[nycbug-talk] OpenBSD 3.9 Pre-Orders

[Ray Lai]

OpenBSD 3.9 pre-orders are up!  Now is a good time to buy the CDs
and support the project.  CD sales have been weak recently, please
help out!  Attached are two letters of encouragement sent to misc@
earlier.

-Ray-

Subject:    pre-orders
From:       Theo de Raadt <deraadt () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2006-03-08 3:23:17

We have activated the pre-orders for OpenBSD 3.9...
More information can be found at

http://www.openbsd.org/39.html

There's a T-shirt and a poster too...

(The whole subject of the artwork will become more clear in a while,
as we make more of it available.... :)



Subject:    Pre-orders for our releases.
From:       Theo de Raadt <deraadt () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2006-03-08 21:55:33

I would like to remind our community that our project lives and
breathes because of the sale of CDs and the receipt of donations.  In
the last few years a few very large donations have allowed our
hackathons to happen, but other than that we are always digging
ourself a bigger and bigger hole.

Most of our user community increases their use of the FTP servers,
while we naturally sell fewer CDs.  For instance, I would approximate
that the sale of every T-shirt we make probably does not pay for the
electricity used in the machine room.  It's about $5000 a year.

This is placing a severe strain on our ability to toss money at
projects.  For instance, we want to hold more mini-hackathons, since
they are so incredibly productive.  And we would like to pay for more
travel expenses for developers to these events, since there are always
developers who are less fortunate.

Yet almost all of our donations really do come from individuals, and
almost none from companies using our software.  Even though there are
many many companies doing so.  Some companies are small, but there are
also quite large ones.  And banks.  Government institutions.  Ones you
see in the news every day.  And operating system vendors who reuse our
code.

But financially we are under strain, and it is not letting us grow any
of our bigger plans.  If anyone has any real clout to make changes
within institutions that could help us in the long term, please do.
Like universities, or even companies that want to sponsor an entire
hackathon.

(But please do not send suggestions, because unfortunately we think we
have heard every single one of them before, and people never listen
when we say that it is not viable for us to play non-profit games, nor
selling special merchandise, nor will it help to hire people to write
special books.  We've heard all these ideas before.  Having us impliment
more ideas does not help.  It's time for outsiders to impliment things
which just let us continue what we do).