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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."
Perhaps they should ask Apple to fund them. Good luck.
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.
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?
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.
You mean a link like this one: http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-1082/
No. Only Netcraft is allowed to do that.
It's. Not. Dead. Yet.
It'll return as a zombie... process?
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. :-/
My
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 . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
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
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.
As soon as BSD gets something similar to KVM I'll switch in a second.
It's already on its way. http://bhyve.org/
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'.
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
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.