OpenBSD looks for funds

Sam Varghese
Monday, 30 July 2007 07:34

Opinion and Analysis

The OpenBSD project is likely to be able to take on new challenges once its sister organisation, the OpenBSD Foundation, set up last week, gets up to speed.
The project has been facing a shortage of funds and has decided that the creation of a separate arm would help raise this shortfall in funds.

Hence, the OpenBSD Foundation has been born, a parallel entity to the project, to not only raise money but also provide a legal entity to whom the cheques can be sent.

Asked whether the OpenBSD head Theo de Raadt could not now raise enough through CD sales and donations, Bob Beck, a director of the Foundation, replied: "Bluntly yes - CD sales are not enough to fund hackathons and deal with infrastructure expansion, faster network, etc."

He said de Raadt had been remarkably successful in attracting corporate support.

"Theo's methods of attacting corporate support have actually been quite successful - where they haven't been is always in the situation of "we'd love to, but we need a legal entity to write the
cheque to" - so in effect this isn't a change of tactics on OpenBSD's part, so much as putting together something we've needed for a long time. We hope it to be more successful at attracting a more sustained level of corporate support to enable us to do more and better things."

Beck and the two directors work free. "Directors of Canadian not-for-profit corporations work for free. they have to - we're all volunteers," he said.

De Raadt will not be personally involved in the foundation. He explained why in a posting: "I just cannot be personally involved in the Foundation myself as a board member since I will (in the eyes of Revenue Canada) perhaps sometimes be benefiting from it, since so much of the infrastructure resides at my house."

He said: "The Foundation is a parallel entity which builds a new way for funding the project; making it easier for companies and other organizations (or even individuals who can benefit from a receipt) to
help ensure more even funding for the project."

There are two things for which OpenBSD has been known, apart from providing a secure and stable operating system: creating open drivers for various wireless cards and creating and maintaining OpenSSH, a client for secure connections without which system administrators worldwide would be really handicapped.

The injection of new funds will doubtless help in two ways - one, attract new talent to the project because the scope of what can be done will increase; two, remove the burden of finance from de Raadt's shoulders and leave him free to do what he does best: coding.