What if someone else told you that if you use bsdiff you should donate to FreeBSD?
Keep in mind that Theo is not the author of OpenSSH.
are you seriously implying that theo is not one of the authors of openssh? or that the other authors of the code don't agree with him on where donations should go?
direct commits, not including ok's on reviewed code:
jcs@air:/usr/src/usr.bin/ssh> cvs log | grep 'author: ' | sed -e 's/.*author: //' -e 's/;.*//' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
cvs server: Logging .
[...]
174 provos
203 itojun
303 jmc
368 dtucker
882 miod
1098 stevesk
1234 deraadt
1417 jason
1623 brad
1765 djm
3827 markus
OpenSSH is brought to you by Markus Friedl, Niels Provos, Theo de Raadt, Kevin Steves, Damien Miller, Darren Tucker, Jason McIntyre, Tim Rice and Ben Lindstrom.
It depends how you define "author". Personally I would say that at this point OpenSSH has two authors -- markus and djm -- and a number of minor contributors. Looking at 'cvs annotate', I see that markus committed 42.6% of the LOC and djm committed 32.8% of the LOC, while nobody else was higher than 6.3%. Sure, LOC isn't a very good metric, but within a single project, with everybody using the same language, a 5x gap is significant.
If you look at who is currently working on OpenSSH, the numbers are even more dramatic: djm is responsible for over 80% of the LOC committed in 2010.
of course, because allocating a donation to a specific page would be nearly impossible. just as allocating openbsd donations to specific commits on src/usr.bin/ssh is difficult and not worth the time.
What Theo is would be like me saying "if you use bsdiff, you should pay me to work on FreeBSD" -- bsdiff is a small part of FreeBSD, and only a very small amount of the time I spend on FreeBSD is even remotely related to bsdiff.
if a critical component of my commercial product offering was bsdiff, i would certainly donate to freebsd (or wherever you directed donations, being the author) to see its continued development.