Unofficial OpenBSD Funding Drive

Skip to the end (the Donate To The OpenBSD Project section and the link for the OpenBSD Foundation's donation page) for the punchline, if you are already convinced of the importance of helping the OpenBSD project meet its funding goals and do not feel a need to read about some of the reasons it is an important project.

Why Does OpenBSD Matter?

In early 2014, some big news from OpenBSD was the fact that it was unable to pay its electricity bills at current funding levels. The project desperately needs to be able to maintain its infrastructure to perform build testing and other core tasks. As founder Theo De Raadt stated, even the testing on architectures that very few people use can help ensure reliability, code quality, and security for the operating system on more popular architectures, because of the fact that broad build testing and other testing tasks can find edge-case bugs that reveal otherwise obscure problems in code. It is thus no surprise that the OpenBSD core developer team is uninterested in throwing out half its build servers to cut the electricity bill for the project.

OpenBSD has long been regarded as one of the most secure operating systems in the world, and possibly the single most secure general purpose OS for many use cases. While there are arguments both ways in that regard from a purely technical perspective, as well as a usability perspective, it is no secret that many subprojects (such as OpenSSH and PF) are used by other projects that also claim a high level of security for their operating systems, and seeing the OpenBSD project fall apart would certainly have a negative impact on the future value of these projects for other operating systems, dragging down the state of software security in a number of ways.

More specifically, the Edward Snowden leaks about governmental surveillance capabilities and tactics have removed the veil from a broad, false sense of security and complacency about our privacy as a computer and Internet using world. Many of the revelantions coming from the Snowden situation show us how deeply compromised our digital world may actually be, not just by the NSA but by other parts of the US government, the governments of other nations, and (by extension) non-governmental entities as well. Whoever you feel most concerned about infiltrating your privacy as a computer and Internet user, the Snowden leaks show us much that is possible that many people never believed possible before. If the NSA is capable of all that has been revealed -- and it is generally regarded as a minority of the possibilities, as most of the documents in Snowden's possession have not yet been analyzed and released, judging by the various sources of our information about the situation -- it is probably also capable of much that has not been revealed and will in fact not be revealed by way of Edward Snowden. Furthermore, it can be reasonably assumed that many of these techniques are also in the hands of other governments (China and the UK, for instance), and in the hands of criminal organizations, spammers, phishers, and other operators of botnets.

This being the case, we should demand access to an operating system that deprecates inclusion of suspicious binary "blobs" that cannot be extensively examined for malicious or negligent vulnerabilities in its default installs, and that performs extensive, careful reviews of software source code to ensure there are no compromising bugs or backdoors. It may even be said that these are the most important privacy-assuring characteristics of any operating system on the market. Luckily, such an operating system project exists, and it is called OpenBSD.

For this reason above all others, now especially, the world should recognize the value of the OpenBSD project and be concerned with its continued operational health. In the end, you must take responsibility for your own security, for whatever you may believe about who should take care of your computing security needs, the truth of the matter is that nobody else will make decisions entirely in your best interest. Governments, ostensibly formed at least in part to see to the safety and security of their citizens, are in fact showing themselves to be deeply invested in violating our security and privacy in the most pervasive manner. Consider this: whatever the NSA's actual institutional motivations, it is obviously doing a poor job of making sure data does not leak out to its enemies. If Snowden had different goals, he might have made off with private information about people all over the world and sold it to the highest bidder rather than simply informing the world of the data collection programs employed by the NSA. We in fact have no guarantee that this has not already happened. The way to protect ourselves, and everyone else for that matter, from the dangers of governmental centralization of our private information is to prevent the NSA from collecting all that information in the first place.

We should, therefore, support the OpenBSD project.

OpenBSD Is A Copyfree Project

While the Copyfree Initiative has no direct relationship to the OpenBSD project, and while all major general purpose operating systems necessarily make use of software under a wide variety of licenses, the OpenBSD project is one of several BSD Unix operating system projects that require core contributions to be offered under the terms of copyfree licenses, and when there are no compelling reasons to do otherwise it also chooses copyfree licensed software for inclusion in the project over non-copyfree alternatives. For this reason, the Copyfree Initiative regards the OpenBSD project as a copyfree software project -- a project whose preferred licensing policy is a copyfree policy. As such, in addition to all the above reasons, the OpenBSD project is one the Copyfree Initiative and members of the copyfree community wish to see succeed.

We therefore ask that you join us in supporting the OpenBSD project.

Share And Discuss

Please share this information (in a non-spammy way, of course). You can discuss it with others in a variety of venues, including (but not limited to):

the ##copyfree channel on the freenode IRC network

channel on the freenode IRC network a reddit discussion page for this very advocacy item

another reddit discussion page

Suggestions for more places to share and discuss will be considered in the above-listed venues.

Donate To The OpenBSD Project

Consider this an unofficial funding drive, organized by members of the copyfree community, and supported by the Copyfree Initiative by provision of community co-ordination resources (e.g. this wiki page). We ask any and all with an interest in this matter to donate as much as you can reasonably afford to give to the OpenBSD project.

While you are at it, if you are willing to do so, we ask you to donate on behalf of the Copyfree Initiative, and refer back to this page, as a means of helping get the word out to more people about why it is important to support the OpenBSD project. We do not condone spam, but any honest, non-spammy means you have to convince your friends and neighbors to give their support to the OpenBSD project as well is greatly appreciated.

The OpenBSD Foundation provides funding support and co-ordination for the OpenBSD project, as well as several related/sub-projects. It accepts donations via PayPal (including credit card donations), checks/cheques, bank transfers, and Bitcoin. Without further ado . . .

Donate to the OpenBSD Foundation.

Thank you.