“The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off its Fall Fundraising Campaign! The success of this effort will have a large impact on our budget for next year. There are many ways that you can help us meet our goal of raising over USD 200000.”
“The FreeBSD Foundation is kicking off its Fall Fundraising Campaign! The success of this effort will have a large impact on our budget for next year. There are many ways that you can help us meet our goal of raising over USD 200000.”
Shit, OpenBSD runs off of like thirty thousand dollars in donations from companies and FreeBSD wants more than six times that much? Jeeze, considering they are only three times as popular as OpenBSD you’d think they’d be targetting more for ninety thousand dollars.
They should lose the Foundation entirely, twenty thousand dollars a year wasted on protecting, “intellectual property,” I’d not put anything into a lawyers hands for that kind of stuff.
I have to completely disagree. Just because OpenBSD runs off of a much smaller amount of money that has nothing to do with the main reason the Foundation.
From what I understand this money helps to pay dev’s while they work on improving FreeBSD. This allows certain dev’s to work full time on these projects and survie (a.k.a. paying bills, because the real world still continues when you stop working) I for one am going to fully back this effort.
The Foundation has also helped to bring better intergration to FreeBSD when it comes to Sun’s Java and this was sorely needed.
I’ll see what I can do to help. What about you?
OpenBSD does the same thing with it’s money it gets, plus it does their annual hackathon, it probably just supports less developers.
I don’t see any benefit to having a body of people toady to Sun regarding Java, and now it is even being made a moot point as Java goes GPL. There was never any integration anyways, there was a licensing agreement allowing for binary redistribution.
And well, to be honest, because I object to FreeBSD’s policies regarding how Free FreeBSD should be and because they waste 20 grand a year on what I consider to be frivolous, I won’t be donating.
While some may disagree about how frivolous or important the expenses of the Foundation are, I would rather not give money to a bureaucratic system, donations I make to a project go straight to specific developers so that I know that if it is being wasted, it is being wasted by a person who I can blame for the waste, can’t really do that when the money is lost in, “the system”.
I agree 100%. Good to know I’m not alone.
Last year the Foundation wasted $35000 on a lawyer for those FreeBSD native Java binaries, whereas the Linux binaries worked just fine with the Linux emulation.
$35000 is more than my yearly income (I’m not American…) Some developer could have worked for them full time for a year on that… and made gcjwebplugin as secure as Java’s plugin. That’s just one idea.
In fact that affair was the last drop in the glass for me to change back to Linux.
[Edit: I usually don’t base my choice of software on politics, but the Foundation just disgusted me to no end]
Edited 2006-11-15 02:41
I might kick them a few bucks if they stop putting proprietary crap in the CVS tree…. 200000 a year to redistribute nVidia’s binary-only ethernet driver when there’s at least two perfectly good free drivers out there.
The nVidia driver isn’t in the CVS tree. You can find a Makefile to help build it in the ports tree, but the actual nVidia software isn’t there.
Actually, it is. And compiled into the GENERIC kernel. See nve(4). It’s being replaced by the truly free OpenBSD nfe driver, though, which is already committed to -CURRENT and works fine on 6.x.
“I don’t see any benefit to having a body of people toady to Sun regarding Java, and now it is even being made a moot point as Java goes GPL.”
No, having redistributable native Java binaries was a big improvement. A lot of time and effort was put into it and nobody could have foreseen Sun’s sudden GPL’ing of Java. Before the redistributable binaries if you needed (or wanted) native Java you had to sign up on Sun’s website and piss around fetching a whole lot of files — individually (and yes, this is with using the ports tree to compile) — and wait for things to compile — and the fact that linux-java was needed to bootstrap the build of the native-java (or I recall something of this nature)… it was unacceptably bothersome.
Money was spent because it had to be. The native java had to pass a bunch of Sun tests in order to be worthy of distribution. Having a Sun blessed JDK means a lot to the corporate guys making the decision to have their developers spend time developing for and supporting x_os.
The project is big, there are expenses, money doesn’t fall from the sky. For such organization 200k is very little compared to the overall spent. Some developers/colaborators are sponsored by the companies where they work, if not 200k wouldn’t be enough to keep the project running. There are many good areas where the 200k are very well spent.
The company where I work saves thousands in one year by using freebsd.
Our contribution is on its way.
i wonder how much on the side big users of freebsd like yahoo etc are kicking in. $200k a year, EVERY YEAR would be nothing to them, particularly since they depend on freebsd to run a multibillion dollar business.
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