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."
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: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).