>> > Free Software: "You don't pay back, you pay forward." >> > -- Robert A. Heinlein >> >> I was trying to decide if I should reply, and if so, how. >> >> I looked for your name on the donations list. I don't see it. > >Out of curiosity, when I bought several t-shirts at the kd85 shop in Belgium, >does actually a part of it go to the donations list and do I pop there up with >few dollars? > >I also suggest that the list include the cumulative amount for each donor, >sorted so that the biggest donors are at the top.
You are assuming that all things revolve around $$$. What about gifts-in-kind? There are instances where donations of professional services which have benefitted the project could easily (and significantly) outrank large cash donations. What's the book value of someone who donated hardware and provides the impetus to make new ports or to fix support for esoteric hardware? These things do not lend themselves to a linear scale of ranking. Thanks for being a jerk and attempting to marginalize the work done by a large number of people over the last 12+ years. Oh wait, that's what the donations list is... a list of who helped, roughly in order. >Personally, it would motivate me more. I would have a feeling of control what's >actually done with my money. If Theo somehow published some breakdown of the >spending, even better. If he actually assigned my donation to a concrete thing >(i. e. Packet filter development,...), that would be even better. > >I would also have a motivation to compete for the topmost positions, with >sending money as my weapon :) I could boast to my friends look I paid xxx of >OpenBSD and I am the xth biggest donor and the packet filter you are using is >actually paid from that. Unless you're talking about Canadian or American monetary figures starting in the mid-5-digits, there's no way you'll be able to start to claim any form of significant sponsorship of any major new OpenBSD subsystem. Some donations actually go directly to paying for costs incurred in specific areas. Unfortunately, small donations might only go to paying for a portion of something. There are a number of recent examples of fund raising drives to get a particular piece of gear to a certain developer. People make donations for various reasons, but I've never heard of anyone wanting to claim that they ensured that the air baffles and extra power cable were in their name. >People are not computers, they decide based on emotions, and if you tune the >psychological aspect of the thing you can induce better emotions without >actually compromising your ideology. If other people think the same way like >me, then Theo would start getting more donations if he changed to that system. People buying things due to emotion alone is a recipe for a potential mess over the long-term. I won't go into a treatise on personal consumer debt and the fundamental motivations behind why people make decisions that are mostly clearly non-optimal. People who use OpenBSD and are active donors are more likely to be heavily rational and understand implicitly why they are putting money into the coffers. >Sometimes I wonder how much money goes to paying Theo's time, how much into >paying other people like artists, how much into buying hardware, and if >something of that isn't actually financed in an inefficient way. If I saw the >real numbers, these concerns would probably vanish. Wow. It's like you're doing due diligence work before purchasing a company. The issue is that OpenBSD isn't a company. It's essentially uses a finance model that is most easily described as "cost recovery". There isn't a lot of surplus in the finances. If extras exist, they are redeployed, akin to a re-investment of profit in a company. This isn't Redhat, which is fully commercialized. There aren't fancy offices with frosted glass. There aren't receptionists. There's no mailroom. Actually, I'd suggest that the vast majority of open source projects are decidedly NOT like Redhat. They are still principally volunteer-run with a smattering of people who derive some form of salary or monetary remuneration. I'm going to explicitly use a portion of the script from "A Few Good Men", a 1992 movie with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. It clearly doesn't map directly and completely to OpenBSD but there are significant number of parallels in the words spoken by Nicholson's character that equally apply. If I need to explain what applies, then there are bigger problems. The references should be pretty much intuitively obvious. Col. Jessep: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to. If people don't like the way that funding is allocated, how the website is laid out, how advisories are published, etc, your option is always to vote with your feet and pocketbook. Find another project to "improve". In the meantime, if you are deriving benefit from that which is essentially given away for FREE but are concerned about your own liability or security exposure, then you better sit down and re-model your risk portfolio and your own tolerance to these factors. It really IS that simple. --Jason
