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.

Comments

Official statement URL

[timshea]

The official statement is here: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/

More about the "quota"?

[agent dero]

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 ;)

Re:More about the "quota"?

[compass46]

Audigy support is already in 5.3. It was not in 5.2.1 though. I'm using an Audigy on 5.3 right now.

Re:More about the "quota"?

[molnarcs]

Don't take this guy too seriously. Some sample from his articles:

His SUSE 'review' His FreeBSD 'review'

Some gems (pun intended) from the latter:

FreeBSD 5.x enjoyed an excellent head start in the fully 64-bit AMD64 operating system arena, but now trails the pack, with only Windows XP 64-bit behind it in speed and completeness.

The bold parts are hyperlins to articles that supposed to show how "slow" AMD64 under FreeBSD 5.3 is supposed to be does in no way even mention FreeBSD and in fact only tests SuSE and Fedora Core along with Windows XP SP1. Same with 'completeness'. On the other hand, I remember his amd64 review of FreeBSD 5.2.1 - which was an excellent and well detailed review. I guess he didn't even try FreeBSD on amd64 since then.

And don't even start me on his 'new feature list'. Forgets to mention important things like backports of many features of ULE to SCHED_4BSD, inclusion of pf and altq framwork in the base system (for sysadmins, this is perhaps one of the most important features), multithreaded network stack (although he mentions it elsewhere, but not under new features!), etc. He is even wrong in his pathetic attempt at humour (if it was that) about the naming of ULE:

The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned.

Well, yes, ULE might not be an acronym, and no, its name is not SCHED_ULE ... name is ULE, SCHED_ULE is the configuration option you put in your kernel file.

I would take this guy's comments with a grain of salt, except for his older work, which I think was excellent (I don't have problems with criticism, and his old amd64 review was quite critical. I have problems with FUD and unsubstantiated claims and badly written articles). What happened to this guy?

Re:More about the "quota"?

[pbnagel]

The 1/3 test has nothing to do with the foundation's Section 501(c)(3) charitable status. There are actually two kinds of Section 501(c)(3) organizations -- "publicly supported organizations" and "private foundations." Private foundations are subject to greater restrictions on their activities (prohibitions against self-dealing, required annual distributions, stricter limitations on owning businesses, and the like), as well as lower limits on the deductibility of contributions, and so avoiding private foundation status is always desirable.

To become a publicly supported organization, a charity must show that it enjoys broad support from the general public, as opposed to having its funding concentrated in a small number of donors. One of the publicly supported organizations tests requires that 1/3 of the organization's funding come from individuals, corporate and foundation grants, and other public charities, and amounts from any one source (except other public charities or the government) in excess of two percent of the organization's total support do not count for these purposes. This 1/3 test is performed each year, but is based on the average received over the previous four years.

If an organization cannot meet the 1/3 test, it may still qualify as a publicly supported charity so long as its "good" support (grants and contributions that pass through the two-percent filter) amount to more than ten percent of its total revenue and it can show that it is engaged in a continuous fundraising program, has a board representative of the community, and satisfies other factors. The BSD Foundation appeared to have been on the verge of falling just shy of the 1/3 test, but probably would have had little difficulty satisfying the alternate 10-percent-plus-facts-and-circumstances test and therefore probably would have remained a publicly supported charity even without its recent plea for donations. Nonetheless, every new Section 501(c)(3) organization is given a five-year test period in which to attempt to meet either test, and at the end of that period must send in a worksheet to the IRS showing how it did, which means that some official in the IRS actually will take a look at the foundation's public charity status.

All publicly supported Section 501(c)(3) organizations must complete a schedule on their annual tax returns (Form 990) that demonstrates their on-going compliance with the public support test. Interestingly enough, though, the IRS simply does not seem to have the computer or personnel resources to do anything about an organization that files a 990 disclosing that it has unquestionably failed the public support test, and there are many charities that have survived the initial five-year probationary period, that have subsequently filed 990's showing that their public support is well below even the minimum 10 percent, and yet that remain classified by the IRS as a publicly supported charity, and not a private foundation.

Re:More about the "quota"?

[Ded Bob]

FreeBSD's SK/Yukon LAN driver stopped working properly between 5.2.1 and 5.3

I can attest that it has been working in 5.3-STABLE for over a month on my ASUS A7V880 board.

Re:Heh

[setagllib]

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.

Re:Heh

[VVelox]

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.

47$ Donations

[Delita]

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...

I support FreeBSD with subscriptions

[mabu]

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!

Requiem for the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

... facts are facts. ;)

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:
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."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

Re:Heh

[dn15]

open source is an attempt at communist ideals emulated within a capitalist reality

While this may appear to be the case at first glance, it is not true. Take the BSD license -- while the code is free, it is reusable in commercial software and changes need not be released. Effectively it allows a publicly created resource to be used in a private or commercial venture. This type of openness is a far cry from any license a Communist would use.

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.

Re:Not that it is going to apply

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Heh

[sean23007]

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.

Re:Fuckin' morons! Support D-fly! FreeBSD IS DEAD!

[MikeCapone]

Well, if you ask so nicely... How can I resist?

I donated $20

[kiwirob]

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!!!

Re:Heh

[Money for Nothin']

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...