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Businesses Operating Systems The Almighty Buck Unix BSD

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."
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FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50%

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  • by Melkman ( 82959 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @03:46PM (#42235567)

    Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

  • by urbanriot ( 924981 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @03:52PM (#42235621)
    Since we made the switch to FreeBSD in 2004, providing various services such as proxying web usage or web access logging for corporations, we've never even considered another OS as it's been a rock solid performer. Thousands of users in various locations are relying on our systems and despite inept people accidentally unplugging some of them, failed UPS', failed hard drives, they ruggedly truck on without issue.

    Hopefully the front page posting will encourage other FreeBSD users to donate. There's certainly more servers in production, especially some of the more reliable ones, that are using FreeBSD according to Netcraft.
  • Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)

    by _Stryker ( 15742 ) <sean@@@linuxbox...org> on Sunday December 09, 2012 @03:57PM (#42235667)
    You mean a link like this one: http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1082/ [apple.com]
  • by Zenin ( 266666 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @04:28PM (#42235925) Homepage

    http://www.freebsd.org/donations/ [freebsd.org]

    Great start! The home page has a Donate link at the top, it takes you to a clear, simple URL.

    Then it all falls apart...

    95% of the page is about everything other then cash donations. The simple PayPal Donate button? No where to be found. The Network For Good Donate link? Again, AWOL. In fact there is only one small paragraph buried 2/3rds of the way down the page about cash donations...and it just tells you to visit the FreeBSD Foundation page. Even worse, it doesn't link you to the Foundation's Donation page...it links you to the home page where you again, need to dig down and find the real donations page.

    Stick the PayPal Donate box (found here [freebsdfoundation.org]) on the top of the main FreeBSD.org page and I guarantee they'll easily quadruple their donations without doing anything else whatsoever.

    I love, love, LOVE FreeBSD, but yah...they've never been particularly good at tooting their own horn. :-/

  • by stephanruby ( 542433 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @04:45PM (#42236085)

    Also considering that the year is not over yet, and that a third of the money usually gets raised during the last month of the year, I'd say their fundraising effort is still going pretty smoothly.

    For 2011, we set a fundraising goal of $400,000 with a spending budget of $350,000. As of this publication we have raised $210,000. By this time last year, we had raised $195,000, but ended the year raising a total of $325,000. We are hoping that you, the FreeBSD community, will help us finish the year strong by making a donation this month. http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2011Dec-newsletter.shtml#Fundraising [freebsdfoundation.org]

    Who wants to bet that this year, they'll have fundraised $400,000 by the deadline, and that for next year -- they'll raise the target to $650,000.

  • Misleading Story (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zamphatta ( 1760346 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @04:48PM (#42236117) Homepage
    A quick Google reveals that FreeBSD's "Year-End Fundraising Campaign" was only recently announced, on December 5th [twitter.com]. So, naturally, they won't be all that close to their goal by December 9th.
  • by 1s44c ( 552956 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @05:52PM (#42236639)

    Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

    I know from personal experience that at least some big mega-corps do give stuff back to the BSD's.

    I worked at a place that spent loads of money improving one of the BSDs. They gave back everything for the purely selfish reason that they could either keep maintaining their changes at a high cost or send the changes to the project and get maintance for free. The improvements to the BSD were publicly known but who funded them never was.

  • Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Informative)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @07:00PM (#42237177)

    GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999). [wikipedia.org]

    The previous license, just above the paragraph in the Wikipedia link you provided, is basically the same and pre-dates 1988 - BSD was initially released in 1977. As a user of 4.3BSD (yes, I'm old) I remember that BSD was available to pretty much anyone with a few buck for a tape and postage. My university used it while I was there from 1981-87.

    The main objection to the older license was the "advertising clause" (below), which does NOT actually restrict use of the software:

    3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
    This product includes software developed by the .

  • by imp ( 7585 ) on Sunday December 09, 2012 @09:07PM (#42237989) Homepage

    Having worked on FreeNAS and its commercial counterpart, I can tell you that iX Systems, the folks behind FreeNAS, give quite a lot back to FreeBSD. There is much code flowing back into the project from them, they sponsor many FreeBSD developers to attend various events, they leverage their buying power to get cheap/free servers for the project.

    Juniper Networks did a port of FreeBSD to mips, and contributed it back, as well as substantial support for different arm and PowerPC platforms.

    Yahoo has contributed many things back to the project over the years.

    And the lest goes on and on. There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the community, the corporations that use it and the project. To speak otherwise shows a woeful ignorance of reality.

  • Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Informative)

    by ilguido ( 1704434 ) on Monday December 10, 2012 @11:21AM (#42242415)
    No, that's a link to all the open source software included in MacOSX, or are you telling me that Apple developed OpenAL, zlib and SQLite (among many others)? Not to mention that all that APSL software is GPL incompatible, DFSG incompatible and, ironically enough, BSD incompatible. Nice try though.

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