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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
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...
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.
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
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. "
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.
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