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."
Obligatry Response with slight disgust (Score:5, Insightful)
a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs
Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.
...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.
Is this newsworthy? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Not to late (Score:2, Insightful)
You know it is not too late to chip in. Fortunately 2012 isn't over yet.
Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust (Score:5, Insightful)
a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs
Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.
...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.
Emphasis mine. That's only your definition of strong. Have you considered the fact that maybe, just maybe, some people might not have the same definition as yours?
Reallocate and re-prioritize. (Score:3, Insightful)
...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.
Hmm...
Problem solved.
Re: Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
While I agree with the last two sentences, it's worth noting two points which undercut your first two sentences rather dramatically:
(1) Taking BSD-licensed code and making a proprietary fork doesn't make the previous release magically go away; it makes a new fork. If I love the open source editor FooEdit and FooEdit has a vibrant community around it, then somebody else comes along and starts selling BarEdit based on their proprietary, closed source fork, I can either choose to switch to BarEdit and accept the risks, or keep using FooEdit. (And arguably that's not a binary proposition in the first place: I can switch to BarEdit and then switch back to FooEdit.) The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software. Furthermore, you can hardly point to BarEdit and say, "those cool BarEdit-only features would be in FooEdit if only it had been under the GPL"; the more likely case is that BarEdit would simply never have existed.
(2) While the anonymous coward who responded with "ROFL" was perhaps unduly acerbic, his point is correct: an end user who can't debug and patch code is dependent on the developers to fix bugs regardless of the license the software she's using is under. As much as people don't like to hear this around these parts, I know an awful lot of end users who look for free software because it's free as in beer.