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Support FreeBSD

welloy writes "In a mail to freebsd-announce Robert Bruce writes that "during the week of September 7th to September 13th, all revenue from purchases at the FreeBSD Mall will be donated to the FreeBSD Foundation to support work being done to improve the fine grained threading in the FreeBSD Kernel, and other improvements needed to make the upcoming 5.2 release a success." The offer also applies to their table at BSDCon. This is a great way to support the FreeBSD project and ensure they have funding to keep up their great work."

3 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Follow the money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll
    This was before Walnut Creek sold FreeBSD. FreeBSD usage dropped precipitously without Walnut Creek's support, and so the business model had to change in order to cover lower-volume production. 5% of net is now given to the FreeBSD foundation while the remainder pays for travel to shows to promote the FreeBSD products, half of the DSL used to host the website, as well as paying toward the monthly advertisement in the back of Family Computing. The bulk of the second usually comes out of pocket, however.

    Sadly, this dying volume is why new versions of the Toolkits and the boxed sets can only be updated every 18 months instead of quarterly as before. The jewel box sets are produced in house on regular old CD-Rs and the labels are printed on an inkjet, so these can always be kept up to date however. If you order a boxed set, please be sure to order a jewel case version as well unless the June 2002 version is sufficient for your needs, unless you have a very high end machine (Pentium 90 or newer.)

    Questions, please feel free to write:
    Bruce, Robert - rab@FREEBSDMALL.COM
    FreeBSD Mall, Inc.
    3623 Sanford Street
    Concord, CA 94520-1405

  2. Re:Even Apple knew enough to change by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll
    bash2 is being made the default shell for FreeBSD 6.0. 6.0 will also be the first version released under the GPL instead of the dated BSD license which has been exploited a few times too many.

    The goal was for 5.0 to be the first GPL release, however nobody anticipated the amount of effort it would take to track down all of the old developers to get them to sign the new license agreement. Some have been completely unreachable, and this has resulted in many userland utilities being rewritten or replaced, as well as the entire network stack. These efforts are well under way, and if the last release critical port authors can be reached in the next three months, you can expect FreeBSD 6.0 by Christmas, along with your treasured bash shell.

    I know I'm replying to a troll, but the fact is that this is being fixed. Hopefully that was your last reason not to join us as a contributing FreeBSD user. Troll amnesty: we welcome you anyway! :)

  3. Re:Follow the money by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Please stop spreading FUD. Thanks to FreeBSD Mall, BSD will enjoy a long and fruitful life. The recovery effort is fantastic, and it may even soon outgrow it's current corner of our kitchen. Once in a while, we can't even fit a whole day's orders in the oven to activate the shrink wrap and we have to ship in zip-lock bags!