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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."
This makes absolutely no sense to my feeble mind: to prove that you are a non-profitable charity you must take all your large donations that make you profitable then ask for more, smaller, donations that will make you even more profitable... to prove that you are a non-profitable charity.
Why does the tax man make things so insanely convoluted.
Good on the FreeBSD team though - I haven't used it personally, but obviously it does so well that people feel the need to donate large sums of money to it.
I drink to make other people interesting!
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.
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
Um..
I'll take a wild shot in the dark:
Because it results in fewer companies being classified as non-profit and tax-exempt?
I agree, $(n)00 is nothing -- I've been paying my rent for almost four years now by administering FreeBSD systems, and loving the hell out of it. This is the least I can do. (Well, that and becoming a FSF member...and that's next on the list.)
Carousel is a lie!
"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.