[LINK] OpenBSD is a charity (was: foss is a charity)

[Brendan Scott]

Deus Ex Machina wrote:
> http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2006/03/surprise.html
> 
> "
> 	"OpenSSH is included in every Unix-derived operating system, yet the
> 	total amount of assistance we've ever got from vendors is zero," said de
> 	Raadt. "It's astounding. I don't know what to do about it."

I must say I'm sympathetic to the criticism.  They have a philosophy of expessly permitting people to take without giving and complain when that happens (http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq1.html#ReallyFree):


"People sometimes ask if it bothers us that our free work is put into commercial products. The answer is, we would prefer that our good code be widely used than that commercial software vendors reimplement and create badly coded incompatible alternative solutions to already solved problems. For example, it is likely that SSH is a widely used protocol due to this freedom, much more widely used than if restrictions had been placed on how people used the OpenSSH code."


They need to work out whether the benefit justifies the cost. 

> "We do have some suggestions as to what he might "do about it." Charge
> money. For the Nth time, MARKETS are the way in which societies achieve
> reciprocity and cooperation."

This bit is misplaced. It assumes that the only signals which can support a market are prices attached to products, which is patently untrue (eg pricing can be via services).




Brendan