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Comment by hackuser | Hacker News Reader

    Gold: $25,000 to $50,000
        Microsoft Corporation 
    Silver: $10,000 to $25,000
        Facebook Inc.
        Google Inc.

Arguably these are small amounts for all three companies, but what is the best way to calculate a fair share - not just for large companies but for anyone? For example,

* How much does OpenBSD need?

* How much does each company benefit from OpenBSD's work?

* How much would it cost to license the software if it were proprietary? How much would it cost to build and maintain it in-house?

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Those are hilariously small numbers. The accounting departments of those companies probably wouldn't even blink if one extra zero were added to the end.

If you're funding open source products like this, companies should fund at least 3-5 full time senior engineer salaries per year. We should praise "donating" $3 million to $10 million per year. Anything less is a joke seeing these amounts are from multi-billion dollar companies built on free software.

Imagine you lived next to a free buffet that only accepted donations. You ate there every day of the year, saved thousands of dollars over buying and making your own food, then thought you were being "generous" by dropping them a tenner at Christmas. Also, you're a full time tech employee who cashed out millions in stock and have several million dollar apartments in cities around the world. But, sure, you're generous by dropping them $10.

While I agree this is pocket change, at least these companies are putting in something. And Microsoft has become a top Linux kernel contributor, and Google, Facebook do hire full time programmers that work on Linux as well (and possibly BSD).

My question is, where's Apple?

You don't get to be a successful company if your accounting department doesn't blink if there are zeros appearing on invoices.

  "I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks"

It's a little hard to describe Microsoft as a company built on free software. Another thing that gets lost here is that large companies certainly pay full time senior engineers to contribute to open source projects. They just work at the company, not for OpenBSD/RedHat/ect directly.

> It's a little hard to describe Microsoft as a company built on free software.

Ethernet (for utp), Wi-fi, ip, tcp, udp, http, ssl, imap, smtp, dns ... just thinking of networking/Internet tech off the top of my head ...

I suppose you're forgetting that one of the most popular Windows releases didn't support Internet connectivity out of the box.

Tiny amounts. The OpenBSD folks contribute a lot of code those corporations use, like OpenSSH and plenty of security bugs fixed for many projects not their own.

OpenBSD still is at a financial crisis and not enough people care. Not even the ones reaping benefits out of it.

I love OpenBSD, I've purchased CD sets and made (small) donations, but they've been in financial crisis for as long as I can remember -- at least 2006. The truth is that it's entirely OpenBSD's fault; from the beginning, their attitude has been, "we'll just produce a lot of high quality code, and fix other people's bugs, and people should then donate to us out of good conscience."

And that doesn't work.

They've been openly hostile to projects like pfsense (or maybe it was Comixwall, I don't remember) and they've repeatedly declined to do anything that might bring more money into the project if it required even the slightest distraction from any of the principals of OpenBSD development.

The sucky practical reality is that "hoping enough people care" isn't a really smart way to ensure financial security for a project.

> They've been openly hostile to projects like pfsense

You may have the polarity reversed there.

I might, I'm working off of memory (and my brain doesn't have ECC). I recall someone working on a web frontend for pf getting a lot of abuse on openbsd-misc and then finally giving up altogether ca. 2009 or so. IIRC the common response from the old guard was, "people should just learn pf instead, it's easy."

> they've repeatedly declined to do anything that might bring more money into the project if it required even the slightest distraction from any of the principals of OpenBSD development.

That sounds like someone I'd want to support (assuming those principles are sound).

Just to clarify: in this case I meant "principals", as in the people most responsible for OpenBSD development, not "principles", as in the ideals driving the project.

Some info here: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/campaign2015.html

Indeed. It almost looks as Microsoft simply wanted to "one-up" the other two and...that's it. They should've been on the Iridium level.

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