FreeBSD Project Falls Short of Year End Funding Target By Nearly 50%

TrueSatan writes "Perhaps a sign of our troubled times or a sign that FreeBSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs: the FreeBSD project has sought $500,000 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. But with the end of this year fast approaching, it has raised just over $280,000, far short of its target."

Comments

Obligatory

[SwabTheDeck]

a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs

Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

Re:Obligatory

[cheesybagel]

Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.

Re:Obligatory

[OzPeter]

a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs

Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

With the obligatory remark about how they never give back to the community.

(Next post please add the link to the source code that Apple releases in order to refute my anti-fanboish trope)

(With any luck we will trap all the anti- and pro- Apple rants in this one thread!)

Re:Obligatory

[ernest.cunningham]

Whether its a dead OS or not, in an attempt to make me feel better about using Mac OS X and iOS I donated :P

Re:Obligatory

[_Stryker]

You mean a link like this one: http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1082/

Re:Obligatory

[OzPeter]

*whoooosh*

Why can't you just check apples web site for your self? Moron?

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

The BSD community must offer more assistance. As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second. If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.

Re:Obligatory

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.

Perhaps they should ask Apple to sue them.

It might get them some sympathy donations . . . ?

Re:Obligatory

[chronokitsune3233]

a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs

Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

Obligatory rebuttal about how even many technical people don't really care much about the fact that an old version of FreeBSD serves as the foundation for OS X as long as they know how to administer the system and/or develop for it, blah, blah, blah.

Re:Obligatory

[peppepz]

OS X 'is' not BSD, it's NeXTSTEP with code derived from BSD.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Either it is Opposite Day in whatever land you come from, or you are a total idiot who doesn't know up from down.

The overwhelmingly obvious trend in the last 12 years has been the decline of restrictively licensed ("copyLEFT") projects in favor of genuinely free ("copyFREE") software. There's a sole noteworthy exception to this rule trend, which is the software component that produces the greatest lock-in: the Linux kernel. (I suggest you read that last linked thread in full - it has many links to details.)

GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999). During that gap, Linux attracted a lot of attention, attained technological superiority, and, by the end of the century, it was considered the obvious choice in open source UNIX. Linux managed to capitalize on the collapse of proprietary UNIX and attract a lot of corporate support. It beats the BSD's on almost every performance benchmark. Kudos to Linus T - he got there first, made a thousand good decisions, and beat us fair and square!

But that doesn't mean Linux will remain the king of the mountain forever. Linux is being written by the very people who its license was designed to hurt! It is a loose alliance of corps mostly trying to undermine Microsoft, and this contradiction cannot last. Linus T made the right choice by not switching to the newer more-restrictive versions of GPL, which should buy it some more time. And its jack-of-all-trades approach, trying to be the ideal kernel for everything from nano to desktops to supercomputers, will catch up to it eventually.

See, sometime in the last few years, people actually started to pay attention to licensing, as the disadvantages of GPL started to become obvious. This resulted in a shift away from copyLEFT all across the board. Many projects switched licenses (ex. Ruby) and got a new lease on life, while in many software categories new copyFREE projects started to gradually suck away GPL's market share. At the turn of the millennium there were no decent copyFREE compilers, desktop environments, or Web browsers. Today we have Clang/LLVM, E17, and Chromium (well, almost - that's why I'd rather use Opera for now). In the most competitive categories, like scripting languages and Web servers, GPL is almost entirely dead. PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, etc are gradually squeezing MySQL. The HTML5 stack's gains are the loss of GTK/Qt/wx/etc, as well as of FFMPEG. FreeBSD is just about finished scraping off the last remnants of copyLEFT, which would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago - now finally I can run a complete UNIX system without any GNU!

This trend is going to continue - gradually, patiently, at times with a few steps back and sideways, but moving forward in aggregate nonetheless. History takes time to play out. Maybe it will be Haiku on portable devices, and/or DragonFly BSD on large servers, and/or a completely new copyFREE OS that's yet to be initiated. Maybe the copyFREE champion Google will pull something out of its sleeve. But, sooner or later, the Penguin Empire will fall!

--libman

Re:Obligatory

[BrokenHalo]

If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.

Who says Ubuntu is the future of Linux? It is merely one distribution among dozens. The fact that it is the most popular at the moment is neither here nor there; during the years I have been using Linux, the previous most popular distributions have been Slackware, RedHat, Debian (and possibly Mandrake). In a year's time, the crown could pass on to some other distribution I've never heard of. (For the record, my preference is now for Arch.)

But if BSD fits your requirements, then by all means use it.

Re:Obligatory

[1s44c]

The BSD community must offer more assistance. As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second. If Ubuntu represents the future of Linux i want none of it, I'll go back to BSD.

FreeBSD has native ZFS which is the one reason I'm using it at home. I thought FreeBSD could act as a xen dom0 but it seems You are right, it can't.

FreeBSD is a very nice OS and much more consistent as a whole system than any Linux distribution.

Re:Obligatory

[1s44c]

Whether its a dead OS or not, in an attempt to make me feel better about using Mac OS X and iOS I donated :P

isaac@xen:~$ ping -c 2 10.0.0.107
PING 10.0.0.107 (10.0.0.107) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.0.0.107: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.595 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.0.107: icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.959 ms

It's certainly not a dead OS, it's running perfectly well.

Re:Obligatory

[kthreadd]

Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.

Apple already funds developers working on projects that are contributed to FreeBSD. Just a few examples are LLVM, OpenBSD and Libdispatch.

Re:Obligatory

[kthreadd]

As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second.

It's already on its way. http://bhyve.org/

Re:Obligatory

[kthreadd]

It's a combination of a lot of things, including various parts of BSD.

Re: Obligatory

[peppepz]

It has a completely different kernel design and a vastly different userspace. If OS X counts as a measure of the relevance of BSD because it contains BSD-derived code, then even most Linux installations 'are BSD'.

Re:Obligatory

[Johnny Loves Linux]

libman, I just don't see the problem with the GPL license. The BSD license permits people to take free source code and lock it way and not share back, the big example here is Apple, and Microsoft's TCP/IP stack from 90's. The way I see it, GPL is an immunization for the user community against the jerks who want to take source code and not share back their changes.

I understand that some people don't see why it's important to immunize the community against for want of a better analogy I call antisocials. Certainly I understand why corporations like Apple and Microsoft don't want the community to be protected from people who take without giving back, but you haven't given me a good explanation yet for why you believe GPL is restrictive.

Yes, in terms of antisocial exploitation of software I suppose you could say it's restrictive. In terms of being able to make use of the software and modify it at will, I think it's awesomely free. The issue I personally have with the BSD license is not the terms of the license, but that it makes no provision to stop exploitation by corporations like Apple and Microsoft who do not have a history of share and share alike, but instead, a history of aggressively attempting to exterminate any competition.

Personally, I'm looking for a software license that makes the world a better place, not some Darwinian winner-exterminates-all-other-competitors where the only survivors are the companies with lots of $$$ whose priority #1 is to make more $$$ by any means necessary such as suing competitors with BS patents.

Re:Obligatory

[fahrbot-bot]

GNU (1984) and Linux (1991) arrived many years before BSD became permissively licensed (1999).

The previous license, just above the paragraph in the Wikipedia link you provided, is basically the same and pre-dates 1988 - BSD was initially released in 1977. As a user of 4.3BSD (yes, I'm old) I remember that BSD was available to pretty much anyone with a few buck for a tape and postage. My university used it while I was there from 1981-87.

The main objection to the older license was the "advertising clause" (below), which does NOT actually restrict use of the software:

3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement:
This product includes software developed by the .

Re:Obligatory

[cyber-vandal]

The GPL is about the freedom of the end-user not the developer. The GPL removes the dependency of the end-user on the developer to release fixes to the code. GPL code can't be closed. BSD code can.

Re:Obligatory

[Osgeld]

and BSD is not Net BSD, nor is it Free BSD

its like saying IBM uses linux, but yellowdog is a dead linux OS, so therefore its IBM's fault

Re:Obligatory

[dudpixel]

I can see the argument for why one might choose either license, but at the end of the day of the author of the code wishes that their code always remain free, and so chooses the GPL, I believe that is their right and it should be respected.

Complaining that a third party licensed their code under a particular license is just stupid. It is the same as saying that the original developer should not have had the choice to license their work however they wanted to.

If you use someone else's code then you should respect the wishes of that developer. It doesn't go further than that.

Sure, you can trumpet the benefits if X, Y, or Z license until the cows come home, but if a developer still chooses to license their work under the GPL, that's their right to do so.

You called it "lock-in". I call it "respecting the rights of the author(s)".

Re:Obligatory

[smash]

Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

Hundreds of millions, you mean.

Re:Obligatory

[Watts Martin]

While I agree with the last two sentences, it's worth noting two points which undercut your first two sentences rather dramatically:

(1) Taking BSD-licensed code and making a proprietary fork doesn't make the previous release magically go away; it makes a new fork. If I love the open source editor FooEdit and FooEdit has a vibrant community around it, then somebody else comes along and starts selling BarEdit based on their proprietary, closed source fork, I can either choose to switch to BarEdit and accept the risks, or keep using FooEdit. (And arguably that's not a binary proposition in the first place: I can switch to BarEdit and then switch back to FooEdit.) The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software. Furthermore, you can hardly point to BarEdit and say, "those cool BarEdit-only features would be in FooEdit if only it had been under the GPL"; the more likely case is that BarEdit would simply never have existed.

(2) While the anonymous coward who responded with "ROFL" was perhaps unduly acerbic, his point is correct: an end user who can't debug and patch code is dependent on the developers to fix bugs regardless of the license the software she's using is under. As much as people don't like to hear this around these parts, I know an awful lot of end users who look for free software because it's free as in beer.

Re:Obligatory

[maxwell demon]

Indeed, currently my bet would be on Mint as the next popular distribution.

Re:Obligatory

[SnatMandu]

I think he's suggesting that *some* people like the *option* of fixing the software they use themselves. It's always nicer to get a fix for something from "upstream" somewhere, but that's not always possible. It's nice (a GPL-cheerleader might say "essential") to be able to fall back on your own elbow grease.

The relative quality of the code in question doesn't enter in to it. After all, what good is beautifully written and documented code if you'll never see it?

Re:Obligatory

[petval]

KVM is level 1 hypervisor (like ESX, XenServer, Hyper-V), BHyVe is level 2 (like VMware Workstation or VirtualBox)

Re:Obligatory

[TheRaven64]

It's probably a typo. OpenBSM is the MAC framework used by FreeBSD and Darwin. Apple funded a lot of its development, but it was originally written for FreeBSD (it's now the basis for the sandboxing system on iOS and OS X).

Re:Obligatory

[TheRaven64]

That hasn't been true since OS X was called Rhapsody DR2. All of the userland utilities, all of the libc, and much of the kernel either come from FreeBSD or were developed in-house by Apple.

Re:Obligatory

[biojayc]

If there are only BSD like licenses, what is the incentive of any corporation to give back? The thinking will be "look here's this awesome tool that we can take, modify and use for ourselves. Let's do that" and giving back won't even be a part of the thought. Energy behind the free version will wane and Open source will disappear. The GPL like licenses helps us know that there WILL be current open source software out there because anyone who wants to use it as a starting point has to give back.

You could argue that some that work on BSD software DO give back, but I think the presence of the GPL has helped the culture form and I'm just not sure that without it's presence that the pattern would continue to long.

I could be wrong, and maybe I am, but I am glad for the GPL and fear the rise of BSD. Perhaps it's best to have both and allow them to co exist, but BSD only I'm afraid will slowly lead to only proprietary software. If someone could help me see the other side, I would certainly listen.

Re:Obligatory

[ilguido]

No, that's a link to all the open source software included in MacOSX, or are you telling me that Apple developed OpenAL, zlib and SQLite (among many others)? Not to mention that all that APSL software is GPL incompatible, DFSG incompatible and, ironically enough, BSD incompatible. Nice try though.

Re:Obligatory

[Hatta]

Indeed. The general trend has been away from freedom. The same has occured in the free software community, as more and more development is primarily driven by for profit corporations. The move from GPL to BSD licenses is a blow for freedom, like we've seen in every other realm over the past decade.

Re: Obligatory

[peppepz]

The point is that Apple (and NeXT) took BSD code to make a different operating system. Running a different kernel, with a different binary format, designed to support a graphics environment which is completely alien from BSD's native X11. You can't run BSD binaries on OS X without an emulation layer. You can't run OS X binaries on BSD without an emulation layer. I have the surname of my father, I am not my father.

Re:Obligatory

[greg1104]

I thought they just threatened to sue, but didn't when the project met their demands.

Re:Obligatory

[greg1104]

The advertising clause made it impossible to combine the BSD programs with GNU ones in some ways. It's fair to say it's not directly the fault of the BSD license, because it results from license terms that interact very badly. That is effectively a strong restriction though, given the state of open source software at the time. Several of the only feasible choices for critical parts of an open source stack then--gcc comes to mind--were only available via the GNU license.

Re:Obligatory

[Skadet]

LLVM, OpenBSD, Libdispatch.

Re:Obligatory

[fahrbot-bot]

I don't know that it made it impossible more than extremely tedious. The ad clause didn't prevent anything, just mandated that credit be mentioned in any ads and notices. But, if someone didn't want anyone else to know their software was, in part or whole, based on or used BSD code, then, ya, it prevented them from using it.

I actually knew people that wanted to use BSD code - as the license permitted - but not mention or note it in ads, docs, notices because they wanted customers and competitors to think it was all locally-developed code and I had to tell them that would violate other parts of the BSD license, as well as being unethical. I believe credit should always be given.

Re:Obligatory

[greg1104]

It really is impossible to legally combine GPL and original BSD licensed software. See Why is the original BSD license incompatible with the GPL?.

Re:Obligatory

[fahrbot-bot]

So actually, the GPL is incompatible with the BSD as the GPL is too restrictive. All the BSD license says is that you must include source credit in your advertising - which isn't really a restriction, but, rather, a requirement, while the GPL says you can't imposes any further restrictions, by which they mean requirements.

How is ensuring that proper source credit is given a problem? The people at Berkeley (and CA taxpayers) were trying to ensure they got their due credit and I don't think providing it is/was an undue burden on those using the BSD software. The GPL itself imposes many requirements on software, like delivering a copy of the GPL license with the software (Section 4) and displaying "Appropriate Legal Notices" [how vague] (Section 5)...

The BSD license is one of the most permissive licenses on the planet - do whatever you want with the software, no charge or restrictions, just give us a little credit where due.

I don't agree that they're incompatible, except in the mind of the fanatical or pedantic... oh wait... Right. this is the FSF and GPL we're talking about...

Re:Obligatory

[Kremmy]

ZFS support on all platforms is significantly lacking in the specified featureset. Every time I've come across a post talking up some awesome thing about ZFS, I've taken a moment to do some research and found that (with the exception of a few things in the Solaris implementation) the major features that everyone is hailing it for are not actually implemented.
That means it doesn't have those features.
That means it doesn't have the benefits that people are using it for.
That means it's garbage.

And that saddens my soul.

Re:Obligatory

[Lakitu]

The worst case hypothetical is that somehow BarEdit's creation kills the FooEdit community, but in reality that seems very unlikely; in practice, I can't think of a single BSD-licensed project that this has happened to. Can you? Yes, it's possible that in my scenario BarEdit would get cool new features denied to FooEdit users, but if you're deliberately choosing your software based on its "openness" then you've already decided to forgo cool features that are only in proprietary software.

while I agree with you, the worry here would be that this is already beginning to happen to FreeBSD itself.

Re:Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

With all due respect to your unixbeardedness, your statement has very little to do with the point I was making. We are comparing open source UNIX to open source UNIX, and what factors influenced the relative success of one OS over an other. The roots of the early success of Linux were the i386 "home users" with some blank floppies, who were far more numerous than people with access to corporate mainframes or university labs. I am explaining why those early adopters of Linux didn't go for BSD instead - BSD simply wasn't on their radar. Linux got there first, and when you've got one kernel you don't need another. (GNU's favoritism of Linux over BSD due to licensing bias is a separate issue.)

GNU was open-source (though restrictively-licensed) since its inception in 1983/4, and Linux from 1991. BSD was entangled in legal FUD until January 1994 , by which time we had not only Linux but also Slackware, Debian, etc. (To some people BSD's "obnoxious advertising clause" was even more of a turn-off than Linux's copyLEFT, and BSD didn't become fully compliant with copyFREE standards until 1999, but that's a side-issue.) So it was in January of 1994 when BSD became a contender, while Linux "went viral" among the home geek crowd in 1993.

Linus himself had said that if 386BSD had been available (i.e. free of AT&T legal uncertainty) at the time, he probably would not have created Linux. (And it didn't become fully free of legal FUD until a few months after that interview was published.) In that same interview, Linus also mentions other reasons that worked against BSD: higher hardware requirements, "lack of co-ordination", bad approach to release engineering, etc.

Switching kernels (which also meant switching file-systems, kernel-dependent system components, etc) has always been very difficult. Switching Web browsers is much easier, and its (mostly) BSD license didn't keep Chromium from leapfrogging over Firefox. Apache httpd wasn't the least bit handicapped by its non-copyLEFT (though not entirely copyFREE) license (in fact the "got there first" advantage of Apache has kept out decent GPL'ed Web servers like Cherokee), and it's now gradually yielding ground to the fully-copyFREE nginx. Among scripting languages, lisp (the most popular scripting language of the 80s, also Stallman's favorite) was overshadowed by weaker-copyLEFT perl, which in turn was leapfrogged by even-less-uncopyFREE python / php, and which are now being leapfrogged by fully-copyFREE node.js / ruby / etc. Apple's recent choices leave no doubt that GPL has handicapped the popularity of mysql and gcc.

Conclusion: The conjecture that FreeBSD was hurt by its license is baseless, buried under a mountain of more plausible handicaps in the history of FreeBSD's development, and is utterly contradicted in most other software categories!

--libman

Re:Obligatory

[dudpixel]

Huh? The only annoying part is that you don't like the fact that someone else has told you what you can do with their code (well, when it comes to distribution at least).

I'm not saying either is right or wrong. I generally use the BSD license for my own projects, so I fail to see how that makes me a GPL fanboy.
I even started my post by saying: "I can see the argument for why one might choose either license"...

I guess where we differ is that you think a developer should not have the rights granted by the GPL. I disagree - I think the GPL is a valid license and the linux kernel is an excellent example of when it is the right choice (in my opinion).

I don't think the GPL fits in all cases, and neither do I think the BSD license fits in all cases.

Let's think about where the GPL hurts most. It hurts because you have to release your own code under the GPL if you use GPL'd code in your project. And why does it hurt to release your own code? well, obviously because you didn't want that code to be "open" (or you didn't want later developers' code to have to be, and so on).

Let's make this really interesting and say that if there was no such thing as closed-source code, then the BSD license would not offer any advantage over the GPL.

Still, my own personal view is that closed source is not evil, and a developer should be able to choose how to license their code/product. True freedom to me means allowing the developer the right to any license he/she chooses. But the only way that works is if other developers respect that choice.

Re:Obligatory

[helix2301]

Apple needs BSD to survive they will bale them out lol. I do think that BSD is struggling with funding cause of Linux popularity boom over last few years. Linux has taken great strides to be come more commercial and get more support on server backed end with Dell, HP and IBM. I do not see BSD having big leaps like that plus they need a better PR rep. Every customer I go to ask for Linux because we are a Linux shop on our commercial side I very rarely see anyone ask for BSD support.

Re:Obligatory

[Galactic Dominator]

KVM is level 1 hypervisor

Pure gibberish faith. KVM looks a kernel module, it operates exclusively within the kernel making it a Type 2. However the distinction itself is meaningless now days except for those who like to pontificate on Old Wives Tales like "Type 1 gives a better security profile" or "Type 2 doesn't have feature X".

It's all bullshit.

Finally....

[identity0]

After many long years on Slashdot, can I be the first one to actually confirm that FreeBSD is dead?

Re:Finally....

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Only Netcraft is allowed to do that.

Re:Finally....

[Kergan]

It's. Not. Dead. Yet.

It'll return as a zombie... process?

Re:Finally....

[TheRaven64]

See the donors page for some of the big donors. NetApp gave $100,000 this year (they had to invent a new category of sponsor for them. Juniper gave somewhere in the $10-25K region, but they've also started pushing a lot of code upstream and employing people to work full-time on FreeBSD, which is more valuable (in terms of code, Juniper has contributed more than all of the Foundation-funded developers in the past year, the advantage of the Foundation is that it can fund work that doesn't give anyone enough a short-term commercial advantage for companies to do it).

To put this in perspective, last year's fund raising total was $400K and they raised about $480K. For the past two years, about half of the fund raising has been in the last week as US companies realise that it's the end of the tax year and they want to offset some tax, so they're pretty well on target.

Actually, the biggest problem for the Foundation currently is the opposite of what you elude to. They need to have a certain (somewhat flexible) percentage of donations from individuals to satisfy the 'broad public support' requirement for their tax-free status. This means that they need small donations from individuals as well as the big corporate donations.

P.S. The Foundation has received over 400 donations in between this story appearing and when I started writing this post. More, of course, are welcome. If you're having trouble figuring out how (apparently some people are), then go to the Foundation's donations page (reachable by clicking on Donations from the Foundation's front page, but depressingly hard to find from FreeBSD.org).

Never met anyone who uses it.

[jfdavis668]

I have never met anyone in person who uses it. I know some must.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Melkman]

Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Cinder6]

Obviously you've never met me (well, most likely you haven't), but I used to use FreeBSD in the early-to-mid-2000s, back before I went to OS X. I always liked it a lot--more than any of the *nixes I used, with the possible exception of Arch.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[jfdavis668]

No, I don't think I ever met you. Nice to meet you.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never met anyone in person who uses it. I know some must.

I have I am sad to say... and unfortunately someone keeps deploying new instances on my network. And then leaves. With my team holding the bloody bag.

2 BSD servers, and 2 bloody Debian servers, installled by some admin that professes a hatred for Redhat.

(Despite Redhat being our organization's standard)

That's the only place I see FreeBSD these days -- unauthorized installs by some diehard.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[epine]

Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

You must be a math major. An economist might have stopped to ask whether Clang/LLVM fell off a turnip wagon.

Anyone who is using FreeBSD properly soon reaches the point where they are thinking about other things they need to accomplish. You probably haven't met too many people having long conversations about their wonderfully reliable plumbing, either.

Linux seems to regard rewriting their firewall facility from scratch as a desirable social activity. Of course if you meet someone who enjoys replacing their deck every second year, you'll hear a lot more about advances in deck paint.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I may not hear others refer to their reliable plumbing that will probably outlast their home but I do hear from plenty of people that have bad plumbing, overflow issues and need their pipes cleaned.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Billly Gates]

FreeBSD was very popular 10 years ago. In my opinion those were its golden days.

BSD Unix golden days were 4.2 - 4.4 where TCP/IP was developed back in the early 1980s and Sun's Gossling worked on the kernel. Its freeBSD counterpart golden days were 4.0 - 4.12 before it went to shit and Linux/Ubuntu took over.

10 years ago FreeBSD was ahead of Linux and it drove me nuts to see slashdot down all the time (not so common now) as Linux couldn't scale for more than 2 cpus and crashed or halted when it had a shitload of network connections. FreeBSD could run smoothly on that old 486 just fine for thousands of connections!

FreeBSD was more user friendly (4.x and earlier) as you could go to /usr/ports/examples/cvsup and /etc and edit .sh files to do all sorts of crazy things like check your main update servers at 3am every night and sync to the ports ... just uncomment this line! FYI I last used it in 2004/2005 so I might have got that directory wrong. Linux .RC scripts are more like programs iwth if/else code than .ini files :-(

You can't really hack them as they are programs. Not things to turn on and off as easily.

Unix geeks used Linux and FreeBSD and if you bought it at any college bookstore it had a nice manual too which is my favorite unix book. It discusses how to use emacs and vi and other things much better than the crappy linux manpages. Infact, FreeBSD has /etc/share/doc with much more detailed things and its man pages were more detailed. Example man /etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.

FreeBSD 4.0 - 4.12 will always have a place in my heart right there with the Windows fan boys loving XP as its golden age.

Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors. Linux has a journaling file system now. It can do async i/o and other things that only FreeBSD could as FreeBSD became bloated and buggy. Rest in peace.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[TheGratefulNet]

I had to programming jobs that used freebsd. and one that used netbsd. but that was many years ago. these days, all I'm seeing are linux this and linux that.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[BrokenHalo]

Example man /etc would talk about that directory where no such entry was in Linux.

Maybe it just isn't necessary. Even BSDs get some things completely wrong:

$ man woman
No manual entry for woman
$

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[1s44c]

I have never met anyone in person who uses it. I know some must.

Dammit. I use it, I was using it 10 minutes ago. I can't be alone.

I store lots of data on FreeBSD 9.0 using ZFS because I really like ZFS. I also run BackupPC for my personal stuff on it.

I also really like the handbook. One simple accessible document for most of everything is so much easier than the Linux distros.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Beetjebrak]

FreeBSD? Right here on my laptop, my media center, my personal web and mail servers, and a hell of a lot of servers (est. 400 or so) at work. But we probably haven't met. If we have, I generally don't use my preference for FreeBSD as a conversation starter.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Beetjebrak]

(Despite Redhat being our organization's standard) The point in time when this was decided was also the point in time your organization stopped thinking about stuff like this, right? Seriously, I'm usually not one for breaking the mold but the threat of tunnel vision is definitely there if you stop looking from side to side.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[1s44c]

Well, I know people who use FreeNAS which is based on FreeBSD. I think the thought behind the BSD license is telling. It basically says you can take the code and nothing in return is expected, which is exactly what they get.

I know from personal experience that at least some big mega-corps do give stuff back to the BSD's.

I worked at a place that spent loads of money improving one of the BSDs. They gave back everything for the purely selfish reason that they could either keep maintaining their changes at a high cost or send the changes to the project and get maintance for free. The improvements to the BSD were publicly known but who funded them never was.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[rtaylor]

I strongly prefer to have a different operating systems on my front-end (Apache) and database/storage (PostgreSQL) layers just to make it a touch more difficult to pull a copy of the DB.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[1s44c]

I use it *without* knowing on my router http://www.pfsense.org/ and my NAS http://www.freenas.org/

Pendantic mode - How do you know you use it without knowing? Besides the boot messages are a dead giveaway.

I used to use pfsense. It worked fine but it did seem annoyingly limited in some respects and everytime I asked how to do a thing I was told I should pay for a bounty to add some feature in the next release. It annoyed me so much I changed to OpenBSD and now write pf rules in vi. Now I know exactly what my firewall is doing, it runs a more recent version of pf, I have way more flexibility to do other things on my firewall if I choose, and pfsense can't compete with OpenBSD's security history.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[1s44c]

CentOS is my organization's standard, but sometimes there are compelling reasons to use something else.

I have no knowledge of your situation. Maybe it was just someone using what they knew best in your case.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Vanders]

I use FreeBSD on NTP servers as it keeps time better than Linux, but damn it makes me wretch every time I have to use the utterly hateful FreeBSD installer.

I couldn't get FreeBSD 9.0 to boot via. iLO virtual media either.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[donaldm]

FreeBSD 4.0 - 4.12 will always have a place in my heart right there with the Windows fan boys loving XP as its golden age.

Yes I do remember installing MS Windows XP when it first came out and getting a virus when I forgot I was connected to the Corporate network although I never had any issues when installing a distribution of Linux. :)

Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors.

With the 3 kernel Linux can scale to 512 processors.

Linux has a journaling file system now

Linux has had a journaling file-system for many years now such as ext3 (approx 2001). Of course I should also mention ext4, JFS, XFS and even BtrFS to name a few.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[m6tt]

I use it all the time. I also use Linux variants.

FreeBSD is really a powerful, well-documented system that brings a lot of stuff to the table that's not possible, not production ready, or simply broken in Linux.

Off the top of my head: standardized networking commands, ZFS (in kernel), GEOM framework, devd, pf firewall is huge, RAID trim support, lagg (link aggregation/hot failover) and CARP (common address redundancy protocol...share IP for multiple servers).

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[toejam13]

Not only have I used BSD, but I'd say that it shaped my adult life.

As a teen, I signed up for a UNIX timeshare service that utilized a Sun SPARCstation running SunOS 4 (4.3BSD based). You got a Csh and a T1 to the 'Net. When they started offering SLIP service, I installed AmiTCP, an Amiga port of the NetBSD network stack which also included many /bin commands and /etc conf files.

I eventually took the plunge and installed NetBSD 0.9 on my Amiga 3000. Later, it was FreeBSD 2.x on my 486/66. While most people in my university programming classes were using Turbo C, I was using GCC. Classmates took MFC/C++ as an elective, I took Perl. Friends were using IPX on their home network, I was using TCP/IP with a FreeBSD box acting as a dial-on-demand gateway.

Having so much networking experience, I drifted from the programming side of computers into networking. My experience with BSD eventually landed me a job with a networking startup that used an embedded *BSD OS as the base for their product. Since then, I've used BSD based gear from Citrix (Netscaler), F5 (BIG-IP, EDGE-FX and 3DNS), Nokia (IPSO Firewall) and Secure Computing (Sidewinder firewall) as part of my job. I've been at it for over 15 years.

I still use FreeBSD for development here at home. DragonFlyBSD is also nice, though I prefer Ports over Pkgsrc, which is why I stuck with FreeBSD.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[KiloByte]

Today Linux has suceeded it and can now scale to 64 processors.

With the 3 kernel Linux can scale to 512 processors.

Try bumping the setting and recompiling, m'kay?

Linux has had a journaling file-system [...]and even BtrFS to name a few.

Actually, btrfs doesn't use band-aids like a journal (except for the fsync log): copy on write means you don't need to write the same thing many times. Take a look at log-structured filesystems for an even cooler solution.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[imp]

Having worked on FreeNAS and its commercial counterpart, I can tell you that iX Systems, the folks behind FreeNAS, give quite a lot back to FreeBSD. There is much code flowing back into the project from them, they sponsor many FreeBSD developers to attend various events, they leverage their buying power to get cheap/free servers for the project.

Juniper Networks did a port of FreeBSD to mips, and contributed it back, as well as substantial support for different arm and PowerPC platforms.

Yahoo has contributed many things back to the project over the years.

And the lest goes on and on. There is a mutually beneficial relationship between the community, the corporations that use it and the project. To speak otherwise shows a woeful ignorance of reality.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[BitZtream]

Well, most large ISPs use it for multiple things. It's the base used for most firewalls and load balencers. It is the fastest TCP/IP implementation on the planet.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[rycamor]

Currently using FreeBSD (in the form of PCBSD) on my home workstation. It works quite well with the latest KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, etc... Nvidia card gets perfect 3D acceleration via the FreeBSD driver, audio works great (I much prefer FreeBSD audio to Linux audio).

Also using FreeBSD on my cloud hosted webserver: one main instance of FreeBSD hosted via KVM, running several jails, so I essentially get VMs inside my VM. Performance is great, and I sleep much better at night managing a FreeBSD server than any standard Linux distro.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[hawkinspeter]

Why don't you replace the BSD and Debian boxes with RedHat ones? If they're using up your time to admin them, then it'd be worth converting them to make it easier to manage.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Trilkk]

I used to use FreeBSD in the early-to-mid-2000s, back before I went to OS X

I'm the inverse. Tried out OSX back in the day, but couldn't get along with it. Tried FreeBSD later, and have been using it since '06.

Actually, I realized I have never donated to the FreeBSD foundation, so did that now.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[madmayr]

i'm not the AC OP, but organization standatrds are there for a reason - and they don't imply tunnel vision, just easier management of a whole system

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[TheRaven64]

The big corporations often donate in a much more direct way: they pay people to work full-time on the project. There's no real incentive for them to indirectly fund someone via the Foundation when they could just hire them and pay them directly. Given that Juniper, Yahoo! and so on all pay significantly more for developers than the Foundation, it works out for them too. It also doesn't help the Foundation maintain its non-profit status if all (or even almost-all) of its money comes from a few big sponsors: the IRS starts to look on it as a corporate tax dodge and it must work harder to prove that it has 'broad public support'.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[TheRaven64]

I find it really hard to believe that you don't know anyone who has used Netflix, Yahoo!, or a Juniper router.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Brian Feldman]

Pretty sure you got told you should either add it yourself or pay a bounty if you're too lazy.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[Brian Feldman]

I work at NASA. All bureaucracies are the same. Trust me. The standards are for tunnel vision.

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[2DGamer]

Nope, not alone. I use it as my primary development box and have since 2006. I also have my NAT running FreeBSD. I do have a few Linux boxes around, but those are for testing only (and yes various flavors of Windows for old games - no DRM thank you).

I prefer FreeBSD. There is something very peaceful and calming about the stability of the system. I don't feel compelled to upgrade to the latest release every 6 - 12 months, and userland ports are mostly independent of the base kernel. I still can update my ports tree and grab the latest for *most* things even though I am still running 7.1.

I also like knowing that I own the system, though and through. No fuss, no muss, no rough stuff.

*(For example, WINE is not upgradeable at this point; a kernel change has necessitated upgrading to 8.x)

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[imp]

Some companies give to the 503(c)3 as their donations, while others donate code and/or developer time. The latter can add up to a quite substantial amount if you look at the total cost it takes to develop something, rather than just the relatively small cost to integrate the patches upstream. The larger companies make modest cash donations to the foundation, records show, but make even larger donations in code to the project. Many of these donations don't necessarily show up in the commit log as being from $LARGE_COMPANY, but instead show up as individual FreeBSD committers that are paid to put the code into FreeBSD, or small consulting houses that large companies sometimes outsource work to.

Warner

Re:Never met anyone who uses it.

[ogdenk]

I'm actually with you. Was a BSD (FreeBSD and NetBSD/mac68k) user most of the 90's. I had a mac around as well but the FreeBSD box was my daily driver.

When OSX came out, I couldn't afford a recent enough mac to run it but I was always impressed by NeXTstep. I didn't get an OSX capable machine until around 2005 or so.

My primary reasons for being a rabid OSX user on the desktop vs. FreeBSD are:

- Native productivity apps that don't suck or are artificially limited due to patent concerns (i.e. Scribus)
- A kickass windowing system that isn't X11. Xquartz works well for X11 apps I just gotta have.
- Once configured and destupified, a UI layer that is second to none.

It takes some tweaking to get OSX tolerable.... The OSX UI is actually quite configurable if you bother digging. You just can't change the window or toolkit decorations.

There's nothing wrong with commercial *NIX OS's. Nor is there anything wrong with FreeBSD. My job required software that wasn't available natively for BSD and I'm not going to try to struggle with a VM or WINE for software I need daily. OSX had all the UNIXy goodness under the hood that's real easy to get at. OSS software through Fink or Macports. It also has a great library of familiar off-the-shelf commercial software.

Yes, OSX is different in a lot of ways.... things like changing your login shell or adding users from the command line might require a google query.... people get over it or go back to canned Linux distros they don't understand either.

Server-side I still prefer FreeBSD.

Obligatry Response with slight disgust

[tuppe666]

a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs

Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.

Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust

[Pieroxy]

a sign that BSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs

Obligatory remark about how Mac OS X and iOS are BSD and are used by tens of millions of people everyday, blah, blah, blah.

...and that does not refute the point. Mac OS took code one way; the main developers...and gave out free laptops to the others. Its an example how the spirit of sharing from BSD is not as strong as having a license enforce it. When a company gets involved with Linux the ecosystem gets stronger...not sort of meander into obscurity [and no throwing money it at in a PR stunt is not the answer]. The only sick thing is the amount of Apple users promoting BSD.

Emphasis mine. That's only your definition of strong. Have you considered the fact that maybe, just maybe, some people might not have the same definition as yours?

Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust

[PhamNguyen]

You are missing an important point, which is that the main developers willingly went to work for Apple. Since they though this was advantageious, this implies that when they started out the project, the possibility of this happening would also have counted as a plus in their eyes. So this possibility presumably helped motivate people to become the main developers for BSD in the first place. tl;dr you can't say "contribute to open source - it might get you a lucrative job" and "don't steal open source developers" at the same time.

Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust

[Osgeld]

BSD like linux is in flavors, FreeBSD is not the same as NetBSD, which is what OSX uses as a base, nor are there any stories saying NetBSD is circling the shitter financially

Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust

[BitZtream]

OSX has user land components from FreeBSD, not Net

Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust

[LizardKing]

OS X has user land components and code from both Net and Free. The initial updates to the creaky old OpenStep code base relied on NetBSD as the primary source, but this gradually changed as key FreeBSD developers were recruited by Apple.

Re:Obligatry Response with slight disgust

[hobarrera]

Indeed. I remember recently reading that marc (an OpenBSD dev) recently said that he wants people to re-shared their modified code, but he wants them to do so because they want to, not because the license forces them to.

Is this newsworthy?

[butlerm]

My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[Kjella]

My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time? Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?

Last year their target was $400k and they reached $426k so they're not intentionally making too ambitious targets. That this is an annual campaign and they're $146k short of matching last year indicates interest has dropped significantly. Looking at their donors it's now practically run by Netapp that's moved up to double platinum ($100k+), accounting for more than a third of their total donations. The more disturbing part for them should be that the donor list is much, much shorter than last year.

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[stephanruby]

Also considering that the year is not over yet, and that a third of the money usually gets raised during the last month of the year, I'd say their fundraising effort is still going pretty smoothly.

For 2011, we set a fundraising goal of $400,000 with a spending budget of $350,000. As of this publication we have raised $210,000. By this time last year, we had raised $195,000, but ended the year raising a total of $325,000. We are hoping that you, the FreeBSD community, will help us finish the year strong by making a donation this month. http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2011Dec-newsletter.shtml#Fundraising

Who wants to bet that this year, they'll have fundraised $400,000 by the deadline, and that for next year -- they'll raise the target to $650,000.

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[Billly Gates]

FreeBSD... actually BSD is very newsworthy as it holds an integral part of computer history. Like other important pieces of history such as VMS, IBM 360, and other gone technologies BSD will be part of it that we owe a gratitude for.

We have the internet thanks to it. TCP/IP v. 4 came to be on BSD Unix 4.2 in the early 1980s. It is so bizaare how Linux overtook it and shocking as it took 10 years before Linux became a somewhat decent server OS that can play with the big boys from a toy. FreeBSD was already there. BSD was opensource before GNU was even around and had an academic following before linux was twinkle in Linuses eye.

In the 1990s I have heard of BSDI to run BBS and a few webservers. But not Linux. That was years later

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[Onymous Coward]

The question wasn't whether BSD was itself newsworthy.

And don't refer to it like it's only historical.

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[gl4ss]

no, but less bsd nerds will get to travel on that dime.

I'm thinking maybe freebsd should add a huge banner to appear! think wikipedia.

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[Guy Harris]

FreeBSD... actually BSD is very newsworthy as it holds an integral part of computer history. Like other important pieces of history such as VMS, IBM 360, and other gone technologies BSD will be part of it that we owe a gratitude for.

Actually, neither BSD nor VMS are gone - OS X is a BSD-flavored OS at the UNIX layer, and DEC^WCompaq^WHP are still selling VMS IBM haven't made S/360's for a while, but they are making their (64-bit) descendants, which still run a descendant of OS/360, a descendant of DOS/360, a descendant of CP/CMS, and even a descendant of the Airlines Control Program. And, yes, it runs Linux, although I don't know of any BSD ports.

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[Guy Harris]

VMS and CP/M have nothing to with BSD.

Neither does CP/CMS, which, for that matter, has nothing to do with CP/M, either.

Re:Is this newsworthy?

[TheRaven64]

My first instinct is to think so what? Shouldn't non-profit foundations have ambitious fund raising targets that they fall short of most of the time?

Actually, the FreeBSD Foundation has never missed a funding target and, given late donations in previous years and unannounced pledges by a few companies looks like it should meet it this year too (which is nice, as it's 25% higher than the goal for last year).

Is FreeBSD in danger of ceasing to be a viable operating system because the target wasn't met?

No. The project lasted for a long time without the Foundation and could continue to do so. The Foundation does a number of useful things for the project, however. They have a lawyer, who can field tedious questions. They sponsor travel for unfunded developers to BSD conferences (and sometimes sponsor the conferences). Perhaps most importantly, they also fund work that everyone wants done but no one wants to do. For example, they funded the Intel GPU / GEM / KMS work, which is tedious work that no one wants to do, not in the commercial interests of any big FreeBSD users, but very useful for a lot of end users.

They also do an increasing amount of matched-funding work, where a commercial user pays for half of the work and the Foundation matches it. In a few cases, they also provide a matchmaking service, where two or more companies can each part-fund the work, but between them completely fund it. This is arguably the most useful thing that they do, because it's the core idea behind open source: that it's cheaper to cooperate than to work independently.

Read the Link

[tuppe666]

is that 50k or 500k?

Perhaps you should look at the graphic in the middle of the linked article.

Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[urbanriot]

Since we made the switch to FreeBSD in 2004, providing various services such as proxying web usage or web access logging for corporations, we've never even considered another OS as it's been a rock solid performer. Thousands of users in various locations are relying on our systems and despite inept people accidentally unplugging some of them, failed UPS', failed hard drives, they ruggedly truck on without issue.

Hopefully the front page posting will encourage other FreeBSD users to donate. There's certainly more servers in production, especially some of the more reliable ones, that are using FreeBSD according to Netcraft.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[Great Big Bird]

I currently use FreeBSD on a student run server, but will be switching back to Linux because a lot of the ports are getting a little long in the tooth. I have otherwise enjoyed the stability of the system, but for our needs having an up to date php and apache are very useful things.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[adri]

.. FreeBSD person here.

Which ports in question? I was under the impression that PHP/apache ports are kept up to date in the ports tree.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[urbanriot]

He may be referring to Apache HTTP Server 2.4.x, discussion concerning what he's referring to can be found on forums.freebsd.org - http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=34310

... of course, at the end of the day he can always compile from source or follow blog postings which provide a considerable amount of detail to complete this simple task. We've compiled from source many of our applications so we can customize the compiled experience to a finer degree. I may have made some ports contributions along the way as well.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[illaqueate]

he may also just be referring to how easier it is to install on Ubuntu just small things like installing a server will have it properly configured already meanwhile I'll install some things from a port then need to edit for what seems like forever to get things up and running assuming I can find the conf files as they aren't necessarily put in a logical place like in ubuntu

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[rgbrenner]

Care to give an example of conf files being placed illogically in FBSD?

the directory structure is explained here:
http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/dirstructure.html
and every port is required to follow that structure.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[urbanriot]

If you're finding it difficult to find .conf files in /etc and properly constructing a sentence, then it's possible that Ubuntu Server is perfect for him or you. Especially you.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[Billly Gates]

I never recommend compiling from source in 2012!

SOmething complex with lots of dependencies are just going to cause problems as who the hell knows what .config files will change and crap being spewed all over the file system.

The official ports patch everything and it has to pass the FreeBSD QA and integrates with it well into the system. .deb files are similiar

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[1s44c]

..but for our needs having an up to date php and apache are very useful things.

You might want to lookup nginx. Apache is so 2000-late.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[1s44c]

The conf files are in absolutely logical and consistent places, they are merely not in the place where you expect them nor in the same place they would be on ubuntu.

Like someone else said, read the handbook.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[m6tt]

I'm not sure what you're talking about...I'm a FreeBSD user, I compile everything, and it doesn't spew things all over the file system. Unlike linux, man hier is essentially enforced.

Re:Some of my most reliable servers are FreeBSD...

[m6tt]

There's always the option of fixing the port and learning about the software you're working with too...That's one of my favorite parts about FreeBSD, there are few barriers to getting into the code or makefiles if your install is source based.

Not to late

[Anonymous Coward]

You know it is not too late to chip in. Fortunately 2012 isn't over yet.

Re:$500,00

[alexhs]

Isn't that $500, ¢0 ?
Slashcode is eating the cent symbol, and a comma for decimal mark followed by two decimals is common in the whole continental Europe.

Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[fahrbot-bot]

...the FreeBSD project has sought $500,000 by year end to allow it to continue to offer to fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers.

Hmm...

• manage projects: YES
• sponsor FreeBSD events: NO
• sponsor Developer Summits: NO
• provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers: NO

Problem solved.

Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[darthdavid]

Oh certainly, that can probably solve things for a year or two, depending on just how they were gonna allocate that 500k, but long term you have to remember that FreeBSD is a community project and, in the long term, sponsoring those things is part of how you make the community grow and thrive.

Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[water-and-sewer]

Agreed, this is management 101. I'm not sure the funding gap reflects a loss in relevance for the platform. I chose it specifically as a platform and its suited my needs and even met them. I've never managed a better put-together *nix system. Nice when the man pages all match the software and are up to date, and the ports system is lovely. I'm not sure I'll build another Linux server again after the good experience I had with BSD (It's dictatorshandbook.net by the way, a VPS run by rockvps.com - also highly recommended, offering FreeBSD 9 images, somewhat of a rarity).

But maybe they should just funding/supporting less side activities and focus on the code.

In the meantime I'm going to write them a check. Happy Xmas!

Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[Gothmolly]

Good point. Infrastructure and some office supplies for the project managers yes, hookers and blow in exotic locations, no.

Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[TrueSatan]

I can understand this in terms of setting a top priority but wouldn't each element being removed affect the short and long term viability of the project? If funding can't be provided what would be the short term and long term effects of less/no events/summits be and even if some were to be held what would be the effect of developers whose personal situation, or company support, wouldn't otherwise allow them to go then not getting a grant and, thus, not attending?

Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[gl4ss]

Oh certainly, that can probably solve things for a year or two, depending on just how they were gonna allocate that 500k, but long term you have to remember that FreeBSD is a community project and, in the long term, sponsoring those things is part of how you make the community grow and thrive.

just spend the money on beer for the summits.
people will come if you promise them free hats and beer.

have them in the summer, so you'll save on rent on a warm place(outdoor drinking in the arctic in the winter sucks, even if the beer is cold).

Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[iggymanz]

get real, no need for travel. summit can be held online. meetings and forums can be done online. development can be done online.

I just saved FreeBSD a cool half million.

Re:Reallocate and re-prioritize.

[Brian Feldman]

You've never attended a conference, apparently.

Re:Everybody has left

[dan325]

I sure have. My first exposure to BSD was NetBSD and then I switched to OpenBSD several years ago and haven't looked back.

If raising $ 1/4 million is "failure"

[Anonymous Coward]

then perhaps there's a problem with the business model and with expectations?

$250k is quite a large sum of money for many open source businesses. Perhaps the people concerned think that they're bigger than they really are?

FBSD opportunities

[unixisc]

Technically, FBSD seems to have done a fine job, but they need to be more proactive in proliferating the market. For one, they could partner w/ server manufacturers of various platforms. One that comes straight to mind is HP w/ the Itanium, and here, FBSD's only competition would be Debian and HP/UX. Given all the OSs that have abandoned the platform, this is one golden opportunity for FBSD. Others would be to get into the AVL of major server manufacturers, be it HP, Dell, IBM and so on.

The other thing FBSD can do is try selling itself against Linux. Here, they can adapt a 2 pronged strategy - offer FBSD to any server vendor considering Linux as a server, and offer other alternatives, based on the target applications. If it requires good SMP support or a special file system, consider DragonFly BSD. If it's for routers and firewalls, promote pFsense or m0n0wall. If it's for desktop or laptop use, promote PC-BSD. If it is for embedded applications, consider Minix, or maybe one of the other BSDs. The main marketing strategies should focus on all technical advantages of FBSD and FBSD based distros over Linux based distros. Things like backwards compatibility, stable APIs and ABIs, and so on. Use the licensing advantage only as icing on the cake. While some Linux shops may be dug in, others may be more open to such alternatives.

One thing I wonder - if FBSD, heaven forbid, goes under, what would be the effect on all the other projects - pFsense, m0n0wall, PC-BSD, et al? Will they automatically fold, or will they just be forks from 9.1? I do think a less onerous alternative to GPL is needed, which is why I'd hate to see BSD go under.

Re:FBSD opportunities

[unixisc]

Isn't the compiler for HP/UX GCC? Even if it's not, various Linuxes, such as Debian, RHEL, Ubuntu did at one time exist on Itanium, so GCC support for that had to have existed, and for that to exist, GCC would have had to have had Itanium's optimizations. Now, that was w/ Itanium I & II. With Itanium III coming out, I dunno whether HP has been making that an HP/UX only platform. It would be a shame if they did.

That was a part of what I was suggesting - that HP/UX provide all the EPIC compiler optimizations to LLVM/Clang, so that FreeBSD has no problems compiling and running. Since the future of the Itanium is in question, a good move would be to pitch it to houses that have Itaniums, so that w/ the source code, they'd be able to provide their own long term support independent of HP. Of course, same could also be done w/ Debian.

Accepting Donations: They're doing it wrong

[Zenin]

http://www.freebsd.org/donations/

Great start! The home page has a Donate link at the top, it takes you to a clear, simple URL.

Then it all falls apart...

95% of the page is about everything other then cash donations. The simple PayPal Donate button? No where to be found. The Network For Good Donate link? Again, AWOL. In fact there is only one small paragraph buried 2/3rds of the way down the page about cash donations...and it just tells you to visit the FreeBSD Foundation page. Even worse, it doesn't link you to the Foundation's Donation page...it links you to the home page where you again, need to dig down and find the real donations page.

Stick the PayPal Donate box (found here) on the top of the main FreeBSD.org page and I guarantee they'll easily quadruple their donations without doing anything else whatsoever.

I love, love, LOVE FreeBSD, but yah...they've never been particularly good at tooting their own horn. :-/

not that great for home servers anymore

[illaqueate]

I've been using FreeBSD on my home servers since 2.1 until recently when I tried Ubuntu on the new server I was building. It's just drastically better at initial configuration. Most of the servers I would want to use are either installed by default or are very easy to install or configure with little intervention. There are too many hoops to jump through on FreeBSD.

Re:not that great for home servers anymore

[Alex Zepeda]

Agreed. I've been using FreeBSD off and on since 2.2.2. Despite some really eye watering bugs with Ubuntu (especially their ec2 instances), FreeBSD is just more tedious and more frustrating to use. But... FreeBSD has the one killer feature for me: ZFS. It's portable in a pinch and ensure a decent amount of data integrity. Hammer, BTRFS, etc don't offer that kind of flexibility.

For the upgrade from 7.x to 8.x I used "freebsd-update". I forgot to disable the cron task, so after falling asleep the machine proceeded to lunch itself. Fine. User error. Again I tried "freebsd-update" to apply security patches. Guess what? "freebsd-update" doesn't handle new files gracefully, and again it lunched itself. Sure, there was an easy fix (download the single missing file that threw a wrench into the works), but the maintainer of "freebsd-update" knew of the problem and, as far as I can tell, just ignored it. Too much manual intervention is required to keep a FreeBSD system running compared to Linux.

I decided to tempt fate again with the upgrade from 8.x to 9.x (to see if the much promised support for Intel graphics chips was usable -- lesson learned, despite being in the release notes it's pre-alpha at best). Well, this time "freebsd-update" didn't mess anything up, the new kernel did. Turns out what FreeBSD 9.x and FreeBSD < 9.x consider BSD disk labels are two very separate things. My ZFS pools vanished. All sorts of fun ensued (there's that pesky data integrity thing). While FreeBSD 8.x would recognize the pool, 9.1 both missed and corrupted the ZFS magic bits. UGH.

Then there's the ports system. A clusterfuck if I've ever seen one. I've been using 'portupgrade' to ease some of the pain. And it works. Until it doesn't. It's definitely not particularly compatible with ruby 1.9. It's utterly confused by the versioning on the ruby 1.9 port. Upgrading (as of this week) to the latest version of the "pciids" port breaks "portupgrade" with no clean way to back these things out. When mucking about with all the updated XOrg stuff (see above about trying to get Intel graphics to work) I discovered that if you're not using "portupgrade" it's super easy to install duplicate, conflicting versions of a package with no clean way of backing this out. Compare this to Debian based distros where dpkg -i will neatly handle upgrades without lunching your system. While compiling is something of a pain, there are out of date binary packages that are sorta available. The real pain is just that the ports toolchain sucks rocks.

Oh, and watching trivial bugs languish for years got frustrating too. Ah well.

Re:not that great for home servers anymore

[clonehappy]

Most of the servers I would want to use are either installed by default or are very easy to install or configure with little intervention.

From a security standpoint, I prefer the FreeBSD model. Nothing extra running, and very secure by default. Anything that's running is there because I made it to do so, and nothing more. The hoops are generally there to make sure the system stays secured.

Re:not that great for home servers anymore

[kobaz]

FreeBSD has the one killer feature for me: ZFS. It's portable in a pinch and ensure a decent amount of data integrity.

In theory.

In practice, a normal RAID10/RAID1 array is more reliable ...

I went through the same thing. I waited until freebsd 8 to try zfs after watching some videos about how awesome it was. I had been running multi TB storage arrays on lvm + raid1 on linux for years and decided to try and switch to ZFS. The lack of an fsck really shows when you get data corruption issues while resizing a pool. ZFS also lacks the capability of downsizing a pool, so when the upsize fails half way, you're fairly fscked. The recovery tools are just immature compared to even things like ext3. Trying to recover from the failed ZFS upsize involved raw disk editing to change uuids to try and move back to using an old drive that had good data.

I got the ZFS array working enough to pull off the new data and move back to an lvm append + raid1 setup. I've had failed lvm moves and failed lvm upsizes but the recovery is so easy because all the metadata about the array (and plenty of automatic backups) are stored in plain conf files. Ah the beauty of simplicity.

And speaking of bleeding edge, I've been playing with btrfs for some non-critical stuff and I've been very impressed. Much moreso than with ZFS.

Misleading Story

[Zamphatta]

A quick Google reveals that FreeBSD's "Year-End Fundraising Campaign" was only recently announced, on December 5th. So, naturally, they won't be all that close to their goal by December 9th.

Re:Misleading Story

[BitingChaos]

I don't think the amount is from the past 5 days. http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2012Jul-newsletter.shtml#Fundraising As of July 31st, 2012, they had $180,000 raised. So from July 31st to December 10th, they raised $80,000 or so.

Re:Misleading Story

[Zamphatta]

Oh, interesting! I couldn't find anything about this year-end fundraiser being an extention of an older fundraiser from months ago. I guess it was FreeBSD that was misleading then? That is, if this is just making extending an older campaign to make it sound like a new one.

Re:$5/$10 minimum donation??

[ArcadeNut]

Every time you make a donation via credit card or PayPal the organization gets dinged with fees. Typically it's a percentage and a per transaction fee. So with such a small donation, the fees might wind up costing them too much for the size of the donation.

Managing Expectations

[srobert]

Apparently the FreeBSD developers have seldom met their own schedule estimates. They don't really think it's important to do so. They estimate October, by December if you ask them when it will be released, they answer, "when it's ready". Their setting of fund raising goals may be similar to their scheduling. They're not good at managing expectations. I don't think FreeBSD will be going away any time soon. How many Linux distributions have failed to meet their fund raising goals from time to time and yet are still very active?

FUD

[laffer1]

FreeBSD tends to do a funding push for short iterations. I don't think this one has been going long. I've only seen posts on it recently. Often, they get many donations from a few select companies that use it. For example, ixsystems, cisco, and juniper.

As someone that runs a very small project, I think they're lucky to have the funding support that they get. Several of the regulars have gotten day jobs or contract work out of their involvement too. I think FreeBSD is a great example of a successful open source project.

I'm running MidnightBSD on about $300 of advertising revenue this year. That doesn't even cover hardware and internet connectivity costs for the year.

The real problem is many folks don't donate to open source projects. I've donated to OpenSSH via OpenBSD in the past as I use it all the time. If everyone donated even a few dollars to their favorite projects, it would make a huge difference. The reality is that large projects can afford to have a few folks full time on the project, but we need money and developers to succeed. The money covers all the downloads, advertising and infrastructure necessary to compete with commercial solutions. Imagine if Linux never would have had the support of Redhat, IBM, or Novell. Imagine if Mozilla wouldn't have had the AOL and Google handouts. Critical mass takes a push and a good product.

Re:FUD

[inglorion_on_the_net]

The real problem is many folks don't donate to open source projects. I've donated to OpenSSH via OpenBSD in the past as I use it all the time. If everyone donated even a few dollars to their favorite projects, it would make a huge difference.

I don't know if that's a real problem. There are a lot of ways you can help a project. Contributing code. Using it and filing bug reports and feature requests. Even just talking about it can be helpful.

As for donations, I think there have been cases where getting more money into the project has hurt rather than helped (sorry, I don't have links and don't remember the specifics). At the very least, that means it's not clear that donating money is the best way to help a project. Of course, some things cost money, so please don't take that as dismissing donations altogether. I'm just saying that donations aren't the only way and aren't necessarily the best way to help a project.

Still relevant

[gallondr00nk]

I split my Unix derivative loyalties between Arch and FreeBSD, usually with the lNeverputt runs smoother on it than it did on my Arch install.

atter for servers on really old hardware. Recently, I've found Arch upgrading has become more and more of a pain in the ass, especially on rigs with ATI cards. I carried on with it, but the recent removal of the awesome little installation program (I'm lazy when it comes to installers) made me think twice about switching.

So I went with FreeBSD on an old ThinkPad A31. It's absolutely solid, and runs linux binaries happily if I need it to (such as Flash). I dare say that it has a slight performance advantage as well.

Hardly dead.

Re:Still relevant

[gallondr00nk]

I split my Unix derivative loyalties between Arch and FreeBSD, usually with the lNeverputt runs smoother on it than it did on my Arch install.

God, I fucked that up.

Trolling Title

[ghelmer]

Title should be something like "FreeBSD Foundation push to raise $500,000 goal". Usually a lot of the money each year is raised in the last month or so.

FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple Corporaton should sponsor BSDs & Free BSD. Oracle's Solaris is a derivative of BSD. FreeBSD should get their monies from Apple Corporation, IBM, Oracle, Universities, BSD Certificate programs, BSD teaching programs, etc. The main focus is to increase taxes. If Corporations, Billionaires, & Millionaires pays 35% tax up tp 45% tax then Organizations like BSDs, FreeBSD, Linux Distros, etc would get their funding to continue the progress in American Technologies.

Re:FreeBSD

[unixisc]

Oracle's Solaris is a derivative of former Unix System Labs' SVR4. SunOS was a derivative of BSD. SunOS changed to Solaris when Sun switched from BSD to USL's SVR4.

I agree that Apple should pay them, but IBM? IBM can get by fine w/ AIX, so doesn't sound like they need something above and beyond what others are getting on the x64 platform. Unless one is talking about POWER or Z-series ports of FreeBSD.

Other things - like Universities, certificate programs, agreed. Those who use FBSD should financially support it. I just don't see Oracle or IBM amongst those.

FreeBSD and Debian

[dgharmon]

How about merging with Debian?

Re:FreeBSD and Debian

[unixisc]

Debian already has a project called kFreeBSD, where they combine Debian userland w/ a FreeBSD kernel. They also have a new Clang project. Long term, given Debian's strained relations w/ the FSF, it may not be such a bad idea. It would enable Debian to de-emphasize Linux and push their FBSD instead, and make all their software, such as apt, available for FBSD as well.

Re:FreeBSD and Debian

[unixisc]

Who said it is?

Year End Donations are the Norm...

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

Last year they aimed at $300k and got over $400k. This year, they asked for $500k and got $250k thus far...

Except that every year, sponsors hold out until the end of the year. Seeing 50% of goal before the major corporate donations is great. Last year they were far from their goal at this time.

Sorry, but this is a bit of doom saying by a Linux fanboi. There isn't even an article attached, just the donation link (thanks for spreading the word) and a some conjecture about what being only half way implies.

The reality is that even if FreeBSD fails to meet the $500k goal, it simply fails to grow that 66% increase from last year's goal. That's pretty much all it means. All jokes aside, FreeBSD is growing faster than their current infrastructure can keep up with. Hence the request for even more funding.

lackluster donation page

[phorm]

I donated, and shortly after got an email from the spam filter/greylist of the address their paypal account.
In addition to the auto-generated message bouncing back at me, it appears do have some funky encoding so the message makes it look like I paid 240x what my actual donation was. Kinda scary until I confirmed that I hadn't typo'ed my payment amount.

test

[Ptolemarch]

this is a test comment; please ignore

ignorant

[GentooBob]

this post is just ridiculous. someone is bored and trying to stir up the pot. get out from behind your computer you anti social unfriendly know it all computer geek and go take a walk and find a life.