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Romanian Bitcoin baron 'stumps up $20k to keep OpenBSD's lights on'

No word on whether he's paying their server 'leccy bill forever and ever, though

A mysterious Bitcoin-powered white knight is reported to have come to the rescue of the struggling OpenBSD Foundation.

Described as a Romanian billionaire, an individual named Mircea Popescu has offered to bail out the OpenBSD Foundation.

The Foundation responsible for maintaining OpenBSD is $20,000 in the red over an electricity bill for powering the servers which host the operating system.

As yet, Popescu does not feature on the OpenBSD list of “significant” Foundation sponsors.

In an IRC session on January 19 Popescu had asked how to make a donation. On a #Bitcoin-assets IRC here, he made a comment that’s been taken as read that he had donated. “And it pleases me to announce openbsd got itself sponsored,” he wrote.

Last week the OpenBSD Foundation said it would close down unless it received money to pay off their server ‘leccy bill. The group also asked for somebody to take permanent responsibility for picking up the tab.

“OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on,” OpenBSD developer Bob Beck said in an email to OpenBSD followers on January 14.

“We are looking at a significant shortfall for the upcoming year – meaning the project won’t be able to cover 20 thousand dollars in electrical expenses before being able to use money for other things. That sort of situation is not sustainable,” Beck wrote.

OpenBSD is important because it’s widely used in firewalls, other edge servers, email, DNS and intrusion detection servers for its security. Its base system includes a number of popular third-party packages such as SQLite, BIND, Sendmail and the Lynx web browser. ®

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