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FreeBSD Foundation Passes '04 Small Donation Needs
MTS writes "Thanks to the generous contributions of over 800 donors, a combination of both first-time donors and existing supportors, the FreeBSD Foundation has met and exceeded its fund-raising goal necessary to qualify for the 1/3 'public support' goal required to maintain its 501(c)3 status with the IRS. Your continued donations will help to support a broad variety of FreeBSD activities, including critical development, developer collaboration, testing, and involvement in standards processes." Convoluted tax laws meant that FreeBSD's success in attracting larger donations had threatened the organization's tax-free status.
The official statement is here: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/
Will this quota of 1/3 of public donations need to be held every year from now on? Or is this just to _acquire_ non-profit status.
;)
None the less, woohoo for the foundation, help make FreeBSD 6.0 even better
Error 407 - No creative sig found
What's so strange about that? In capitalism you need money to get anything useful done. But open source is an attempt at communist ideals emulated within a capitalist reality. It doesn't work out without money.
Don't complain about open source, go complain about governments making it so hard to MAKE anything for free.
Sam ty sig.
It has nothing to do with communist ideas or even being free. Open source easily fits in with capitalism as well or any other economics system.
Open Source just means that you can easily view the source code and generally possibly to modify it.
If you want to talk about ideas, you should talk about different groups and the like, but not generalize like that.
For those that care, the average donation amounts to about 47$. Even the smallest of donations were quite helpful here. I do wonder if anyone actually donated the 8000$ max...
As a long time FreeBSD user and supporter, it should be noted that many of us support the effort with our auto-subscriptions, where we pay $25 for each new release. On many of my servers I'm still running old versions, and I'm aware that I don't need the CDs for the latest versions mailed to me, but this is my way of supporting their efforts by kicking back money each time they have a major release. I urge all FreeBSD users to subscribe and provide the project with a solid source of recurring revenue that helps keep their project going.
While the funding drives are helpful, it's important to give the team a more substantive commitment and ongoing revenue they can bank on. It's a small price to pay. Subscribe and make a difference!
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."
The is one thing that I believe makes the BSD license a beautiful thing. The same code, created under the same license, can be freely reused in something totally open (such as Linux), partly open (such as Mac OS X), or totally closed (such as Windows XP.) Communist? Hardly.
Same old FUD, that has been disproved countless times...
Ahhh.... Yes *BSD is dying. I guess that is why their source code is used in:
d ocumentation/W indowsServ/2003/standard/proddocs/en-us/Default.as p?url=/resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/st andard/proddocs/en-us/copyright.asp
Microsoft:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/
Apple (OS X)
Sun (SunOS)
Nokeia (check point)
Juniper Routers (JunOS)
Linux
Yep, all is dead in the world of BSD. Well... with all of those folks using BSD then how can it be dying? Must not be true... Ahhh... you must be a cluess troll...
O'well, debunked another myth.
Pretty much, and he/she/it's a big one, considered what Netcraft actually says. ;)
Oh, and btw: Netcraft runs on FreeBSD servers!
Not only does the poster below point out:1 09&cid =10951312
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=131
The orginally story is from 1994. Dont forget that ext2 was based on BSD FFS. And ofcourse that since its 10 years old, no mention of softupdates or FFS2.
So, I guess that there is plenty of innovation happening in the BSD Labs. O'wait, don't forget the porting of XFS and someother file systems to *BSD.
Yes, yes, there are plenty of good files systems out there and the *BSD's take the cream of the crop.
I guess, folks forget to mention some of those things.
Long live *BSD.
Please don't play political games with BSD. Let others do that as we all know one OS doesn't solve all problems or meet everyone's needs. BSD is technically superior, but users should choose for themselves.
Actually open source ideals are much more in line with free-market, small-scale capitalism, rather than any form of communism. In fact, it's all much closer to Smith than to Marx. Perhaps you should read them and not spit McCarthyisms at people who might actually know something.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
Well, if you ask so nicely... How can I resist?
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Open Source/Free Software is about cooperation instead of competition, because the current capitalist market is deeply flawed and it's often impossible for good ideas to see the light of days because the market is pretty much totally dominated by multi-billion dollars corporations.
The only way to survive, to not be driven out of business, to not be bought, is not to try to compete on their terms, not to be for sale and not to be a business.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
I have been using FreeBSD on my desktop for years (since 4.2 or 4.3 I think) and this was the first money I've ever paid to support it.
While I feel good that I helped a little I kinda feel a little bad I've never done anything else before!!!
Ya dito. Usually i don't donate but this had to be done and i feel good about it!
Cheers & a happy new year, fellowes
Open source software is nothing more than a libertarian flavor of capitalism implemented within the software market.
That is, essentially, lots of private individuals are contributing -- not for profit -- to a privately-organized collection of code which is re-released back to the public under a set of rules (defined in the license) by a private entity's terms.
In essence, nearly the entire operation is privately-run. Is there an exchange of money for software? No.
But the software is developed mostly privately, without the assistance of the government -- meaning it's largely non-socialist. And because property rights -- in the form of copyrights -- are retained by private holders, the so-called "communism" of the open-source system is privately-held -- meaning it's not communism at all, but rather, capitalism of an intellectual-property variety. The property rights backing copyrighht law, on which even the GPL relies, ensures that this system is based on property rights -- rights which are fundamental to any capitalist system, and purely antithetical to communism in any form, as communism rejects private property rights.
Hence, open source is actually a very capitalistic system, contrary to the beliefs of both some propoents and detractors...
There are exceptions. The NSA's security contributions are a socialist contribution to Linux. Contributions to Linux or FreeBSD from NASA or DARPA are socialist contributions. But by and large, most code is written by private individuals, and in any case, the decision as to whether the code is included into the source tree is made usually, if not entirely (as with Linus Torvalds) by 1 or more private entities.
Thus, the developement of open-source software is largely a private -- and therefore, non-communist, non-socialist, and therefore, by elimination of all other current economic models, capitalist -- affair.
So long as the rights of copyright remain in private hands, OSS is a largely-private, capitalist affair. Change the rights of copyright to a more community-oriented set of rights, and then we'll talk...
Now, does open-source require money to operate? It surely requires money or time. But OSS tends to receive one of those 2 resources from private individuals, just as it always has, and nothing under a privately-owned system of individually-controlled capitalist economics prevents this from occurring. Ayn Rand would disapprove, but she disapproved of anybody who worked for free, calling them a "slave" to charitable causes. Most sane people -- even staunch free-marketeers like myself -- would disagree with that view, seeing such work as the product of the emotions of the individual felt for another person... Rand's failure was to factor in the non-objective, debateably less-rational parts of human behavior into her system of worldview...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Actually, it doesn't have a journalling file system YET, but the foundations are mostly in place. Read the mailing lists or at LEAST justin's blog.
At this rate give them a month or two to get something usable in, at the most. Brilliant developers.
Sam ty sig.
[This is my last reply (not anonymous and karma-free) to this name-calling AC]
/. story understood that. In fact he says:
:)
That one by Oppermann was a mailing list post, in which he was implicitly referring to a Xeon. Not surprisingly, the submitter of the
"Andre claims that FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
Notice the "on a 2.8GHz Xeon" part... *Both* the numbers (1 Mpps and "not much more than 100kpps") are referred to one particular architecture.
And, I repeat, there's *nothing* in the post you linked that either disproves that, or justifies your previous claims. The 1.3 Mpps figure is *not* referred to the same architecture. About the Xeon, the post you linked just says "Our numbers on Xeons are less than 1Mpps".
I think that's enough to acknowledge that if there is a troll, that would definitely be you.
One more thing about the "can't do much more than 100kpps" part: even if it were an underestimate, and the actual figure turned out to be 300, 400 or even 500 kpps, it's still hardly relevant compared to FreeBSD's 1 Mpps.
Not to say that FreeBSD is without weak points, of course (just like every OS, and the devs are surely working on those), but it routes much better than Linux.
And underlining this fact, in the one place (/.) where trolls have been spreading the "BSD is dying" FUD for *years*, is more than appropriate.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.