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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."
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
*clears throat* WHY?!
This is, of course, answered in TFA, but I'll do some cut and pasting for the lazy:
December 31st of this year will mark the end of the FreeBSD
Foundation's probationary period as a 501(c)3. The IRS requires
all non-profit public charities to prove, at the five year mark,
that they have met the "public support test" or be classified as
a private foundation. For several reasons that are too technical
to go into, it is in the Foundation's interest to remain a public
charity.
The easiest way for the Foundation to demonstrate "public support"
is to pass the "1/3rd test":
[ Editors comment: The following formula is not presented exactly as in TFA, in order to avoid the lameness filter]
Limited Donations / All Donations = 1 / 3
For the purposes of this test, no single donor may contribute
more than 2% of the total donation pool to the numerator.
Through good fortune and the extreme charity of a handful of
donors, the FreeBSD Foundation finds itself at risk of failing
the "1/3rd test". As of today, the ratio of limited donations
to total donations stands at 27.9%. While we have every confidence
that our support history will substantiate that the FreeBSD
Foundation is a public charity, going through the appeals process
can be a lengthy and expensive ordeal.
May we live long and die out
"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.