Just to chime in here: The work the FreeBSD Foundation does is really really important. A lot of what they do is behind the scenes, but things like providing legal advice or ensuring that FreeBSD developers can attend conferences makes the project run much more smoothly than it would otherwise.
And if you compare the budgets (~300k vs. ~20M), well, the FreeBSD Foundation needs the money far more than Wikipedia does.
I think there would be far more donations if people could donate to OpenSSH rather than donating to OpenBSD. Theo loves to use OpenSSH to guilt-trip people into donating, but there's no guarantee that donations will, in fact, end up supporting OpenSSH at all.
that's like saying you'll donate to wikipedia only if it's used to pay for the bandwidth used by a single page on the site.
openssh is developed in the openbsd tree, by openbsd developers. there are infrastructure, travel, equipment, and other costs that can't be decoupled from openbsd work. if you want to support openssh, support openbsd developers.
i'm sure if someone stepped up and sponsored an openssh-specific hackathon, they could be "guaranteed" that their money was directly funding more openssh work than openbsd work. but, not surprisingly, nobody's ever done that.
that's like saying you'll donate to wikipedia only if it's used to pay for the bandwidth used by a single page on the site.
No, because wikipedia isn't going out and saying "you should support us because we have a page about Hacker News". They say that we should support them for everything they do.
What Theo is would be like me saying "if you use bsdiff, you should pay me to work on FreeBSD" -- bsdiff is a small part of FreeBSD, and only a very small amount of the time I spend on FreeBSD is even remotely related to bsdiff.
No, because wikipedia isn't going out and saying "you should support us because we have a page about Hacker News". They say that we should support them for everything they do.
of course, because allocating a donation to a specific page would be nearly impossible. just as allocating openbsd donations to specific commits on src/usr.bin/ssh is difficult and not worth the time.
What Theo is would be like me saying "if you use bsdiff, you should pay me to work on FreeBSD" -- bsdiff is a small part of FreeBSD, and only a very small amount of the time I spend on FreeBSD is even remotely related to bsdiff.
if a critical component of my commercial product offering was bsdiff, i would certainly donate to freebsd (or wherever you directed donations, being the author) to see its continued development.
are you seriously implying that theo is not one of the authors of openssh? or that the other authors of the code don't agree with him on where donations should go?
direct commits, not including ok's on reviewed code:
OpenSSH is brought to you by Markus Friedl, Niels Provos, Theo de Raadt, Kevin Steves, Damien Miller, Darren Tucker, Jason McIntyre, Tim Rice and Ben Lindstrom.
It depends how you define "author". Personally I would say that at this point OpenSSH has two authors -- markus and djm -- and a number of minor contributors. Looking at 'cvs annotate', I see that markus committed 42.6% of the LOC and djm committed 32.8% of the LOC, while nobody else was higher than 6.3%. Sure, LOC isn't a very good metric, but within a single project, with everybody using the same language, a 5x gap is significant.
If you look at who is currently working on OpenSSH, the numbers are even more dramatic: djm is responsible for over 80% of the LOC committed in 2010.
And if you compare the budgets (~300k vs. ~20M), well, the FreeBSD Foundation needs the money far more than Wikipedia does.