It's not a big deal, and I don't expect him to go into detail. He just won't get a cent from me without elaborating, and that's OK. I'm not mad, and I understand he has mis-givings. I just don't think that answer is acceptable enough for me to donate, but that's my subjective opinion (and not everyone else's).

The more transparency you have in your discussion, the more supportive people will be.

I think that's total, obvious nonsense and if you need to be convinced, here's an exercise: consider how much money the average nonprofit would raise if people knew where all that money went.

Because every US nonprofit is required by law to do that. You can browse it all on line: http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/990finder/

The web is bringing a lot of good transparency to nonprofits but there's still a lot of repugnant wastefulness and avarice that often isn't captured well by a 990 form. (publishing salaries is pretty huge, though)

I stand by my point that the more a person learns about the average charity the less they're going to want to donate... transparency doesn't magically lead to supportiveness. And wanting a project to account for every watt of electricity is just completely silly.

edit: transparency is a way for better charities to look good relative to poor ones, yes, but all things being equal, it's a negative for fundraising: as with business and government, a lot of what goes on in ANY organization is ugly to look at and is bound to turn some people off. (none of that is an argument against transparency itself, let's just not kid ourselves about its usefulness for raising money)

Transparency is critical.

I'm sure there are some people with unrealistic standards that would not donate at all. And I'm sure that there are plenty of organizations that take advantage of a lack of transparency to do dubious things. But the solution to that is more transparency. And more analysis of the transparent information, so that people can easily contextualize it.

That being said since OpenBSD is all about security maybe that's the reason they don't want to move the servers to some place where they won't be able to monitor physical access to the machines. That's pure speculation though.

Apparently, there isn't very much documentation/open accounting, and they aren't willing to discuss options to reduce the bill. That doesn't inspire confidence.

It is a lot of work for a small team to itemize and publish every expense, but some rough breakdown of monthly expenses that my donation would be going towards would really help.

OpenBSD releases quality software that all of us use EVERY SINGLE DAY as far as I'm concerned Theo can take the money and buy a yacht with it as long as they keep doing what they are doing.

Also keep in mind that a lot of contributors might not use OpenBSD, yet they might be interested in offering some small amount if they believe it's for a good cause and they know where that money is going.

So your feeling is similar to that toward a homeless dude? You'll give him a sandwich but not cash? If they're saying power is the shortfall, maybe we just need to buy them some solar panels or wind generators or something.