Background: Smartisan is an Android phone maker in China. Smartisan fans pay for admission tickets to attend Smartisan's new product release events, and Smartisan donates the ticket sales to an open source project. So far they've donated to OpenSSL ($160k), OpenBSD (CA$280k), and OpenResty (pending approval).<p>Edit: IIRC, Smartisan's first donation to OpenSSL happened right after HeartBleed.
Smartisan (the phone maker) is placed in the top level, called "Iridium". It's defined as $100,000 and above.<p>That level of donation used to be defined as $100,000 to $250,000. [0] The removal of the top limit could in theory mean that Smartisan actually donated more than $250,000.<p>[0] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161114061632/http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20161114061632/http://www.openbs...</a>
So Google donated to OpenBSD from 2012 to 2015 but not in 2016 (or less than $5000), interesting.<p>They seem to be their only long term recurrent donor.<p>Edit: Actually they are just part of the Core Infrastructure Initiative now <a href="https://www.coreinfrastructure.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.coreinfrastructure.org</a>
Its strange to see negativity to genuine support for open source projects. Instead of inventing conspiracy theories to try to explain away and diminish the donations perhaps it might be better to focus on the positive.<p>And maybe be try to understand why all the billion dollar companies so popular here rely on open source but do not seem to accomplish much beyond token gestures and posturing. Clearly Smartisan shows if there is a will you can do a lot. Maybe there is something to learn here that can lead to a positive change.<p>I think its beginning to look more and more like HN should stick strictly to VC and new tech stores. There is no social or moral dimension here to process any other information.
Considering few people here seems to have heard about Smartisan before this thread, I think we can agree that this sort of donation works very well for publicity among geeks.