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FreeBSD Foundation Needs Cash For 501(c)3 Status

Posted by timothy on from the cash-in-the-form-of-donations-that-is dept.

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."

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Um... by thegrassyknowl · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  2. Wait wait wait... by HaloZero · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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
  3. Re:Who needs an "organization" to contribute? by Saint+Aardvark · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Just donated $200 (ha! take that! :-). Tried submitting it to the front page before I realized this had made it here...I suppose it's a good thing there wasn't YAD.

    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!
  4. Re:Uh by ArbitraryConstant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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.