I will make a more detailed and public statement after May, but right now, let me give you a summary so you can draw your own conclusions.
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The OpenBSD project does not exist as a legal entity and all funding is handled through the Computer Shop of Calgary. They produce the CDs and sell them to resellers like me.
I place orders for CDs and they send me an invoice. After I pay the invoice, some money goes to Theo, who is employed by the Computer Shop of Calgary. So he gets a wage that allows him to live his life according to the style he prefers: hack on OpenBSD, mountain bike, and climbing mountains, in that order.
There is no other way to get money to Theo officially, unless you donate in the Paypal or Canadian credit card account. But Theo does not issue receipts or invoices, so as a company you are limited to buying CDs.
The OpenBSD foundation is only able to cash a limited amount of (preferably) big donations per year but their bylaws prevent them from paying out wages to Theo. They can pay for expenses (leased lines, electricity) and hackathons, but not provide a fixed income.
This also means the project has no PR division or budget for PR or doing events. They basically depend on volunteers to step in and promote OpenBSD. I had done a couple of small events in 1999 and decided that I could contribute to the popularity of OpenBSD by presenting it at as many events as possible. So I approached Theo and he referred me to Austin who started to sell me CDs. Originally I imported the T-shirts from Canada but that proved to be too expensive due to transport and import taxes. I have produced all the textile here locally in Europe since the '3head shirt'. I also produced posters (the 100 x 70 cm ones) and various things like some of the stickers you might have seen around (like in the 4.3 CD). All this inventory is stored at my house, over 12.000 pieces stock.
Most of the CDs I resell are sold to resellers in Europe, mostly bookstores, at the 60% reduced price. Anybody can buy CDs in Canada at 60% of the official price and resell them at whatever price they want (minimum order is 20 CDs). Leftover CDs can be returned and exchanged for new releases.
To compensate for transport to Europe, exchange rate fluctuation and general damaged goods (broken tabs anyone?), the rate I negotiated was lower than the 60% discounted price, but always more than the production costs so that the Computer Shop of Calgary would never make extra costs on our behalf. The understanding was that the 'leftover money', the difference between what I paid and the discounted price, would be spent on OpenBSD activities in Europe. (Note that I say 'understanding' as there has never been a contract, email or letter specifying the details.)
These could be: buying hardware for developers, paying their travel, hotel costs for hackathons, ... Basically whatever Theo emailed me, I paid out. To give you an idea, this is a break-down per year of how much was (estimated) paid: (details available on request)
2001: EUR 4935.64 2002: EUR 8676.21 2003: EUR 7640.16 2004: EUR 16388.64 2005: EUR 7651.06 2006: EUR 10630.27 2007: EUR 13787.78 2008: EUR 71.13This list is far from complete as it does not include all hardware that was donated to developers, some of the paperwork is still pending. Also it's near impossible to calculate the costs for carting around vax and mvme machines and just event traveling. The only exact number I have is the total amount of km driven with our company vehicle: 200k km. The costs here for petrol, insurance and maintenance can be calculated betwen EUR 0.45 and 0.50 / km. Hotel costs per year can be found in our company balance sheets.
All the invoices I got from the Computer Shop were paid and on top of that, I paid for developer expenses.
The rest of the money was spent on organizing presences at events, I did a lot of conferences, most are listed on http://www.openbsd.org/events.html
Some money was spent on stickers, flyers, posters, ... to give away. Each release we also paid extra for the UPS express shipping of those who preordered their CDs first, to make sure they got them early.
My view was to invest all the money in OpenBSD to promote OpenBSD. From 2000 to 2005 I ran this as a side business, not taking any wages. From 2006 on I became full time self-employed and got paid the legal minimum to be covered by social security.
As long as I broke even at the end of the year, I was happy to continue. Here is an overview of our company balance sheets:
Overview 2007 Overview 2006 Overview 2005 Overview 2004 Overview 2003 Overview 2002
As you can see I have run up a deficit of EUR 230.000 due to overspending, some of that money is covered by our large stock of textile and leftover CDs. Pouring money into the project has not made me or my company rich.
But our efforts paid of and OpenBSD enjoys a pretty good project reputation, attracting users and developers in Europe. Everybody was happy and nobody ever questioned the strategy. But then the relationship turned sour. Of course money was the main dispute...
Because CD sales continued to decrease, in 2007 Austin and I figured out that to continue to pay for Theo's wages, I would have to pay up the full 60% price for the CDs. Since 4.1, I pay the full price, but due to the weak $CAD, it turned out that I could still resell CDs to resellers without making a loss. In the meantime, the spending on hackathons and such continued.
More money was requested. Theo refused any expenses made for events done in the past, claiming that I should have covered that out of my own pocket. It would have been nice to know that 7 years earlier... then at least I could have put that money into an account (minus the 40% that government takes of course). He wanted me to "unspend" the money and get it as back-pay. Have you ever seen a supplier telling you that he wants more money for goods delivered 9 years ago? I agreed to pay up as much as OpenBSD brought in, as long as I don't make a loss on it, I could keep supporting the project that way, I thought. Being nice to people always pays off in the long run. Right?
The tactics changed: For 4.3, the CD delivery at the very last moment was blocked and CDs were only shipped to me after I paid up an extra EUR 7.000. As I had already taken all the pre-orders, I could not refuse this.
For 4.4, I had to prepay the money for the CDs before the pre-sales went online, instead of paying the CDs when they shipped from the factory. As Theo makes each time earlier and earlier pre-sales, it caught me by surprise, and since the CAD money I had set aside was locked in a one month term deposit, the money would be released on the 18th, two weeks before it was needed in Canada. So the pre-orders were blocked until the 9th of September. This decreased our CD sales even more reducing my OpenBSD budget.
For 4.5, I thought to be better prepared so I wired EUR 20.000 to the Computer Shop of Calgary account before anybody even asked me (I haven't gotten the proforma invoice yet). With a bit of luck by the time 4.5 would officially ship, the extra orders could have brought in EUR 10.000 that I planned on wiring in May to further fund the project. The day the money arrived, Theo decided to suspend the European orders and send me no CDs or artwork. Note the choice of going public not before the pre-orders but after 252 people have already placed and paid their orders, essentially screwing all of them. Later he changed his mind and decided to send me some CDs, but it's not clear how many. In the meantime I have not had any communication or email explaining what the deal is.
The suspension of the ordering site was not discussed or announced to me. I had to read it in cvs commits like all of you.
To add insult to injury, Theo had first removed my cvs account. This means I no longer have access to the script that runs the ordering site and for every single modification I need to go through Bob. Now Bob is a nice guy but he's busy and it's impossible to get things done. So this posed loads of conflicts where I was looking for new ways to pressure Bob to get off his ass and *fix* problems (instead of being able to do it myself). A bit later, Theo removed my name from the announcement mails and classified me with the rest of defunct developers. I guess I'm in good company ;-)
List of payments made to the Computer Shop of Calgary for CD releases. The transaction of September 2008 is missing as that came from our CAD account, here and here is the payment proof.
| Release | Amount prepaid | # of CDs | CAD price/CD |
| 4.3 | EUR 39.000 = CAD 62k | 1100 CDs | CAD 56.73/CD |
| 4.4 | CAD 27.000 | 900 CDs | CAD 30.00/CD |
| 4.5 | EUR 20.000= CAD 33.786 | 800 CDs | CAD 42.23/CD |
T-shirts have been shipping since Thursday. CDs, I've been promised (on the phone) that the 800 I paid should ship out. Posters: no clue yet.
As a customer, you are of course 100% covered and if you want to cancel your order, contact me for a full refund. If there are items I can't deliver, I will give you a full refund for those items. Email me at wim@kd85.com or call me at +32 478 21 73 55 if you have questions.
Let's make it clear, that this is not how I prefer to do business. A long term relationship like this should be based on clear arrangements and trust. Not strong-arming and FUD. In the last year, I have gone to lengths to clear out this mess: I shipped back $CAD 50.000 worth of old CDs for refund, CAD 110.000 of expenses were filed and I've overpaid the CD price.
A major problem is that I never got valid invoices for all the payments done where we paid more than $CAD 30/CD. The IM4 import documents declare $CAD 30 but the invoices for the additional invoices for 4.1 and 4.2 release never materialised.
There are no open invoices or balance sheets to to show a deficit. If I'm "fallen ridiculously far behind in A/R" then show those figures.
It would be logical that if I did owe immense amounts of money, I would continue to generate income for the project, to pay up the debts. It took 7 years to build them up, according to Theo's view, so I guess might take another 7 years to pay them off. But that is out of the question now, it seems.
There are no winners here. None of the parties involved has anything to gain by the way this has played out.
I'm stuck here with over 12.000 pieces of textile, if anybody feels the urge to become the next distributor for Europe, contact me, you can have the lot.
If you have questions of what happened in the last 9 years and if I'm such an evil guy, ask any (European) developer who has worked with me and went to events. Don't take my word for it that I've been trying to do the right thing. If anybody has any complaints or questions of how I handled things in the past, talk to me.
What really is incredible is that a large project like OpenBSD can operate like this, without any transparency in what money comes in and where it all goes. People have spent an incredible amount of time, competence and money on OpenBSD but nobody knows where the CD and donation money ends up. Conveniently, no records are ever published. Not about CD sales, expenses paid, wages or hackathons.
Now Theo claims *I* kept donation money while all of it was transferred to his German IBAN account. Some of the donation money went to Marco Peereboom's private account in Netherlands (for hardware purchases), some went to funeral costs (Itojun).
30/01 EUROPESE OVERSCHRIJVING O.G.V. VAN 31-01 30,00+
D.S.W. MUSULIN
UNDEALY.ORG (MARCO PEEREBOOM) DELL SERVER HW RAI
D DONATION
31/01 EUROPESE OVERSCHRIJVING O.G.V. VAN 01-02 350,00+
J H VAN DIETEN
OPENBSD PCIE RAID FUND DRIVEJOCHEM
06/02 EUROPESE OVERSCHRIJVING NAAR 05-02 380,00-
MARCO PEEREBOOM
FOR RAID HARDWARE
All donations that came in (IBAN transfer and credit card) were transferred to Theo and I have all the transaction receipts.
Very bummed out and annoyed,
Wim.
PS: if you try to email me, be patient, I'll be offline for the rest of the week.