pkgsrc-2006Q1 out

Joerg Sonnenberger forwarded along the announcement that the first quarterly release of pkgsrc for 2006 is out. Notably, there’s nearly 6,000 packages, and these two interesting tips:

As always, we’d like to encourage users of the packages collection to install and run pkgsrc/security/audit-packages at least every day – this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable to exploit.

We’d also really appreciate it if people would install the pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey package, and then run the pkgsurvey script for us. This will forward us a list of the packages installed on that machine, and the operating system and release level of the operating system. The results will be kept confidential, but the output will help us analyse the packages that are most used.

Bugs and fixes

Several FreeBSD security issues were found recently that also apply to DragonFly: ipsec (DragonFly fix), opie (DragonFly fix), and sendmail (DragonFly fix).  The fix for sendmail incidentally brings it to version 8.13.6.  David Rhodus has also started to bring in some applicable changes from NetBSD found by the Coverity scan.  (Coverity is apparently not accepting any new source collections to scan at this time, so we don’t get it directly.)

BSD and money

A recent post on undeadly.org highlights the need for OpenBSD to find new funding sources to support the various hackathons held around the world for OpenBSD. It appears that the normal funding source, selling CDs of each release of OpenBSD, has become much less lucrative. OpenBSD also has a donations page.

With the growth of broadband access, the need to order a separate CD has dwindled. It appears the OpenBSD Project is going to have to supply some different form of services in order to continue the same revenue stream. According to the article, they previously generated US $80,000 each year for the last two years, and still came up $20,000 short.

Along the same lines, the FreeBSD Foundation is accepting donations. According to the most recent newsletter, the Foundation is doing well enough that a part-time administrator has been brought in to handle affairs. The most recent Foundation newsletter does not describe their financial status in specific terms, other than to sound positive. The newsletter for 2004 shows a small loss.

NetBSD also has a non-profit Foundation, with donations possible. The most recent financial report for the NetBSD foundation shows a positive balance, and recent newsletters show 2005 went well.

What about DragonFly? DragonFly is not yet a non-profit, so there’s no direct place for donations to go, though there are requests for equipment that can be filled. Pretty much all costs for dragonflybsd.org come out of Matthew Dillon’s pocket. Given the relatively huge size of these other project’s budgets, Dragonfly appears to be doing well.