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FreeBSD Foundation Needs Cash For 501(c)3 Status
ashpool7 writes "In an *extremely* late announcement, the FreeBSD foundation has posted in their quarterly newsletter that they're $30,400 short on donations in order to prove that they're a non-profit charity (501(c)3 as they say). If your organization relies upon FreeBSD, it might be a good idea to see if you can scrounge up the $8,000 maximum donation."
I love FreeBSD as much as the next guy, but this isn't the most reassuring thing to see when you need to convince your boss that a project is well managed and likely to stick around.
I've had this sig for three days.
I think they should return the $15K that is putting them over the limit. If they want more money, they should try managing it better.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
I just gave all my money to some guy named Seth - he promised to give to the Thunderbird developers...
Well, that and the fact that I don't actually use FreeBSD.
Why are we looking to an "organization" (aka, corporation) to bail out FreeBSD? Why not have individuals contribute? I sent $100 to the FreeBSD Foundation via PayPal this morning.
$100 is nothing to "pay" for the dozen or so releases I've used in the past four years. I also subscribe to FreeBSD releases, even though I might never remove the wrappings from the CD cases.
I know the FreeBSD community will step up to the plate in the last 10 days of 2004 to help the FreeBSD Foundation meet the IRS' tax rules.
Helevius
They were successful in getting $187k in 2003, and yet somebody didn't look ahead enough to see the coming crisis? Every other year they have raised less than $20k, so this looks to be a failed attempt.
On the other hand phk can raise tons in a short while, so maybe there is reason for optimism. I like the *BSDs and applaud the cross-pollination.
I really like the Java progress, in spite of SUN.
I just donated $300.00 via paypal. For the number of machines I have FreeBSD running on that's a very reasonable price to pay.
Your allowance wouldn't help much.
Your ad hominem attempt at humor doesn't change the situation FreeBSD is in. FreeBSD is suffering from mangement problems at the top, and it's a surprise that nobody's forked it yet. Oh wait, they did! And it already has the performance of FreeBSD-5, but with cleaner code and a clear upgrade path! If the FreeBSD folks don't get their stuff together, FreeBSD-7 might be a DragonFly fork, assuming FreeBSD lasts that long.
Even though you're post surely isn't meant to be taken seriously, I'll reply to your comments seriously:
man vim patch diff send-pr
I already know vim very well (boo emacs!). I'm less familiar with patch and diff, although I've used them. The suggestion to use send-pr is idiocy. The problem is that FreeBSD is going to have a shortage of kernel developers who can really get into the dirt of the kernel, if they're not already in that situation. How many years would it take to get up to speed on the FreeBSD5 kernel, and what's the point when NetBSD's kernel is cleaner, OpenBSD's kernel is more bug free, and DragonFlyBSD's kernel is better designed? Anyone just now getting into working on FreeBSD is wasting their time. Send-pr will only work if there's somebody there who understands the problem.
So then use linux.
People are, and in great numbers. There'll be a lot of FreeBSD users who'll be left out in the cold, if things continue on the same course.
This doesn't matter for 90% of people out there, and thats a lowball.
It matters greatly to the other 10% out there, though, who have a monetarily free operating system to put on some esoteric system. It's also a testament to the cleanliness of NetBSD's design, which is a huge advantage for NetBSD, which was the point of mentioning it in the first place.
Sure, but it's general layout sucks donkey balls, not to mention the userland, and it's attempt at a ports system. Don't get me started on the installer.
If you can't use OpenBSD effectively, you can always turn to FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Linux. Mix & match what you need. If you need security, any of those will be not-quite as good as OpenBSD, and much easier to use.
Much like it was a waste of my time to respond to your post (which was apparently shaped to be an anti-troll response to a serious post), it's a waste of time for people to be getting into FreeBSD now. You're always free to use whatever OS you want, but the pace of technology is fast enough without a spaghetti kernel and no developers.
how many times do you install an OS.
0 00000000000000000000000000001 of your user time in the installer, maybe you should go back to xp.
jesus man, if you spend more than a fraction of even %.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
So you need to have an income, of domations, in the thousands-of-dollars range per quarter, in order to qualify for 'not-for-profit' status?
*clears throat* WHY?!
I would think that their lack of monetary influx sort of makes the point for them; not-for-profit. Do they qualify for not-going-to-break-even status, atleast?
Informatus Technologicus
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
Portage might sound good in theory. The childish smileys and colours nothwithstanding, the fact that they do almost zero QA means that portage ebuilds break all the time. The ports system is handled by people who actually know what they're doing. NetBSD's pkgsrc is even better.
After I read the comments here, I didn't feel so bad not having much to donate. I encourage everyone to support FreeBSD by making a donation. As the other posters have pointed out, every donation is important to keeping the ratio in check so it doesn't matter if you can only give $10 or $20.
At the moment it wouldn't hurt FreeBSD if it underwent a major re-write on a new independent branch. Put a feature freeze on 5.x, and continue to try to fix all the bugs in the 5.x branch. The rewrite could take place in a new branch, oh call it 7.x say. It could start by using a lot of the work done in DragonFly. Sadly, other than PHK, only one or two others have a full understanding of the FreeBSD internals anymore. The documentation is way out of date for certain crucial parts of the kernel. The rewrite should take place with a concurrent documentation team which tracked and explained each change and design feature.
FreeBSD needs to get back to doing it right. There's a lesson to be had from the success of NetBSD too. NetBSD has struck a reasonable balance between the ultra-conservatism of OpenBSD, and the newer wing-dings of FreeBSD. Whatever criticism one might have of NetBSD, you can't fault its clean architecture.
While we are on the subject, OpenBSD is also looking for donations (around $20,000) to organize their anual hackathon, a one week meeting of most OpenBSD developers.
See Theo's mails to misc@: (1) and (2)
Odd interpretation. Actually, Matt Dillon
was kicked out of the FreeBSD Project due to
his abusive treatment of other developers --
he seems to be better suited to running a
very small boat in which he is the king, as
he appears unable to work well with others...
He's probably happier on his own, so maybe
everyone wins that way.
Actually, the NetBSD design is at least as complicated as the FreeBSD design, if not more so: their focus on obscure portability issues results in a much more complex VM system, and their threading model is at least as complicated as the FreeBSD model. It does appear they have fewer trolls, not just fewer developers, than FreeBSD, however.
At the risk of being modded down... WHY!?! Why do they need more money to say that they don't make money!?!
One of the interesting things about NetBSD is that they've managed to lure some of the OpenBSD refugees: people like Neils Provos who are thrown out by Theo in fits of pique end up working on other systems. Although I hear Neils is at Google now, working on Linux, so who knows... NetBSD seems to lose its share of
developers and users to FreeBSD however. While
this post suggest NetBSD is more mainstream,
the focus on portability in NetBSD comes at
the cost of cleanliness and performance.
You guys are *so* damn weird.
"there are distributions of Linux right now that rival the BSDs' strong points--except for DragonFlyBSD's."
No... Nobody rivals OpenBSD in terms of security features, and the only one that comes close at the moment is NetBSD. Therefore, there are strong points that Linux does not rival.
"Portage is better than the ports system, and other distributions have binary packages pretty well covered (looking at you, Slackware). At this point, about the only reasons one could claim for choosing FreeBSD over Gentoo are the use of PF, the kernel architecture, or personal preference."
I'm sorry, but that's just wrong.
Portage might be better than the ports tree if someone actually did QA on it. They do not. For example, KDE 3.2 went live with a masked dependency, causing the build to fail. If any of the developers had tried it on a stable system, this problem would have been found and fixed easily. Because no one bothered to try it on a stable system it was broken for a week.
Due to that case and others like it, I have concluded that the Gentoo developers do not do significant QA. That makes it unsuitable for production systems. I for one will not bet my livelihood on someone on the Gentoo forums coming up with a hack to fix some problem before a deadline.
FreeBSD has its problems and it might not survive, but let's not pretend Portage is currently a viable alternative to ports.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
>You guys are *so* damn weird.
"guys"?
It's one disgruntled troll...
Funny, Mike Smith is now a senior kernel developer at Apple working on their FreeBSD-derived kernel, and Apple is hardly dying.
FYI: FreeBSD is hardly dying too.
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD
Make point, back it up with evidence anyone can look up, get modded flamebait.
/.
This must be
FreeBSD has proven invaluable to our company -- we really couldn't live without it. Release after release "just works" for years at a time without hands on attendence and the baby-sitting other systems seem to need. I'm not sure I can get the company itself to make a donation before new years, but we'll be a donor next year!
How come? Check it for yourself. NetBSD 2.0 is actually *faster* than FreeBSD 5.3, which was once the epitome of performance on x86. And NetBSD's code was the most clean I've seen in the free unix-like world.
If you donate via PayPal, please provide a "shipping address." FreeBSD Foundation treasurer Justin Gibbs has to mail a paper receipt to every contributor, per IRS rules. If you don't give him a "shipping address" at PayPal, he has to email you and request an address. He told me he is dealing with a "flood of donations missing address data."
Helevius
Glad you pointed this out. NetBSD is faster then FreeBSD, NetBSD is cleaner, and NetBSD is correctly organized. NetBSD has been refactored. NetBSD has abstracted the key subsystems. The result is that all the cruft which you find in FreeBSD is nowhere to be found in NetBSD. NetBSD achieved its speed and stability not through gimmicks but by sound engineering basics. FreeBSD could surely take a lesson here, if it's not too late.
I will donate them iff FreeBSD OS is very clean (= not dirty), doesn't crash, has not oldest-newest bugs and doesn't depend on Unix-&-others Licenses-copyrighties to profit.
open4free ©
Is that you Matt Dillon.
Nobody rivals OpenBSD in terms of security features
OpenBSD is definitely on top of the pile, but Linux is quite close. The features are there in Linux, and once they get to where they're doing code readings just to catch bugs, they'll be competitive with OpenBSD on security, with NetBSD on portability, and FreeBSD on speed, features, and stability. Linux is competing well with all three of the old BSDs at once, on their terms. DragonFlyBSD is ready to supplant FreeBSD for speed, features, and stability.
Portage might be better than the ports tree if someone actually did QA on it. They do not. For example, KDE 3.2 went live with a masked dependency, causing the build to fail. If any of the developers had tried it on a stable system, this problem would have been found and fixed easily. Because no one bothered to try it on a stable system it was broken for a week. The Portage code is better than ports. Your description only attests to shitty QA on the Gentoo peoples' part. A lot of the features of portupgrade are considered to be necessary by a lot of admins out there, and it's such a relatively small amount of code for such a huge benefit, that it's silly it hasn't been done so far. Integrating portupgrade into the ports system, using make and sh, would put ports on top of portage again, but until that happens, ports is just an idea that found its best implementation in portage.
FreeBSD has its problems and it might not survive
It's hard to kill such a large project. It's more likely to become completely irrelevant than it is outright die, but it's most likely at all that they'll adopt some other architecture to stay relevant: DragonFly's for example. But why would anyone use FreeBSD-as-a-dfly-fork when they could use the real thing? FreeBSD might not die, but there are levels of existance far below where they are now.
"OpenBSD is definitely on top of the pile, but Linux is quite close. The features are there in Linux, and once they get to where they're doing code readings just to catch bugs, they'll be competitive with OpenBSD on security"
... FreeBSD might not die, but there are levels of existance far below where they are now."
As long as things like new memory leaks continue to turn up in 2.6, I somehow doubt that extensive auditing is going to take place or be of much benefit if it did. The situation isn't going to improve until 2.7 forks, which isn't in the forseeable future.
Also, I honestly don't think the GNU people are willing to do what it takes to match OpenBSD for userspace security. Some of the modifications require cooperations from the kernel and userspace, which means they're not portable. The GNU people take (and deserve) pride in their portability, so it will be a while I think.
And OpenBSD isn't exactly standing still.
"and FreeBSD on speed, features, and stability. Linux is competing well with all three of the old BSDs at once, on their terms."
I do not deny that Linux is a fine OS, but it will be a long time before the stability of 2.6 is comperable to any of the BSDs, and it continues to lack features such as a firewall comparable to PF, something equivilant to the jail facility on {Free,DragonFly}BSD, etc.
"It's hard to kill such a large project
My point was just that projects with technical merit have been known to die.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
As long as things like new memory leaks continue to turn up in 2.6, I somehow doubt that extensive auditing is going to take place or be of much benefit if it did.
Well, auditing is always beneficial. If you and I both started auditing the Linux kernel randomly, but magically managed to audit exactly the same files, we haven't wasted our time. It just means that piece of code has been gone over by more eyes. The end result of auditing is _always_ better code.
It's also situations like this that make me wonder what might happen if someone tried to redo the kernel in Ada (where Ada is an example of a language that can be used to do systems programming but has harder compile time checking than C), but the end result of speculation is _never_ better code.
Also, I honestly don't think the GNU people are willing to do what it takes to match OpenBSD for userspace security. Some of the modifications require cooperations from the kernel and userspace, which means they're not portable.
I concur, but I think the GNU people--the real FSF/GNU people, not coders who GPL their stuff--are really interested in the HURD as being their kernel of choice and that they see the Linux kernel as being something to fill in the space until the HURD arrives. Then perhaps those changes will be made.
That's my personal bias, though. Again with the auditing: if someone decides to do it, sometime, then it'll result in better code. I don't bother checking how often coreutils gets updated, but I don't imagine there's much left to do, other than audit.
I do not deny that Linux is a fine OS, but it will be a long time before the stability of 2.6 is comperable to any of the BSDs
I've no experience with 2.6. I moved to FreeBSD-5.3 from 2.4 as my desktop, and so far BSD has been exactly as stable as Linux, which is to say that nothing ever breaks, ever. I'd imagine you'd have to push either one into a niche before it started to have problems, but I don't even know of any niches where FreeBSD4 would have problems. The world is blessed with some really nice software in the BSDs and Linux. I wouldn't be disparaging at all, except for the fact that FreeBSD's problems are mangagement related. There's no law that says code forks must be preceeded by vocal internal disputes.
n/t
[n/t]
I checked the website and it says they are 87% of the way, which translates to $27K from 556 donors, which equals about $50 per donor.
Shouldn't be surprising to have that many satisfied users who want to continue using a grest OS.
IT is noticable to see what the power of many can do.
Now, what will the foundation do? This is mroe money than they raised this entire year, so lets see some real accomplishments. For all the knocks OpenBSD takes, they really have made some great progress with their hackathons, why not spend some of the $227K they now have to get a real hackathon sponsored?
Then FreeBSD's SMP support either isn't that bad or isn't that relevant in most scenarios, since the hosting professionals keep choosing it.
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD
It's from june 2004. One year before it was 1.5 million (1 million less).
>If they hadn't used the 5.3 RCs, they'd be accused of intentionally using old versions that had inferior SMP support.
This is simply a silly assumption.
That was hardly flamebait. FBSD is just now starting to get acceptable on 2 way machines for typical server tasks. They have a good long way to go before they are "good". Linux and Solaris (and even NT) have been there for years.
Indeed that post was hardly flamebait, but it was also hardly relevant.
Everybody knows that FreeBSD has points of weakness (SMP support now is far from optimal) along with many points of strength (see the Network Stack link in the first post in the thread, and how in that case FreeBSD's performance excels compared to Linux): but this has hardly anything to do with the "BSD is dying" FUD that has been circulating for some years, and that the first post in the thread was about.
you mean only 3.8 organizations are using it?
I've misread the numbers here, sorry: actually, one year before it was 2 million (.5 million less). It "only" had a 25% increase. :)
Doesn't Yahoo use thousands of FreeBSD machines for their game servers and such? They could donate big time.
According to the Foundation's page they are "87% of the way to $32,000 2004 small ( ;)
Thanks to everyone that has help and the rest... what are you waiting for today ??
hahah what does this have to do with anything? Also
I have been using gentoo for 8 months and never had a ebuild break on me, but I have hda freebsd installed for about 3 months before and ports broke on me all the time. Maybe I'm just an idiot though
"I've no experience with 2.6. I moved to FreeBSD-5.3 from 2.4 as my desktop, and so far BSD has been exactly as stable as Linux, which is to say that nothing ever breaks, ever."
I've had significant stability problems with kernel 2.6, even on distros that are supposed to have the resources to do QA on their kernels. Well, not so much stability problems as really annoying bugs that randomly get introduced with each revision.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Helevius
Is a charity. Passes the duck test.
Now when scoundrels argue with a charity, or costs a charity legal expenses, the public gets very cross indeed.
Actually it's at least *two* disgruntled trolls; I posted the original, and some kind soul (er, kind troll) has reposted it in every article since.
*BSD is dead. God bless us every one.
>Actually it's at least *two* disgruntled trolls;
not only dementia: schizophrenia, too.
Myself, I have run into a lot of terrible bugs in FreeBSD 5.3 :(
Could you quickly describe them? Just to make sure you're not a troll.
The Linux 2.6 bugs? No, I haven't run into any Linux bugs myself. OP, can you please quickly describe those Linux 2.6 bugs you've encountered, just to make sure you're not a troll? Thanks.
Gotcha. A nice FUD-spreading Linux zealot. They're such a rarity... ;)
Next time, maybe you'll ask the OP for clarifications *before* spreading your disgusting FUD over FreeBSD.
Err, what? What are you talking about? How about you explain what Linux bugs you are supposedly running into.
significant stability problems ... not so much stability problems as really annoying bugs
Clap clap clap. Nice troll. I bet you don't even see "really annoying bugs", do you?
Try the firewire support in 2.6. On some systems it would lock up the kernel so the fedora people had to disable it for quite a while. Also look at the cd recording breakage in 2.6.7 - 2.6.9 , some of the kernel changes broke cd recording apps like xcdroast and k3b.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Try the firewire support in 2.6.
Works alright for me. Better than FreeBSD firewire support which has been giving me the following sorts of messages and then locking up the kernel:
fwohci0: BUS reset
fwohci0: node_id=0xc800ffc1, gen=2, CYCLEMASTER mode
firewire0: 2 nodes, maxhop
So I guess the motto is, YMMV. This isn't a big failing on the part of Linux though.
Also look at the cd recording breakage in 2.6.7 - 2.6.9 , some of the kernel changes broke cd recording apps like xcdroast and k3b.
They simply ceased to allow unprivileged users from recording a CD. It was a bug to allow them to do so in the first place, so this was actually a fix.