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Funding An Individual BSD Developer
PuceBaboon writes "Poul-Henning Kamp,a committed FreeBSD developer (the
main contributor to
"jails", one of my
favourite features) has lost his main
contract and is
appealing for funding to enable him to work
on FreeBSD exclusively for the rest of the year."
RedHat charged people $60/year for access to binary updates (the company which has taken over supplying updates to old RedHat releases also charges the same rate). MandrakeClub costs at least $60/year, with a "Recommended level" of $120/year.
As phk wrote, "Imagine if some of our users sent $1/month for each FreeBSD machine they were running." There are a lot of people and companies running FreeBSD, and it wouldn't take much from each of them to pay for several people to work full-time on FreeBSD.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Link is broken. A real picture is here.
USD$5500/month? That's more than my net take home, and that's with a $415k mortgage to feed!
It may be where his budget balances, but if he expects to live off the kindness of strangers, he needs to adjust his budget substantially.
He's got some enormous cojones asking people to give him what amounts to $66,000 net/year salary (it'd be over USD$100,000 gross/year were he salaried).
.@.
Hmm, honest question, why a troll mod ? the link points to http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/
which actually IS poul henning kamp's homepage..
Hope you make your goal, Poul-Henning, or rather that the community makes it possible. I'm shoveling all my money into a new-house-sized hole as fast as I can or you'd have my donation already.
Probably the "BSD is dying" trolls not appreciating your being on topic.
The replies to the other 2 PRs were more than exemplary. I got replies (and patches) in less than 2 hours for my reports on wine not compiling and amarok using using up all kern.maxproc. This, of course, doesn't mean that src folks are as much diligent as ports folks are, but the few times I browsed the -current and other mailing lists, devs. seemed friendly and helpful most of the time. Just my 2cents.
I've only had excellent experiences with the core team of developers. Every well-crafted PR that I've submitted has been treated to a solution in less than one week. The team is very responsive and is quick to escalate a problem when necessary. I've never received such dedicated attention on a paid support contract. These guys deserve every penny we donate to them.
.-.--
seriously,i can understand students with no jobs shying away from donating to fbsd. For everyone else out there, if peeps donated just a bit (either to this guy or the FBSD foundation) then perhaps projects like this could be funded more frequently. just a couple bucks from most people is all it takes.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
people with red hair look scary with facial hair
They stole FreeBSD and should have to pay for each and every BSD developer. All two of them.
The team is very responsive...
Yes, well... (*ahem*).
To be perfectly honest, you've been lucky. Ports PRs tend to get resolved fairly quickly; src PRs often get lost in the shuffle. The big problem is that most PRs are poorly written, either lacking necessary information or lacking coherant English; as a result, most src committers won't take the time necessary to comb through the database in order to find the relatively few good PRs.
Prior to getting a commit bit of my own, I often had bug fixes sit in the PR database for months... the trick, as I learned, is to send in the PR with a patch, wait a couple weeks, and then start sending emails to committers.
Dealing with PRs is certainly a major issue which we'd like to improve upon, but in the end it's all a question of time and money; reading through PRs is rather dull work, and if we're not going to pay people (and there isn't any money available for this) then there simply isn't enough committer-time to do as well as we should.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
A fair bit of phk's code is under the Beer-ware license:
(Some formatting changed for the lameness filter)
In all likelyhood, I'll never meet phk, so I reckon I can donate instead of buying him a beer directly.
nice! so what are the immigration laws in Denmark like? Whats the technical job market like?
word. I saw him in real life at BSDCon, and although he's a great guy, the red facial hair did throw me off a bit.
-anonymous
I have been in the unique position of working in close proximity with some incredible programmers over the course of my career. Although I have never worked with PHK, I have been the happy user of some of his work. $66K/year for PHK's time has got to be the deal of the century! Even in our post bubble burst economy.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
PHK should be getting corporate funding for doing development work on a feature like SMP which enterprise users would want much more than home users.
Yahoo! got started on FreeBSD and now the news is they are having record profits. Where's the Yahoo! funding? Where's the Apple funding? Where's the corporate funding at all?
I quote from his page:
" This is the very best price I'm able to offer on my time, and it only applies for doing FreeBSD work of my own choice.) "
So let me get this straight... he wants someone to pay him a quite large amount of money for 3 to 6 months for doing stuff that HE chooses???!
Sorry pal , but if you're reading this I suggest you land your spaceship and take a walk around on planet earth with the rest of us where you'll
find that people who pay you money expect you to do what THEY tell YOU, NOT the other way around!
That is why you got the choose if you wanna support him... nobody forces you, if you don't like the terms, don't donate! This is pretty much like ever other charity, you pay them money/time/whatever and they choose what to do with it. You still get something out of it because he will put his full time on FreeBSD and that benefits you! I trust him as an old time commiter to choose good stuff to put his time.
Because you replied to a blatant troll (strike number one) with a post that wasn't even factually correct (the link isn't broken at all). People like you are the reason the *BSD trolls are still around, grow the fuck up already.
Maybe in a few weeks someone should have an interview with this guy and maybe it could even make it to the front page? That should get more exposure and if includes a line like we are already 75% of the way there then I'm sure that will help the donatations role in. I suspect that some people are worried about not making the minimum and just having their donation get lost there as opposed to some real important work getting done.
My bet: if the minimum gets met than at least two of the months will go too since it will prove that this works.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
From dragonfly.kernel:
:By the way i suppose everyone is aware of the
fundraising campaign by
:phk to be able to precisely work on vfs for>
FreeBSD-5 (please, i don't know
:if mentioning this name here is kosher, don't
flame me ...). By reading his :memo :http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/plan.html
:i cannot refrain remarking some similarities between the work he wants to
:engage into, and your own agenda on vfs. Isn't it appearing as some sort of
:duplication of work in a domain where very unfortunately resources are
:scarce?
:
:--
:Michel Talon
I came across that but I really doubt that our visions are even remotely similar. Our work is going to be based on our well tested LWKT stuff. FreeBSD-5 does not have any LWKT stuff, or anything remotely similar to it. It also strikes me odd that it should require money for work to progress. I realize that there are potentially many people who would like to work on open source to the exclusion of their normal jobs, but the meager amounts of money that can be raised by our projects does not come close to replacement income for even a single person. Money also severely skews the governance structure, creating pressures and consequences that can result in a failure of the normal open source peer review process. In fact, I believe this is precisely what has occured in the FreeBSD project, on multiple occassions, in the last few years. -Matt Matthew Dillon
Activists United
On the other hand, (good) PRs are very important. I've been (I am still) very critical about the quality of gentoo (my roommate uses it, and since he is a *nix novice, I had the pleasure/pain of figuring out some stuff in gentoo), but I saw on their forums developers (ebuild-maintainers to be precise) complaining about the lack of bugreports.
So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.
Yahoo is probably funding several of the developers.
A corporation is an amoral entity charged with maximizing the profit of its human owners. While generosity is an admirable human trait, it is not necessarily viable in a corporation. A generous corporation will be replaced by less generous corporations unless that generosity leads to profit.
In the end FOSS needs to make peace with this corporate race to the bottom, and convince the guys and gals with the purse strings that FOSS maximizes shareholder value.
I don't know about you but where I work, the higher paid people are expected to be able to work independently, and not have to be told what to do for each buck they are paid.
Donors are paying him to work on FreeBSD.
He is to do satisfactory work on FreeBSD, and I don't see why he wouldn't - he's going to work on stuff he chooses, so I don't see why he would work on stuff he is crap at.
When you order the Chef's Special in a restaurant of some standing you're not expecting "soup of the day", the Chef usually produces something satisfactory, if not impressive.
Better than 3000 ignorant donors telling him what to do. Think 3000 PHBs.
So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.
That would be great; but much less than that would still be helpful. Having someone go through and identify PRs which
1. Report a reproducible bug, and
2. Contain a patch which fixes that bug
would be useful just by itself.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
There's no politics on his plan page. The political discussion above came into being due to an observation of the differences between US and Denmark tax policies. You are being way too sensitive.
As a libertarian, I long ago realized that most people disagree with me on politics. Even were I a conservative or liberal, there would still be one out of every two people who would disagree with me. Life is about people disagreeing with you. Get over it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Try here: http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/download.cgi
Activists United
Your attitude is typical of someone who can't imagine how to make a living as anything other than a salary slave.
I pay money to several charities and foundations that I support, and no, I don't expect them to do what I tell them.
And he's not your "pal".
Please tell us then, what would you tell phk to do, if you donate him.
Perhaps people, who rated your post as "Interesting" could also join the conversation.
As some slashdotters pointed out, I am against free speech (because I've proposed to trash the trolls out of BSD section). Perhaps then all those pro-free-speech people, together with all those, who think phk sounds arrogant could reply right below this message.
If you know, how to do things the better way (and I am pretty sure you do; you wouldn't criticize then), please tell us. I am pretty sure we all are interested.
I believe that if he puts up a small work plan with the following items he will convince more funding from corporations such as Yahoo!, Apple, etc.
More details on the work he wants to do.
A description of the benefits from the output and who will benefit most.
Milestones and a rough timeline.
A priorities list on the work.
Just my opinion...
Marcos
There's at least one Y! employee working pretty much on FreeBSD and making it happy on fast, modern hardware.
There were more than one in the past but its been a while since I've spoken to them all.
I believe Y! also provide some resources to the FreeBSD developers.
Basically, Y! have put in their 2c.
I hate to go even more off-topic, but I'm not being sensitive and you've totally missed my point. I clarify:
It was not a good idea for PHK to make the political comment here on Slashdot. (Even though he was just responding to someone else's complaint of Denmark's excessive taxes.) I disagree with socialism, but still very much support PHK and this project and am serious about soliciting my company to donate.
Given your serious misreading of my post, I'm not sure how you can even tell who does and doesn't agree with you.
According to the fundraising page (see cheesy HTML bar graphs here) 98.7% of the goal for 6 months funding has already been reached.
Uh, why don't you look into the Linux kernel? He was the one that fixed the extremely broken VMM, the messed up VFS, the erronous TCP-stack and many other things; things that made people go in droves to BSD. Not because he really wanted to but because noone in the Linux camp could.
And to think I was worried he wouldn't make it. Someone should suggest that as a story that PHK made it. I'm sure FreeBSD could use the PR.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled .005% of internet servers. A recent attempt at a face-to-face summit in Boulder, Colorado culminated in an out-and-out fistfight between core developers. Hotel security guards broke up the melee and banned the participants from the hotel. Two of the developers were hospitalized.
// when /* is obviously better? YOU HEAR THAT YOU DOUBLE-SLASH ASSHOLES?!!!!
I was there -- it was Justin and Jeremy, the two main leads. Justins jaw is broken and he can't talk right anymore. Jeremy said he still hates Justin and would do it again and their problem is that they dont like the way each other does indentation in source code. Jeremy says to use tabs and Justin wants spaces and this is totally huge and is tearing FreeBSD apart.
Personally I think the comment styles issues are a bigger deal. What kind of assfuck uses
According to the donation page, the funding goals has been reached. This took about ... uhm, two weeks? It is interesting to see that posting an appeal for funding can raise so much money so quick.
Was it /.? Or was it because the project had well defined goals? (Resolving certain buffer related issues). Was it the phk karma?
I have no idea of the funding the freebsd foundation gets, but maybe they would be able to raise more money quickly if they announced specific projects with specific funding needs, project description, expected timelines and milestones.
Personally, I am more likely to sponsor a concrete project with clear goals. It gives a sence of knowing what you get for the money and that this money is not swallowed by administration or other borring tasks.
I think this should raise a discussion in the community as to how funding is raised and used.
Funiest gay EVAR!!! oMG!!!
On April 13th pair Networks donated almost 2/3 of the money he received. ($20,000 of ~$33,000)
So, I'd say that's a good start.
A corporation would have to examine the cost/benifit ratio of a donation of that nature. Since it is not a tax-deductible donation, the donation must stand on it's own. Corporations are liable to their stockholders, and frivolous expenses are very much frowned upon.
It's not that the company execs don't appreciate the hard work, it's just that they would have to justify making a donation to somebody who would, in all likelyhood, continue doing what they are doing without it.
This is where non-profit organizations such as OSDN come in. Corporations can take a tax deduction on donations to such entities, which makes it much more palatable to coporate execs. Perhaps phk should consider working for a non-profit that would be willing to support his current work, much as Linus does now.
But by all means, send the guy a few bucks if you can. IMO, he deserves much more than the measely 66k he's asked for.
No matter how many of my rights are taken away, somehow I still don't feel safe. -Frigid Monkey
..bury the bitch already for fuck's sake!
Just wait for Apple to do this to their BSD layer. Don't spend the money on this one guy. Just go buy Mac OS X and fund Apple's ability to do this (they're already working on it and have the brains to do it right)...