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The Almighty Buck Slashdot.org

Slashdot Story Helps Raise $43,200 For the FreeBSD Foundation In Three Days 84

Posted by samzenpus from the not-done-yet dept.
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."
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Slashdot Story Helps Raise $43,200 For the FreeBSD Foundation In Three Days More

Slashdot Story Helps Raise $43,200 For the FreeBSD Foundation In Three Days

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  • Exaggeration (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 13, 2012 @09:09PM (#42282909)

    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)

      by Nyder ( 754090 ) on Thursday December 13, 2012 @09:43PM (#42283183) Journal

      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?

      • 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.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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.

        • So why are you still here, let alone participating in the conversation?

        • 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.

          • 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

            • 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.

    • 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

  • 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

  • Article down - full article text (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Man, it's been a long time since the last proper Slashdotting. Anyway the server seems slow, so here's the article text.
    ---
    *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

  • I kind of figured that.. (Score:3)

    by cyberjock1980 ( 1131059 ) on Thursday December 13, 2012 @09:18PM (#42282995)

    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.

    • I did the same, as I had not much time when I saw the initial article, but forgot about it. Seeing this article made me go "Ooops, I wanted to give something... which I promptly did"

    • Re:I kind of figured that.. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Friday December 14, 2012 @04:35AM (#42284957) Journal

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • 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.

  • Correlation != Causation

    • Re:I keep being told (Score:5, Informative)

      by shutdown -p now ( 807394 ) on Friday December 14, 2012 @12:26AM (#42284111) Journal

      That's why they looked at referrer headers to see where the people who's been donating were coming from...

      • I am sure many of the die hard slashdoters use BSD. The old slashdot readers like myself were and still are linux and unix enthusiasts. The article helped a NON-PROFIT organization and slashdot got some positive press. Good for them. Web sites do have ways to track where site donations and site traffic comes from.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 1s44c ( 552956 )

          Yep, a good thing happened.

          I don't get why there is so much trolling on this story.

  • 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

    • Would rather have resources allocated to 9.1 which is a long-term support release that most institutional users of FreeBSD actually look to.

  • For example, if ReactOS was getting this kind of funding, we would have a complete open source windows clone by now.

  • Just Donated (Score:3)

    by TheNinjaroach ( 878876 ) on Friday December 14, 2012 @11:06AM (#42286805)
    I donated $30 last night after reading this article.

    My reasons are 1) I think the BSD license is awesome, 2) SSH rocks, and 3) OS diversity is a good thing.
  • Is the Openoffice suite already ported to LLVM? So you can use FreeBSD for OO.org headless servers?

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