FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50% 245
TrueSatan writes "Perhaps a sign of our troubled times or a sign that FreeBSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs: the FreeBSD project has sought $500,000 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. But with the end of this year fast approaching, it has raised just over $280,000, far short of its target."
Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously you've never met me (well, most likely you haven't), but I used to use FreeBSD in the early-to-mid-2000s, back before I went to OS X. I always liked it a lot--more than any of the *nixes I used, with the possible exception of Arch.
Re:Is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Interesting)
My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?
Last year their target was $400k and they reached $426k so they're not intentionally making too ambitious targets. That this is an annual campaign and they're $146k short of matching last year indicates interest has dropped significantly. Looking at their donors it's now practically run by Netapp that's moved up to double platinum ($100k+), accounting for more than a third of their total donations. The more disturbing part for them should be that the donor [freebsdfoundation.org] list is much, much shorter than last year.
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
Either it is Opposite Day in whatever land you come from, or you are a total idiot who doesn't know up from down.
The overwhelmingly obvious trend in the last 12 years has been the decline of restrictively licensed ("copyLEFT") projects in favor of genuinely free ("copyFREE") [copyfree.org] software. There's a sole noteworthy exception [slashdot.org] to this rule trend, which is the software component that produces the greatest lock-in: the Linux kernel. (I suggest you read that last linked thread in full - it has many links to details.)
GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999 [wikipedia.org]). During that gap, Linux attracted a lot of attention, attained technological superiority, and, by the end of the century, it was considered the obvious choice in open source UNIX. Linux managed to capitalize on the collapse of proprietary UNIX and attract a lot of corporate support. It beats the BSD's on almost every performance benchmark. Kudos to Linus T - he got there first, made a thousand good decisions, and beat us fair and square!
But that doesn't mean Linux will remain the king of the mountain forever. Linux is being written by the very people who its license was designed to hurt! It is a loose alliance of corps mostly trying to undermine Microsoft, and this contradiction cannot last. Linus T made the right choice by not switching to the newer more-restrictive versions of GPL, which should buy it some more time. And its jack-of-all-trades approach, trying to be the ideal kernel for everything from nano to desktops to supercomputers, will catch up to it eventually.
See, sometime in the last few years, people actually started to pay attention to licensing, as the disadvantages of GPL started to become obvious. This resulted in a shift away from copyLEFT all across the board. Many projects switched licenses (ex. Ruby) and got a new lease on life, while in many software categories new copyFREE projects started to gradually suck away GPL's market share. At the turn of the millennium there were no decent copyFREE compilers, desktop environments, or Web browsers. Today we have Clang/LLVM, E17, and Chromium (well, almost - that's why I'd rather use Opera for now). In the most competitive categories, like scripting languages and Web servers, GPL is almost entirely dead. PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, etc are gradually squeezing MySQL. The HTML5 stack's gains are the loss of GTK/Qt/wx/etc, as well as of FFMPEG. FreeBSD is just about finished scraping off the last remnants of copyLEFT, which would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago - now finally I can run a complete UNIX system without any GNU!
This trend is going to continue - gradually, patiently, at times with a few steps back and sideways, but moving forward in aggregate nonetheless. History takes time to play out. Maybe it will be Haiku on portable devices, and/or DragonFly BSD on large servers, and/or a completely new copyFREE OS that's yet to be initiated. Maybe the copyFREE champion Google will pull something out of its sleeve. But, sooner or later, the Penguin Empire will fall!
--libman
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Interesting)
The BSD community must offer more assistance. As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second. If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.
FreeBSD has native ZFS which is the one reason I'm using it at home. I thought FreeBSD could act as a xen dom0 but it seems You are right, it can't.
FreeBSD is a very nice OS and much more consistent as a whole system than any Linux distribution.
Re:Never met anyone who uses it. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second.
It's already on its way. http://bhyve.org/ [bhyve.org]
FreeBSD and Debian (Score:2, Interesting)