OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt told iTWire that like in the case of other companies which made donations, the money would pass through the foundation to projects, based on needs.

OpenBSD is one of three UNIX-like operating systems that have forked from the BSD developed in the 1980s. It has a very good reputation for security and runs some of the websites with the longest uptimes.

The Microsoft contribution followed an announcement by the company's PowerShell team that they would offer support for OpenSSH, which is a project also run by OpenBSD.

"The type of not-for-profit the OpenBSD Foundation is does not accept 'goal-targeted' contributions, because they would require separate accounting from contribution through to spend. As a result, by the time this contribution reaches OpenBSD, it will be money, just like all the other contributions."

Microsoft and other proprietary software companies like to use software released under the BSD licence because it allows them to do what they want with the code, including locking it away, without any disclosure. Licences like the GPL do not offer this degree of freedom.

"In my role, I spend to make problems go away, but beforehand the OpenBSD Foundation and I will have liaisoned to ensure it becomes a budget item for them," De Raadt said. "Conflict of interest problems are avoided through this structure."

He said Microsoft needed and wanted SSH support in their software stack. This had been published on the Microsoft blog sites, and created some waves about six weeks ago.

SSH or Secure Shell is a program used to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and secure communications over insecure channels. OpenSSH is a free implementation of the program and ie very widely used across different platforms.

"Our goal at OpenBSD and OpenSSH has always been to build great, gutsy software bits so that any and all can adopt them, no matter who they are, rather than having them do fresh rewrites," De Raadt said. "If a SSH stack was written from scratch today, it would take a half a decade to remove the bugs."

He said the money from Microsoft did not pay for OpenSSH help and there was no connection.

"However, for the last few months core OpenSSH developers have been giving them small tidbits of advice, mostly about coding strategies which we hope will result in the common OpenSSH base working on Windows, rather than a fork. Microsoft apparently does not want a fork, either."