The spectre of OpenBSD shutting down its operations has passed, with the OpenBSD Foundation announcing that so far, over CA$100,000 has been raised for the project — five times the amount of the annual CA$20,000 electricity bill that threatened to shut down the project.

"In a nutshell, we have in one week gone from being in a dire situation to having a commitment of approximately CA$100,000 in donations to the foundation," OpenBSD Foundation's Bob Beck said in a post to an OpenBSD mailing list. "From a developer's perspective, let me assure you that this reaffirms the worth of what we are supporting, and makes us want to work on it that much more.

"We would like to continue to build on your groundswell of support, and have set a target for CA$150,000 this year in fundraising."

As well as receiving donations from over 1,700 individual contributors, stepping up to the platewere Google and one Romanian BitCoin user who claimed credit for covering the CA$20,000 bill — the OpenBSD Foundation now lists MPEx Bitcoin stock exchange as a significant contributor.

The OpenBSD Foundation's contributor page shows that Google has helped fund OpenBSD for the past three years.