes to the project. >For expenses or to developers, who spend so much time on this, to >spend on whatever they want (beer, fish, little rubber balls...) But >I will not buy things I cannot use. You use software we've produced for almost 20 years, without cost, then you think you can saunter in here and demand greater transparancy? Why don't you show your bank accounts...