OpenBSD out of financial trouble thanks to donations

In a week’s time, the OpenBSD project has raised enough money through donations to pay its electricity bill. A week ago, it looked as though the project would have to close its doors.

An electricity bill of 20,000 Canadian dollars, converted about 13,500 euros, for the servers of the OpenBSD project, seemed to kill the open source BSD variant just a week ago. The project suffered from ‘declining financing’, although it is not clear what caused this.

In a week, however, OpenBSD has collected 100,000 Canadian dollars, or almost 67,500 euros in donations; five times as much as it took to pay the bill. OpenBSD developer Bob Beck has announced this. “We’ve gone from a predicament to CAD 100,000 in pledges in a week,” Beck said. The project hopes to raise another half of that to pay its bills this year.

OpenBSD is a BSD fork focused on stability and security. The project never includes the most recent versions of software packages, to avoid security vulnerabilities. As a result, OpenBSD has relatively few serious security vulnerabilities, making it popular among server administrators.