1. Free is not free anymore if anyone has to pay anything. 2. Big companies will not donate out of their own generosity 3. One of our main goals - as a community must be to donate ourselves, encourage donation from our clients and most of all encourage donations from big companies.
How can you encourage donations from big companies? a)Whenever you work with representatives from that company, mention to them how much money their company is saving using openssh. b)Whenever advising your clients on solutions from most OS vendors, mention how they treat the project which saved them millions. c)Write an article to a newspaper or to a blog, or any other public media d)Raise awareness to this issue. e)Call public relation department of many OS vendors and tell them how you feel. Encourage them to donate. How can you encourage donations from your clients and friends? There is only one answer to this. Tell them OpenBSD and OpenSSH are the standards in the quality of software engineering and the only reason they could be this good is because its an open source project managed by some of the most talented in the industry. Tell them if they care about the quality of software, if they use openssh and they like it, if they like good, reliable, secure software - they should donate. Thank you for your time.
