On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 11:46:24AM -0600, Bob Beck wrote:
quoted text
> > (though i have to confess, i haven't made a donation since i upgraded
> > my gateway to 4.1 ... i have an excuse !!!  and it was only last week.
> > and i will)
> > 
> 
> 	And this is exactly the problem. Look, you guys can quibble
> all you want about "awww, we should be able to make our own distros"
> Yes, you can. 
> 
> 	However, you won't be able to make your own distro when OpenBSD
> ceases to exist for financial reasons. Free software still costs money
> to produce, and all the talk about "well I should donate" does not translate
> into dollars. 
> 
> 	Unless people buy CD's, you may not see future releases. it's that
> simple. We all love doing this, but without money to maintain a place to
> do it and someone to look over it, it isn't going to continue.  

That is blatant FUD. There are dozens of counterexamples of large-scale free
software projects which continue successfully without this sort of emotional
blackmail.

I would argue that OpenBSD is probably the least "free" of all the free Unix
options out there. Why?

* You cannot download an ISO image and burn it yourself.
* If you buy a CD-ROM, you cannot legally make copies to give to your
  friends, your school etc.

By this measure, OpenBSD is about as "free" as, say, Red Hat Enterprise
Linux.

Of course, if there were enough demand, someone would go and make their own
OpenBSD distribution with downloadable unencumbered ISO images built from
source - such as CentOS do with RHEL. Nobody says "don't use CentOS; you're
stealing money from those poor Red Hat guys who have put so much investment
into refining their product".

The reason nobody makes free OpenBSD ISO images, I presume, is because the
user base is comparatively tiny, and it's not worth the effort. And that in
turn is probably because OpenBSD turns people away with this sort of
nonsense.

FreeBSD used to have a similar model: you had to buy the CDs and you
couldn't copy them. They abandoned it several years ago, and have flourished
since. If they hadn't, they would have risked losing against the Linux tide.
They also risked losing high quality code contributors.

So if OpenBSD does come to an end, as you threaten, IMO it won't be because
people don't buy the CDs - it will be because it continues to cut itself off
from the mainstream and simply becomes irrelevant.

Regards,

Brian.