Fate has made me the “money guy” for OpenSSL so I’m going to talk about that for a bit.
As has been well reported in the news of late, the OpenSSL Software Foundation (OSF) is a legal entity created to hustle money in support of OpenSSL. By “hustle” I mean exactly that: raising revenue by any and all means[1]. OSF typically receives about US$2000 a year in outright donations and sells commercial software support contracts[2] and does both hourly rate and fixed price “work-for-hire” consulting as shown on the OSF web site. The media have noted that in the five years since it was created OSF has never taken in over $1 million in gross revenues annually.
Thanks to that publicity there has been an outpouring of grassroots support from the OpenSSL user community, roughly two hundred donations this past week[3] along with many messages of support and encouragement[4]. Most were for $5 or $10 and, judging from the E-mail addresses and names, were from all around the world. I haven’t finished entering all of them to get an exact total, but all those donations together come to about US$9,000.
OpenSSL uses a “give away code and charge for consulting” model that FSMLabs began with in 1999. We couldn’t make it work either.