If he's asking for money from me, I would like to know why it's not an option. The root of the issue being raised is power/space, so I'd definitely want to know why I'm forking up for something the project could potentially get for free.
It's not a big deal, and I don't expect him to go into detail. He just won't get a cent from me without elaborating, and that's OK. I'm not mad, and I understand he has mis-givings. I just don't think that answer is acceptable enough for me to donate, but that's my subjective opinion (and not everyone else's).
> The more transparency you have in your discussion, the more supportive people will be.
I think that's total, obvious nonsense and if you need to be convinced, here's an exercise: consider how much money the average nonprofit would raise if people knew where all that money went.
That is a nice tool, thanks. Someone else posted something similar recently and it wanted to charge $250 for membership or something like that.
The web is bringing a lot of good transparency to nonprofits but there's still a lot of repugnant wastefulness and avarice that often isn't captured well by a 990 form. (publishing salaries is pretty huge, though)
I stand by my point that the more a person learns about the average charity the less they're going to want to donate... transparency doesn't magically lead to supportiveness. And wanting a project to account for every watt of electricity is just completely silly.
edit: transparency is a way for better charities to look good relative to poor ones, yes, but all things being equal, it's a negative for fundraising: as with business and government, a lot of what goes on in ANY organization is ugly to look at and is bound to turn some people off. (none of that is an argument against transparency itself, let's just not kid ourselves about its usefulness for raising money)
The more transparency there is, the better the legitimate charities look and the less likely people are to throw money at what turn out to be obvious scams.
I get your point, but I think you're generally wrong. My criterion around that for donating is not, "Is this place perfect?" but "Is this place materially more screwed up than any other organization?"
I'm sure there are some people with unrealistic standards that would not donate at all. And I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that take advantage of a lack of transparency to do dubious things. But the solution to that is more transparency. And more analysis of the transparent information, so that people can easily contextualize it.
Which is the point exactly. People DO have confidence in the nonprofits they donate to. It might not be warranted at all, but the nonprofit has actively built confidence for their audience.
The average nonprofit isn't worthy of the money they get so unless you are trying to say OpenBSD is not worthy of the money and the only way they can get it is to hide the details then I don't get what your point is.
Probably, but then again if he wants my money he better explain why he needs it and how he's going to spend it, doesn't he?
That being said since OpenBSD is all about security maybe that's the reason they don't want to move the servers to some place where they won't be able to monitor physical access to the machines. That's pure speculation though.
If I'm donating I would like to know exactly where the money is going, and what options have already been explored. OpenBSD should have referenced, full documentation about these things if they want to maximize donations.
Apparently, there isn't very much documentation/open accounting, and they aren't willing to discuss options to reduce the bill. That doesn't inspire confidence.
> Apparently, there isn't very much documentation/open accounting, and they aren't willing to discuss options to reduce the bill. That doesn't inspire confidence.
It is a lot of work for a small team to itemize and publish every expense, but some rough breakdown of monthly expenses that my donation would be going towards would really help.
If their books are clean, this is actually pretty easy. Just pulling an annual operating budget should be much easier, if they have good financial practices and controls in place.
They're not looking for a lot of smaller donators in this specific instance (although I'm sure it's appreciated), but rather one large Canadian company to foot the bill and on that company's books for accounting purposes.
And suppose OpenBSD wanted to know exactly wtf you were planning on doing with OpenSSH after you downloaded it... what servers are you planning to connect to, what keys are you planning on using? You know, if you're going to use OpenSSH they want to know exactly what for. Just leaching off the project doesn't inspire confidence.
OpenBSD releases quality software that all of us use EVERY SINGLE DAY as far as I'm concerned Theo can take the money and buy a yacht with it as long as they keep doing what they are doing.
Yes he can(and probably should) buy a yacht. What you're missing though is that
by not being transparent they miss out on a lot more contributors. So it's not
a super smart move.
Also keep in mind that a lot of contributors might not use OpenBSD, yet they might
be interested in offering some small amount if they believe it's for a good cause
and they know where that money is going.
...there isn't very much documentation/open accounting...
So your feeling is similar to that toward a homeless dude? You'll give him a sandwich but not cash? If they're saying power is the shortfall, maybe we just need to buy them some solar panels or wind generators or something.
Not sure how much they are hiring developers. They said the number they need annually is more inline with $150,000. I'm not sure if that's in addition to current donations or total but you wouldn't be hiring many devs with $150k - $20k for power- wherever Theo needs.
Isn't he in a better position to decide what's unacceptable than you are?