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 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.
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."
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.