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Operating Systems Unix BSD

Yearly FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Campaign Is On 83

Posted by timothy from the free-costs-money dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Foundation's annual year-end fundraising drive is currently running. Their goal this year is US$ 1M, and they're currently at US$ 427K. In 2013, the efforts that were funded were from the last drive were: Native iSCSI kernel stack, Updated Intel graphics chipset support, Integration of Newcons, UTF-8 console support, Superpages for ARM architecture, and Layer 2 networking updates. Also various conferences and summit sponsorships, as well as hardware purchases for the Project. The Foundation is a US 501(c)3 non-profit, so your donations (if in the US) are tax-deductible. Some of the larger 2013 (corporate?) sponsors so far are NetApp, LineRate, WhatsApp, and Tarsnap."
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Yearly FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Campaign Is On More

Yearly FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Campaign Is On

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  • ...I need to start my own... (Score:3, Funny)

    by martiniturbide ( 1203660 ) on Saturday November 16, 2013 @09:13PM (#45445785) Homepage Journal
    I need to start my fundraising to make an open source clone of OS/2 Warp :)

    • My brother would donate.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by rjr3 ( 658693 )

        The mouse pad I use for my Ubuntu machine is an OS2 Warp one.
        It works as well as I would assume Warp would still today.

    • Look up http://www.osfree.org/ [osfree.org] Such a project is already under development.

  • As I recall, FreeBSD provided some of the key underpinnings to Mac OS X and iOS. Surely Apple can spare some of its $90B back to the effort. $1M is a rounding error compared to $90B...

    • Apple is stripping out all of their GPL based components so that they *don't* have to contribute back. They would strip out any FreeBSD code too if the license required them to contribute back.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Mr Z ( 6791 )
        Well, there's contributing code back, and there's paying programmers. Donating to FreeBSD would be more like "paying programmers."

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Mr Z ( 6791 )
        Actually... it's not even like paying programmers. It's more like tipping because you like the service.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        Apple contributes back A LOT. What they don't want to do is contribute back their trade secret stuff. The other 95% of code they don't have a problem with.

      • The reason why it is stripping GPL is because it is unfriendly for corporations including Apple and others to distribute.

        The GPL forces to give the source code away even if it is just .0001% of the actual product even if you link it! So if I write a cout "Hello World\n!"; but the iostream.h is GPL then my rights to use my work are hindered.

        Whether that is more free is personal flamewar here on slashdot and I do not want to be modded down for taking sides here if corporations should be forced to give out t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bengie ( 1121981 )

          CLANG is a big pronoent of this movement away from the GPL

          CLANG was started and heavily funded by Apple. But without GPL, Apple will never give back, right?

      • Apple strips out the GPL stuff because they don't like having to contribute everything back. They like being able to release things on their own schedule. FreeBSD has benefitted quite a lot from Apple (for example, the MAC framework was jointly developed for FreeBSD and Darwin, funded by Apple), but they generally contribute developer time rather than money. The FreeBSD Foundation is on their list for matched donations though, so if Apple employees donate then Apple will also add to the contribution. Th

      • Total non-sequitur. Apple does contribute to FreeBSD, both in terms of employing some FreeBSD devs, as well as donating certain software to be merged upstream w/ the project. LLVM/Clang being one major example.

        Apple is stripping out GPL3 based components, due to certain clauses in the license that make it pretty hostile to business - like the one granting patent rights to everybody in case a certain component uses a certain patent which the contributor holds. But FreeBSD is doing the same - LLVM/Clang

        • Apple is stripping out GPL3 based components

          More specifically, Apple does not and never has allowed GPLv3 code into the building. They're not stripping out GPLv3 code, they're staying with old versions of projects that switched to GPLv3 until a permissively licensed replacement is finished. This is not a strategy exclusive to Apple - a lot of companies were unhappy with GPLv2 and now find GPLv3 quite scary. We've had quite a few companies start to contribute to FreeBSD and related projects as a result of GPLv3.

    • They borrowed from NetBSD and OpenBSD too. Depending on the OS X version, you find more RCS strings from one or the other. X.4 had more from NetBSD than the others, for instance.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sabri ( 584428 )

      FreeBSD provided some of the key underpinnings to Mac OS X and iOS.

      Not to mention JUNOS, the operating system running on Juniper Networks routers. The JUNOS kernel is based on FreeBSD.

      Anyone using Facebook, Twitter, AT&T, Verizon (I can go on for about an hour) will have their packets routed through a box runing JUNOS.

      Come on Kevin [juniper.net], I'm sure you can donate a bit...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by David_W ( 35680 )

        They were "silver" sponsors last year. Just wait, I suspect they'll pitch in before the campaign is up.

      • I believe Cisco iOS (not apple's) is made from BSD Unix (4.4 tapes from Berkely) or was over a decade ago. I do not know if it still is but BSD is really good at packets.

        BSD Unix 4.2 invented TCP/IP and the modern internet from arpanet so it is not surprising. :-)

        I guess working with tiny tiny machines compared to today you needed no bloat and very efficient mathmatical data algorithms and structures made by people at Berkely writting master theises papers rather than volunteers growing it in Linux as a wee

      • Juniper was a silver sponsor last year, but that doesn't tell the entire story. They've also been upstreaming a lot of the JUNOS code over the last couple of years. Most recently, they've started to push their code signing infrastructure (built on top of the MAC framework that was financed by Apple) to FreeBSD. The code is still under review, but should be landing quite soon. They've also spent quite a bit of manpower on some really tedious things, like improving the FreeBSD build process, which makes l
    • And the PlayStation4 is full of FreeBSD.

  • Stop and consider... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thatkid_2002 ( 1529917 ) on Saturday November 16, 2013 @09:23PM (#45445829)

    FreeBSD probably isn't useful to you every day. Maybe some of your net traffic will go through a FreeBSD box, but that box could be replaced by just about anything really. However, I'm not trying to say that FreeBSD is useless or irrelevant - what I want to say is that FreeBSD has some excellent out-of-band uses.

    I think people should consider the value of the educational, developmental, experimental and competitive opportunities that FreeBSD provides. We need projects and communities which have low hanging fruit for beginners and we need projects that are ready to give different approaches to problems a go - so that the rest of us on whatever OS can learn from it regardless of the success of the implementation.

    The same goes for my favourite alternative OS - Haiku [haiku-os.org] which also contains some bits and pieces from FreeBSD for networking/wireless IIRC. (BTW, it has package management now and a lot of improvements to the native browser, and more.)

    • You might be surprised at where FreeBSD code ends up. A lot of cheap home routers that run 'Linux' strip out the Linux 802.11 stack and graft on the FreeBSD one.

    • Fact is just about everything you use today contains parts of FreeBSD. TCP/IP Networking stack. Well Microsoft adopted that from FreeBSD back in the 1990's. There are more parts of Linux that came from the BSD's. Oh and let's not forget the most popular Unix Desktop OS MacOS X & iOS. Oh and now the PS4.

      So yeah, FreeBSD is this obscure thing nobody knows about, but pieces of it are everywhere these days.

  • I can't say that I'm terribly impressed with the pledge interface. You end up with a "transaction completed" page that doesn't detail the transaction nor does it refer you back to the original URL.
    When I clicked "back" I hit an autoforward URL, so I'm hoping it was at least smart enough to put in a transaction ID and not attempt the transaction multiple times.

  • What the hell? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jones_supa ( 887896 )
    FreeBSD is used by very important software projects such as Apple stuff, Juniper routers and Sony PlayStation 4. Can't those companies really whip a dime or two to the project? One would think that keeping the base OS flourishing would be a good business case for them.
    • Most of those companies don't donate large amounts to the Foundation, but they do employ people to work on code that can be upstreamed. This benefits the system a lot, but the advantage of Foundation donations is that they can be used to work on things that are not directly commercially relevant now - for more strategic projects, or for cleaning up bits of the infrastructure.

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