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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."
Here is a picture of the *BSD developer
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
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).
.@.
"Ideally, this would have run as a project by the foundation and all fund-raising would have gone to/via the foundation.
Unfortunately the board of directors did not feel that they would be able to tackle this task at the current time, mainly due to lack of time on the part of the foundations officers. " - http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/funding.html
Does any of you also has such problems?
in some areas, BSD developers seem not to have time for even basic things,
GNATS databases are full of unresolved problem reports,
simplies e-mails get no replies,
standard reply "noone pays us for developing bsd",
standard follow-up "so as noone pays me for wasting my time on it"...
Why is the situation like those, how do you think? I'd also like to see comments of other people, who also had lags in communication with BSD developers.
They are generally friendly towards FreeBSD developers and pay pretty good donation money, but require to show up and make burgers every once in a while.
I am a world-renowned FreeBSD developer and so far I got my Mom to pay me $10 a week, plus 30 hours a week at McDonalds bring in healthy $200, life is not bad.
The chutzpah of some of these open-source people really annoys me. There was a time when real men were ASHAMED to take charity when they had the ability to work, even if it was just digging ditches.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
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.
Pahroza is seeking donations in order to work on his slashdot article and comment reading skills full time. At present he is able only to skim the articles, and able to read only a portion of the higher rated posts.
Should enough donations be received, he can become a full time slashdot reader, and ensure that all posts and articles are read completely.
Please contact him for details.
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
They stole FreeBSD and should have to pay for each and every BSD developer. All two of them.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dbblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
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.
Somewhere, in a lonely hospital room,
*BSD is dying
nice! so what are the immigration laws in Denmark like? Whats the technical job market like?
... I'll buy a tombstone for BSD instead and you go and get a real job.
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. "
It's about time the widows of the deceased started panhandling and prostituting themselves.
If I haven't seen farther, it is by standing the grave of a giant that is BSD.
I know a very cheap undertaker who is willing to bury FreeBSD.
After reading that I'm assured that you are at least half as charming as Theo.
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.
Bad idea bringing politics into this discussion. I'm very happy living in the U.S.A. over any of the socialist "utopias" of Europe. At the same time, I don't fault anyone else for living under such a system. (And, from the sound of things, there are more than a few /.ers that ought to move across the pond away from screwed up America.)
:)
I have the greatest regard for PHK and all of his fine work on FreeBSD. I will try hard to get my (big, evil, oppressive) company to contribute.
However, Poul_Henning, I'm afraid that if you ever run for elective office in the U.S.A., you have lost my vote.
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
like the rest of us.
We all know someone who "used to do bsd"
and after 2 years couldnt give it up.
Its time to throw in the towel and
get a real job doing Microsoft updates.
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.
Does Matt Dillon ever do anything besides bitch and complain? Let's see some of your "wonderful" code, buddy.
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
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.
Bullshit you clueless fuckwit. All he did give some input into the VM implementation that was subsequently deemed too unstable and had to be replaced with something better.
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.
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the *BSD community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: *BSD is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.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.
Fact: the *BSDs have balkanized yet again. There are now no less than twelve separate, competing *BSD projects, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other *BSDs, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project: fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: X.org will not include support *BSD. The newly formed group believes that the *BSDs have strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with Linux and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: DragonflyBSD, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered FreeBSD "project", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing." Netcraft reports that DragonflyBSD is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.
Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: NetBSD, which claims to focus on portability (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for BSD use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our NetBSD boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running Linux."
Fact: *BSD has no support from the media. Number of Linux magazines available at bookstores: 5 (Linux Journal, Linux World, Linux Developer, Linux Format, Linux User). Number of available *BSD magazines: 0. Current count of Linux-oriented technical books: 1071. Current count of *BSD books: 6.
Fact: Many user-level applications will no longer work under *BSD, and no one is working to change this. The GIMP, a Photoshop-like application, has not worked at all under *BSD since version 1.1 (sorry, too much trouble for such a small base, developers have said). OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone, has never worked under *BSD and never will. ("Why would we bother?" said developer Steven Andrews, an OpenOffice team lead.)
Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."
With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the *BSD community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: *BSD is already dead.
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.
..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)...