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."

Comments

Re:Not asking for much...

[dotz]

And, as phk says, you'll get much more, than just some binary updates.

Re:He wants HOW much?

[phkamp]

I have to pay my income tax, which here in Denmark is roughly 2/3, and that means the number you are looking at is a $22K/year net salary.

Depending on the jobdescription, my normal salary would be at least $75K, so I tend to think that the FreeBSD users are getting a pretty good deal here.

(And before anybody falls into the other ditch: For that tax we get full healthcare, free schools (incl university) and a practically non-corrupt political system.

Re:BSD-wide lack of time

[molnarcs]

somewhat related: I filed only ports-related bug reports. 3 of them. One was a disaster as far as writing a pr goes - it was my very first one, and forgot to fill out the how to reproduce the error part. I never expected a reply to that one, but eventually, someone after 2 months replied :)

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.

Beer-ware

[Piquan]

A fair bit of phk's code is under the Beer-ware license:

/*
* "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
* <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
* can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
* this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
*/

(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.

Matt Dillon's (dFBSD lead) opinion on this matter

[weekendwarrior1980]

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