Slashdot Story Helps Raise $43,200 For the FreeBSD Foundation In Three Days

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Foundation has posted blog article article talking about the remarkable surge in donations they've received in the last three days following a recent Slashdot article reporting on weak fundraising this year. Deb Goodkin reports that the FreeBSD Foundation, as with many non-profits, receives more than 50% of its annual funds at the end of the US tax year, but that the Foundation has never seen this rate of donations before, and will hit a new record for unique donors this year. She comments that it was Slashdot readers that made the difference! She does, however, appeal for further donations noting that they have a long way to go on their full goal."

Comments

Exaggeration

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure that I agree with the implied attribution to Slashdot. As the Hacker News discussion revealed, the usual pattern of donations to FreeBSD is a late surge, apart from the fact that it got coverage in other places.

It would be nice if Slashdot dropped the self references, as it erodes its credibility.

Re:Exaggeration

[Nyder]

Not sure that I agree with the implied attribution to Slashdot. As the Hacker News discussion revealed, the usual pattern of donations to FreeBSD is a late surge, apart from the fact that it got coverage in other places.

It would be nice if Slashdot dropped the self references, as it erodes its credibility.

Slashdot has credibility?

Re:Exaggeration

[damn_registrars]

Not sure that I agree with the implied attribution to Slashdot. As the Hacker News discussion revealed, the usual pattern of donations to FreeBSD is a late surge, apart from the fact that it got coverage in other places.

It would be nice if Slashdot dropped the self references, as it erodes its credibility.

Slashdot has credibility?

No. Slashdot had credibility, but that was years ago. For the last 10 or more years it has been a place to find out what conservatives think about technology, and in the past 3-4 years it has added on the new goal of providing the most up-to-the-minute news on all things facebook.

Credibility was never profitable. That said, they didn't become profitable after they jettisoned their credibility, either, but they felt they had to try something.

Re:Exaggeration

[1s44c]

Sorry to derail your point a bit but the rest of the world is very far left compared to the US.

What the US calls left and right the rest of the world calls right and far right.

I kind of figured that..

[cyberjock1980]

I bookmarked their FreeBSD donation page so I could watch the thermometer go up(and hopefully reach the top). I made a donation too since I use FreeNAS and I'm going to solicit a friend to donate since he uses FreeNAS as well.

Re:I kind of figured that..

[TheRaven64]

The thermometer is updated manually, because some donations come via bank transfers, some via cheques, some via PayPal and some via DonateNow and automating all of those is a bit tricky. Currently, Deb goes through all of the donations by hand and updates the donors list and the title. Over the last two days, she's been completely swamped with the number of donations. The amount isn't totally unprecedented, but the number of individual donations is even larger than a few years ago when the Foundation put out the call for individual donors because they were in danger of losing their non-profit status because too much of their funding came from large corporate donations.

Also, while I certainly wouldn't discourage anyone from donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, much of the work on FreeNAS (and PC-BSD) is funded by iX Systems, so if you use either of these projects and are in a position to put any business their way, it would possibly have a larger impact. iX is on the donors' page as a gold sponsor, but that doesn't tell the whole story. As well as making a sizeable donation to the Foundation directly, they have matched funding on a couple of Foundation-sponsored projects this year, so the total amount that they've given is considerably more (not to mention employing several people to work full-time on FreeBSD).

Re:It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dyin

[Lisias]

http://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying

Re:Slashdot...

[SomePgmr]

Being posted on Hacker News and Reddit and a few other sites probably had a much larger impact. Slashdot ceased being relevant about a decade ago.

I see statcounter in the page source. I'd guess they know where their traffic is coming from.

Slashdot editor arrogance

[Anonymous Coward]

It takes a lot of arrogance to assume that Slashdot alone was the reason for those donations. It's okay to take some credit, but I read about this issue on Hacker News and other outlets a full day before I read it on Slashdot.

Re:Slashdot editor arrogance

[BitZtream]

Read the summary at least troll, a FreeBSD rep reported that the income was from the slashvertisement based on actual data, like you know ... referrer headers.

The brunt of BSD donations comes from larger organizations, but it certainly did result in some contributions.

Re:It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dyin

[TC Wilcox]

Mod parent up and grandparent down. Stupid troll is not informative....

Re:It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dyin

[BitZtream]

Is this the same post from 2004 or did you edit it before you reposted it?

Two Great Tastes, Even Better Together!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Slashdot and FreeBSD: after all, no one wants to die alone. ;-)

"Pssssst! Hey, buddy! Can I interest you in a vintage Net 4 tape? Real cheap for a collector's item like this. I'll even throw in a QIC-2 tape reader and a 'I'm Mentally Contaminated' button, just for you..."

Re:I keep being told

[shutdown -p now]

That's why they looked at referrer headers to see where the people who's been donating were coming from...

Re:Whatever happened to the slashdot?

[SomePgmr]

Whatever happened to the frantic efforts to post anti-anything-but-linux rants

Wha? We hate everything. Most of all technology. Facebook, iphones, raspberry pi's, 3d printing, your favorite distro, medical technology, the maker movement, twitter, Nasa and Spacex, Arduinos, UAV's, gaming consoles... even Slashdot itself. We really like to hate Slashdot.

So tune in tomorrow, there will be plenty of bitching and whining about everything. It'll be very emo... I promise.

Just Donated

[TheNinjaroach]

I donated $30 last night after reading this article.

My reasons are 1) I think the BSD license is awesome, 2) SSH rocks, and 3) OS diversity is a good thing.

Re:Slashdot...

[MrNaz]

The use of phrases such as "reasonable people like me" usually indicates that the speaker is not a reasonable person.