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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
He still has to pay taxes, you know...
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 not *expecting* anything. This is an experiment: See if the FreeBSD community is willing to pay for someone to work full-time on FreeBSD. If not, well, he finds more contract work, earns the same amount (or more), and works on FreeBSD in his spare time.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
You know, the funny thing is, once you're done paying for all the little not-at-all-tax-items like health-care, pensions, education for your kids etc, then I probably have more financial freedom than you have.
For my 2/3 tax, I get healthcare and there are no "pre-existing conditions" or HMOs to deal with.
It's a bit hard to explain to americans, but healthcare is simply not a thing I have to consider in relation to my employment.
I also get education, including college, for my kids.
I don't have to fear the pan-handlers, insane and other strays because we actually have a social care system that works.
And don't even get me started about guns, bureaucrazy, corruption and the oppresive regime controlled by big business.
I've lived in San Francisco. My son is born there.
I don't miss any of those things.
What I get by paying the same amount you do, is peace of mind.
Priceless!
Poul-Henning Kamp -- FreeBSD since before it was called that...
Two quick observations. First, if you are carrying a $415k mortgage on a salary / wage of less than $5500.00 a month you either a) have no kids or b) have a really odd sense of how interest rates work.
"He's got some enormous cojones asking people to give him what amounts to $66,000
Not really. Poul-Henning Kamp is one of those individuals working on FreeBSD that should in no way feel bad for trying to balance time on a great open source project with family needs. He has the skills. It seems to me that this is a creative solution to help keep excellent developers on projects as they get older, have kids, mortgages, car payments etc etc.
Posting as AC
First it would be $66K gross not net since this is taxable income.
Second Linus does not work for free either and I wonder how much he gets paid.
Third $66k is not that much. Teachers make that, and one of my professors pulls in a $104k. Upper management positions can easily pull that much in and a lot more. This may seem a lot for someone working minimum wage or as a receptionist, entry level web designer but that comparison is invalid. We are talking about a proven, experienced, relaible hacker. A fairer comparison would be comparing to surgeons lawyer and other specialist positions.
If you don;t like the deal don't donate and he'll take his time elsewhere at a great to not just FreeBSD but to the entire OSS community.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
I don't have to fear the pan-handlers, insane and other strays because we actually have a social care system that works.
You *ALSO* have the benifit os a stable socioty that has set expectations on behaviour.
We Americans come from so many parts of the world, that we Americans can have many views of other Americans...
One person's "Gun Nut" is another person's "2nd Amemendment Fan."
One person's "Dirty Hippy" is another person's "Free Sprit."
America *is* the land of pan-handlers, insandes and strays.
I like it that way - it's interesting.
(PS Thanks for all your previous work with FreeBSD - 4.9 is polised perfection and the 5.0 series is facinating)
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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
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.
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. "
I don't know about Denmark, but have you actually been to, say, Paris or Amsterdam or Barcelona? They're a lot more multicultural than pretty much any city in the US except maybe New York and one or two others (and on the whole much less ghettoised than New York). Smaller towns in Europe are comparatively homogeneous, but no more so than mid-western American towns.
Bullshit. You forgot to count Theo, even though he's more of a forker than a developer.
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?
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.
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.
For that tax we get full healthcare, free schools (incl university)
:) But considering you get all those services "for free" with the taxes you pay, one wonders why you would ever need the equivalent of $66,000/year to continue working on FreeBSD. Why don't you and your family live (at least partially) off those services for which you pay so much in taxes? Why should you want to earn such a large salary anyway? After all - you have your government to take care of you...
"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."
If you're paying taxes to get your education, then it's not really "free," now is it?
That's like a car salesman showing you a $20,000 car and saying "Give me $20,000 and you can have this new car for free!" It's a dumb way of looking at trade.
and a practically non-corrupt political system.
One of the things that has been fairly-consistent about statist nations is that after the veil of communism/socialism has been lifted (e.g. after the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism), it's often found that the government beneath that statist veil was quite corrupt. Russia is a perfect example, and it remains as corrupt as ever; China and North Korea too, are prime examples. And Tony Blair doesn't seem too popular among Brits these days, having played along with the Bush II corruption in Iraq.
Not that the U.S. doesn't have its share of corrupt officials -- we have plenty of them -- but at least we *generally* know who is corrupt and who isn't. For example, the former Senator Fritz Hollings was bought off by the MPAA and RIAA (remember the "Fritz chip" that was to be in everybody's computer as mandated by legislation?) - and now he's out of the Senate. Now if only we can do that with President Bush...
Point is, don't buy so much into a nation's horse-and-pony show if you don't have complete and absolute transparency of your government. I wish Americans would take that advice w.r.t. the closed-door dealings we have in Congress occasionally (for "national security," of course *rolls eyes*) and work harder to open them up...
Great work on FreeBSD 5.x BTW.
(I'll admit though, that if you pay 2/3 of your salary to taxes, that you're getting a better deal than us Americans. We pay roughly 50% of our salary in taxes (i.e. we are now 50% socialist), and we don't get subsidized healthcare, university education, and so on. All we get is an oversized military that protects the U.S., Europe, and the rest of our allies, whee... (your taxes would be higher if you had to spend more on your military to protect your country from Russia, etc. You reap the rewards of the U.S.'s implicit protection of the entire Euro-area, including Denmark))
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
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.
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
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.
According to the fundraising page (see cheesy HTML bar graphs here) 98.7% of the goal for 6 months funding has already been reached.
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.