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Comment by doktrin | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of off-putting, to be honest. This quintessential open-source abrasiveness is fine and dandy until you start asking for cold hard cash.

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This. Don't be a dick to people giving you money - customers or donors.

If you can't turn it off, don't be donor facing.

Sure, they should totally just get their PR person on it.

Oh look, now they're asking for $40,000

Is there no one at OpenBSD who can't not be a dick? The situation is more dire than I thought.

From what I can tell the current mentality is: We don't need to accept feature requests or patches to get donors, we could just get more users and sell CDs

"oh Look here's a poor idiot in the Mailing list that didn't become a UNIX expert before asking a question, let's flame the shit out of him."

Alright Let's collect some money. Wanna know why? fuck you it! It just needs to be this way. Wanna help or suggest a solution? fuck you unless it's a check.

How is this system not working?

I'm sure they have their reasons and they've already carefully thought through all of the most common suggestions. The project's been around for awhile.

Frankly, that sounds a lot like an appeal to authority.

"They probably are doing the right thing because they are who they are" isn't really a valid argument.

You must be a hoot at parties.

That's probably true, a simple, polite answer or even a no comment would be far less abrasive. Here's his answer to 'maybe we should evaluate the scope of the project and see if we still need to support VAX':

>Now, If you don't realize this is the reason we try to run on the older platforms, I am sorry but you have really not tried to stay in the loop of what makes OpenBSD a vibrant ecosystem. If you aren't in the loop regarding this, then your mail comes off pretty darn preachy.

>I really love how we keep getting advice. >Anyone want to suggest we hold a bake sale?

A simple no answer would do. Or maybe just the actual reason he runs the VAX.

You don't need a PR person; you just need someone who's not a dick.

I daresay any of their developers would quickly turn into dicks having to deal with that kind of public exposure.

And that's where disenfranchising non dev types is a real problem. Theo talks about pulling devs to make shirts and stickers and how that's a waste of time, but there are people out there that aren't kernel hackers that love to contribute to something bigger than themselves. No one's good at everything and the OpenBSD persona of being for and including only experts has made them a very lopsided organization with loads of talent but no diversity of skills.

Being nice to stupid people is as much of a skill as hacking up some kernel code.

I'm not saying you're wrong. But we have to get realistic here, OpenBSD is not going to turn into Canonical, not overnight, maybe not ever. I'm sure we would all love for it to suddenly sprout a bedside manner, but it probably won't, and you or me sitting around saying it needs one isn't helpful.

What we can rely on it being is technologically awesome. What else can you say that about? If you try to change the culture of OpenBSD, assuming that's even possible, the quality will inevitably suffer.

Could you honestly say you'd prefer OpenBSD to be more like Ubuntu?

No, I don't want that. But there is a big divide between those two things and having a little help with the business/relations wouldn't make them canonical. On the other hand there have been years (like 2012 and or 2011) where there were less than $30-40k donations to the OpenBSD project/foundation. remove electricity and there's just enough money for nothing. If you want a plausible OS you'll need a couple bucks; it's not an iPhone app. So instead of turning into canonical, maybe get some help to raise a few hundred thousand so you can run the boxes and have people behind the keyboards.

As for technically awesome, we are talking about a 'modern' OS that has poor support for multiple cores (servers will only have one core -theo), runs poorly inside a hypervisor and doesen't work as a hypervisor. An OS that does't support any of the newer types of file systems like zfs or btrfs. These things aren't strictly necessary, but that's kinda where things are headed in the server industry.

The code for the OpenBSD kernel is really clean and simple. It is well audited, but has half the security features of something like linux. This is a great approach if you don't stray to far from the kernel, but if it's not a firewall it might need a browser, java and or flash.

I think I am being realistic. It doesn't seem crazy that they could go on a fundraising binge, and get/hire some busines/PR/fundraising help that allows them to really meet their goals in the future. I'm not talking canonical money but you know 3-400k to power the servers and pay a couple people. That's a long term solution. We can all donate, and buy our disks but we'll be back here in a year.

"Being nice to stupid people is as much of a skill as hacking up some kernel code."

I'd rephrase that as 'finding simple tasks peripheral to the main effort that would allow non-expert people to contribute time to the project without detracting from the main work'.

We need PR people to devote their time and expertise to open source projects, just as developers do.

We wouldn't even need a very good one. I bet some kid still in school, studying PR, would do a better job than Theo.

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