Mozilla Foundation Donates $10K to OpenSSH

eklitzke writes to tell us the OpenBSD journal is reporting that the Mozilla Foundation is donating $10,000 USD to the OpenSSH project. This comes as good news after the recent reported financial troubles from the OpenBSD and by extension the OpenSSH team. It seems that quite a few people have answered the call for aid made by OpenBSD's de Raadt.

Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD?

[Tumbleweed]

Is this going directly to OpenSSH efforts, or to OpenBSD in general? There's nothing in there that specifically states which.

There has been much talk in the recent past about the difference between wanting to support OpenBSD (and by default, OpenSSH), and just OpenSSH itself. Is it even possible to support 'just' OpenSSH?

Either way, a classy move by the Mozilla Foundation.

Now if you guys can just make Thunderbird stop sucking, I'd be much happier.

Serious question.

[AltGrendel]

Is this something that can be deducted from Income Tax as a charitable donation?

Trace the source

[quokkapox]

This money is coming from the Mozilla Foundation, which makes serious dough from google searches run via the firefox browser's default start page and the default search engine field. So use firefox, hit CTRL-k to search with google, and keep it going.

Let's hope

[bogie]

That he uses the money to establish a foundation that is equipped to do things like fundraising and marketing. As I said before, being a non-profit is hard as heck, he needs to run it like a business and hire people who have real world non-profit experience. Raising just enough money to get by without committing to major organizational change is extremely shortsighted. Let's also hope that others follow the Mozilla foundation's example.

Re:Serious question.

[Alex P Keaton in da]

There are "Non profits" and "Not For Profits." I know these terms are used interchangeably, but I believe there is a difference.
I don't know enough about the difference between them to deliniate, but my understanding is that to be a "non profit", you have to register with the IRS and meet a bunch of standards.

Good for Mozilla.

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I can see how OpenBSD and OpenSSH aren't doing themselves any favors by alienating people with obnoxious comments and general indifference.

Latest example:
A lots of people/companies asked the OpenSSH group to include the ability to include rate limiting due to large SSH user/dictionary attacks being run by script kiddies. One person even WROTE it for them. I believe the OpenSSH group's response was "Not an ssh problem."

Dissappointing.

Re:This just goes to show...

[BigZaphod]

How can there be a dotcom crash of OSS? Most everyone involved in producing the stuff does it with the foreknowledge that there isn't any money in it directly - and yet they persist. That's because many people are driven more by a need to create than a need to make money. You see that in the extreme with the classic "starving artist" and a lot of the best OSS hackers fit in that same category. They do what they do for the love of it or because there's some kind of deep internal drive to create their visions. No it doesn't put food on the table, but that's often not the point. The beauty of OSS is that even if one author stops due to the demands of real life and the need to eat, their contributions are public and visible for the next hackers to step up and take over. OSS doesn't necessarily work as a model to sustain one individual; instead it works at a level above that - it is the currency of a culture.

Re:Congratulations to the Mozilla Foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree. Donations to the Moz foundation should go toward work on improving the broswer. It's not their place to redirect donations.

Re:Serious question.

[Scott Wunsch]

Honestly, I can't think for the life of me why they haven't become a non-profit yet.

They may well be. However, they're also Canadian. That means:

1. Just incorporating as a non-profit isn't enough. They'd also have to register as a charity, and in Canada, that means a lot of paperwork, and a lot of restrictions.
2. I'm not sure how international donations work for tax purposes, but I bet it still wouldn't be easy for Americans to write off their donations, even if OpenBSD were set up as a Canadian charitable organization.

Re:Congratulations to the Mozilla Foundation

[JFitzsimmons]

I wonder how many security patches OpenBSD has submitted to the mozilla project. I don't know, but this point makes the argument swing both ways. In theory, any software that runs on OpenBSD has to be audited for security, and any changes can be submitted upstream. Perhaps OpenBSD is doing more work for the Mozilla foundation than you might originally think.

Re:Good for Mozilla.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rate limiting a port ISN'T OpenSSH's problem. You have traffic shaping in your OS already.

Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD?

[Just Some Guy]

I'd say it just became a whole helluva lot more meaningful if he's willing to pay for one and not the other. Money talks, open source or not.

Money may talk, but you're asking it to speak gibberish. Again, there's no clear separation between OpenBSD and the OpenSSH subproject. The whole idea is like telling a C++ programmer that you want him to work on function foo(), but not class Bar which it's a part of.

Re:Congratulations to the Mozilla Foundation

[Kelson]

1. Given that Mozilla does acutlaly have a revenue stream in addition to donations, what makes you think that $10K is all redirected donations?

2. Given that "the Mozilla project uses SSH extensively for various purposes, including securing connections to the Mozilla CVS repository," perhaps supporting further development of OpenSSH might be considered important for continued development of the browser?

What about other uses of money that aren't directly "improving the browser?" Would it be acceptable for MoFo to buy new servers for download mirrors? Support forums? How about Windows licenses or Mac hardware for development workstations, build boxes, and QA?

3. While we're at it, what is it with the donate-but-with-strings-attached attitude these days?

Hypocrisy considered harmful.

[44BSD]

I seem to recall RMS getting a 'genius grant' a while back. IIRC, those grants come with no strings, not traceability, and aren't conditional upon the recipient being tax-exempt. Basically, the idea seems (I know this sounds nutty) that people who are passionate about something and have made it their life's work will take such gifts in the spirit intended by the giver.

Now, I may be wrong, but I do not recall a flamefest back then about how that anticapitalist hippie Stallman would just spend the money on pizza and T-shirts. Why is it, then, that when the Mozilla group seeks to fund OpenSSH, the standard seems to be different?

Re:Contribution made to OpenSSH or OpenBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

How much does OpenBSD donate to the third party software devs that they use?

The system includes the following major components from outside suppliers:

        * X.Org 6.9.0 (+ patches, and i386 contains XFree86 3.3.6 servers (+ patches) for legacy chipsets not supported by X.Org)
        * Gcc 2.95.3 (+ patches) and 3.3.5 (+ patches)
        * Perl 5.8.6 (+ patches)
        * Apache 1.3.29, mod_ssl 2.8.16, DSO support (+ patches)
        * OpenSSL 0.9.7g (+ patches)
        * Groff 1.15
        * Sendmail 8.13.4, with libmilter
        * Bind 9.3.1 (+ patches)
        * Lynx 2.8.5rel.4 with HTTPS and IPv6 support (+ patches)
        * Sudo 1.6.8p9
        * Ncurses 5.2
        * Latest KAME IPv6
        * Heimdal 0.7 (+ patches)
        * Arla 0.35.7
        * Binutils 2.15 (+ patches)
        * Gdb 6.3

Re:Mozilla - "OpenSSH" - Beer! Laundry Time!

[thc69]

The rest of your post makes a lot of sense. If you're correct that donation checks are written to Theo personally, then that's rather icky and would discourage me if I was inclined to donate.

However, posting

Now, you don't have to ask around much to find out how that money is handled. Hell, some of it seems to literally go under his mattress.

without backing it up is kinda trollish. I'd be interested in seeing the information whose existence is implied by that statement.

Pro rata donations?

[massysett]

So IBM, Red Hat, Novell, etc. don't give to Open BSD, even though they use OpenSSH. I say, SO WHAT? Are they supposed to give pro rata to every software project they use? We could go down a list asking if they gave money to a whole bunch of projects: Gnome, KDE, GNU, X.org are some big ones. There are tons of other ones too: Vorbis, PHP, and who knows what else.

IBM, Red Hat, Novell, etc. already contribute to open source. Red Hat pays kernel devs! Novell has worked on XGL. If OpenSSH developers all suddenly decided to quit because of IBM, Red Hat, Novell, etc's lack of generosity, gratitude, and groveling, then someone would pick up the development and maintenance of this critical project. But I don't care if these giants don't give one dime to OpenSSH. They can only be expected to do what is in their best interest, and apparently they've decided that doesn't include giving to OpenSSH. I don't see why they should be expected to make pro rata contributions to every one of the THOUSANDS of open source projects that comprise any Linux distribution.

Create nonprofit openBSD for nothing ..

[Blu-Ray]

Software Freedom Conservancy offers nonprofit umbrella to free and open source projects

see this groklaw page for entire article http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200604011 21120517 [groklaw.net]

Here's yet another creative idea to protect FOSS developers. The Software Freedom Law Center has launched the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is designed to permit certain projects accepted as members, such as Wine, uClibc and BusyBox currently, to apply for and then benefit from nonprofit tax-exempt status. The Conservancy does all the onerous paperwork needed to set it up and run that way.

It does the paperwork and it provides the umbrella. It will file one tax return covering all members' projects, and it will handle the other corporate and tax issues that are associated with becoming a nonprofit and then operating as one, as well as holding project assets and managing them as the project directs. That leaves projects members free to code. It's a free service, if your project is accepted as a member.