Slashdot Mirror
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."
Actually if you read what the foundation wrote, you will see that they did so well in large donations that they would loose their charity status which they want to keep. So they are asking for lots of smaller donations.
PS: if I read the ballance sheet right they have about $200K in the bank. Hardly poorly managed
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
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!
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
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.
That's for linux, BSD does not fall under SCO's bullshit lawsuits
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)
"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.
I didn't know either but luckily it was answered by Hank on Osnews.com
change the law - it is a disincentive
Guys stop missing the big picture on the law. Picture it, I'm a millionaire (the name is Joey Bucks) who just made another $750,000 in a stock market transaction. I donate that stock, and thus the capital gains, to my favorite tax free company named "Joey Bucks' Beach Improvement Fund" who's sole purpose is to beautify the wretched Hamptons, Long Island shoreline. Are we getting the picture? The 30% is there to ensure that the ridiculously rich aren't creating phantom tax shelters to stash their millions or billions of dollars.
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
Helevius