Slashdot Story Helps Raise $43,200 For the FreeBSD Foundation In Three Days 84
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Foundation has posted blog article article talking about the remarkable surge in donations they've received in the last three days following a recent Slashdot article reporting on weak fundraising this year. Deb Goodkin reports that the FreeBSD Foundation, as with many non-profits, receives more than 50% of its annual funds at the end of the US tax year, but that the Foundation has never seen this rate of donations before, and will hit a new record for unique donors this year. She comments that it was Slashdot readers that made the difference! She does, however, appeal for further donations noting that they have a long way to go on their full goal."
Two Great Tastes, Even Better Together! (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdot and FreeBSD: after all, no one wants to die alone. ;-)
"Pssssst! Hey, buddy! Can I interest you in a vintage Net 4 tape? Real cheap for a collector's item like this. I'll even throw in a QIC-2 tape reader and a 'I'm Mentally Contaminated' button, just for you..."
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Your humor detector is malfunctioning. That probably because it was made in Chine - and has no "satire" spectrum.
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BSD is dying.
etc.
Two Great Tastes, Even Better Together! (Score:1)
Slashdot and FreeBSD: after all, no one wants to die alone.
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Slashdot and BSD both have to catch up to Usenet in time awaiting impending doom, as Usenet has been dying for 20 years.
--
BMO
P.S. An example of how crowdsourcing works: http://www.youtube.com/watc [youtube.com] h?v=R6Z7xceSLy4
Be sure to watch to the end.
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The use of phrases such as "reasonable people like me" usually indicates that the speaker is not a reasonable person.
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Re:Slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)
Being posted on Hacker News and Reddit and a few other sites probably had a much larger impact. Slashdot ceased being relevant about a decade ago.
I see statcounter in the page source. I'd guess they know where their traffic is coming from.
Exaggeration (Score:4, Interesting)
Not sure that I agree with the implied attribution to Slashdot. As the Hacker News [ycombinator.com] discussion revealed, the usual pattern of donations to FreeBSD is a late surge, apart from the fact that it got coverage in other places.
It would be nice if Slashdot dropped the self references, as it erodes its credibility.
Re:Exaggeration (Score:5, Funny)
Not sure that I agree with the implied attribution to Slashdot. As the Hacker News [ycombinator.com] discussion revealed, the usual pattern of donations to FreeBSD is a late surge, apart from the fact that it got coverage in other places.
It would be nice if Slashdot dropped the self references, as it erodes its credibility.
Slashdot has credibility?
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Not sure that I agree with the implied attribution to Slashdot. As the Hacker News discussion revealed, the usual pattern of donations to FreeBSD is a late surge, apart from the fact that it got coverage in other places.
It would be nice if Slashdot dropped the self references, as it erodes its credibility.
Slashdot has credibility?
No. Slashdot had credibility, but that was years ago. For the last 10 or more years it has been a place to find out what conservatives think about technology, and in the past 3-4 years it has added on the new goal of providing the most up-to-the-minute news on all things facebook.
Credibility was never profitable. That said, they didn't become profitable after they jettisoned their credibility, either, but they felt they had to try something.
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For the last 10 or more years it has been a place to find out what conservatives think about technology
I don't want to start a fight about peoples political views, but the only time that's the case is as intentional fodder. There's virtually nothing in the way of dissenting opinion on slashdot, which is very far left when compared to the rest of the US. The few that do turn up and offer meek resistance are quickly buried.
Re:Exaggeration (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry to derail your point a bit but the rest of the world is very far left compared to the US.
What the US calls left and right the rest of the world calls right and far right.
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No. Slashdot had credibility, but that was years ago.
Maybe Slashdot has less credibility with you, but it has steadily been gaining more credibility with everyone else to the point where news outlets regularly cite it today.
Credibility was never profitable.
I guess there are two kinds of lies, registrars and damn_registrars. That's an incredibly ridiculous thing to say. Credibility brings eyeballs and eyeballs drive impressions.
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No. Slashdot had credibility, but that was years ago.
Maybe Slashdot has less credibility with you, but it has steadily been gaining more credibility with everyone else
Wow, someone woke up on the pissy side of the bed this morning?
And how do you know that everyone else views it as being increasing in credibility?
to the point where news outlets regularly cite it today.
I don't know what news outlets you look at, but the ones I watch often scoop slashdot to the news. While slashdot is - and pretty well always has been - a news aggregator rather than a news site in it's own right, it fails to be even close to the first aggregator to pick up on most stories now.
I guess there are two kinds of lies, registrars and damn_registrars. That's an incredibly ridiculous thing to say.
Indeed, what you just said was incredibly ridiculous.
Credibility brings eyeballs and eyeballs drive impressions.
No, stateme
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Credibility brings eyeballs and eyeballs drive impressions.
No, statements do not need to be credible to bring eyeballs
No, but sites do. Unfortunately, many people are poor at separating credible from incredible information. One of the less credible memes commonly spread here on slashdot today is that slashdot was once of higher quality. To that I say lawl roffle, roffle lawl, et cetera.
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It's acknowledged by the linked blog post, so the self-reference is perfectly valid and proper:
"We were thus surprised by coverage on Slashdot and Hacker News suggesting that we were behind in our fundraising goal ... The response to those articles was a remarkable outpouring of support — we have had over 650 new donations in the last three days alone, raising $43,196. ... This massive increase in small donations will set a new record for individual donors in a single year. The readership of these s
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying (Score:1, Troll)
Honestly, how can we have a BSD post and NOT have the "BSD is Dying" meme?
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by faili
Re:It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dyin (Score:5, Informative)
http://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying [everything2.com]
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Is this the same post from 2004 or did you edit it before you reposted it?
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Nope. He's just an automaton and the post is hard coded as a constant.
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That meme is dead. Netcraft comfirms it.
Article down - full article text (Score:1)
Man, it's been a long time since the last proper Slashdotting. Anyway the server seems slow, so here's the article text.
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*Stunning News Website Fundraising Contribution:* Over 650 new donations raise $43,200 in three days!
Astute readers of our blog know that The FreeBSD Foundation's annual year-end fundraising drive began last week. Every year over 50% of our donations arrive during this campaign. We were thus surprised by coverage on Slashdot and Hacker News suggesting that we were behind in our fundr
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CmdrTaco has a small penis.
Did NetCraft confirm that?
I kind of figured that.. (Score:3)
I bookmarked their FreeBSD donation page so I could watch the thermometer go up(and hopefully reach the top). I made a donation too since I use FreeNAS and I'm going to solicit a friend to donate since he uses FreeNAS as well.
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Re:I kind of figured that.. (Score:4, Interesting)
The thermometer is updated manually, because some donations come via bank transfers, some via cheques, some via PayPal and some via DonateNow and automating all of those is a bit tricky. Currently, Deb goes through all of the donations by hand and updates the donors list and the title. Over the last two days, she's been completely swamped with the number of donations. The amount isn't totally unprecedented, but the number of individual donations is even larger than a few years ago when the Foundation put out the call for individual donors because they were in danger of losing their non-profit status because too much of their funding came from large corporate donations.
Also, while I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, much of the work on FreeNAS (and PC-BSD) is funded by iX Systems [ixsystems.com], so if you use either of these projects and are in a position to put any business their way, it would possibly have a larger impact. iX is on the donors' page as a gold sponsor, but that doesn't tell the whole story. As well as making a sizeable donation to the Foundation directly, they have matched funding on a couple of Foundation-sponsored projects this year, so the total amount that they've given is considerably more (not to mention employing several people to work full-time on FreeBSD).
Slashdot editor arrogance (Score:2, Insightful)
It takes a lot of arrogance to assume that Slashdot alone was the reason for those donations. It's okay to take some credit, but I read about this issue on Hacker News and other outlets a full day before I read it on Slashdot.
Re:Slashdot editor arrogance (Score:5, Informative)
Read the summary at least troll, a FreeBSD rep reported that the income was from the slashvertisement based on actual data, like you know ... referrer headers.
The brunt of BSD donations comes from larger organizations, but it certainly did result in some contributions.
Re:Whatever happened to the slashdot? (Score:5, Funny)
Whatever happened to the frantic efforts to post anti-anything-but-linux rants
Wha? We hate everything. Most of all technology. Facebook, iphones, raspberry pi's, 3d printing, your favorite distro, medical technology, the maker movement, twitter, Nasa and Spacex, Arduinos, UAV's, gaming consoles... even Slashdot itself. We really like to hate Slashdot.
So tune in tomorrow, there will be plenty of bitching and whining about everything. It'll be very emo... I promise.
Not to beat a dead... (Score:2)
Operating system... just kidding, I am fully aware it is alive and well and doing great things...
HOWEVER, it would make more sense and get them MORE DONATIONS if the giant "Donate" button on the top of the page ACTUALLY took you to the place/page you can make a donation instead of some monotonous page about their good works and why you should donate.
Just sayin', but the obligitory dead os thing was funny.
I keep being told (Score:2)
Correlation != Causation
Re:I keep being told (Score:5, Informative)
That's why they looked at referrer headers to see where the people who's been donating were coming from...
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Yep, a good thing happened.
I don't get why there is so much trolling on this story.
FreeBSD 10 will change fortunes for the FreeBSD (Score:1)
The FreeBSD is a great operating system that we use in our desktops, laptops and servers. The upcoming FreeBSD 10 will be a great OS for specially for desktops and laptops with high end graphics. The FreeBSD foundation should pay more attention for desktop/laptop requirements of the FreeBSD OS, especially in graphics and power management sector, such as offer a solution to support hybrid switchable graphics such as Nvidia's Optimus, etc. And also should allocate more resources to release FreeBSD 10 as early
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i would've expected more from slashdot readers... much more. $43k raised from slashdot traffic is an embarrassment to this site.
Given the poor economy and the fact that a lot of really good people are unemployed or underemployed $43k for one story is really good going.
So many better uses for this kind of money... (Score:1)
For example, if ReactOS was getting this kind of funding, we would have a complete open source windows clone by now.
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Just Donated (Score:3)
My reasons are 1) I think the BSD license is awesome, 2) SSH rocks, and 3) OS diversity is a good thing.
Openoffice (Score:2)