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Strong Foundations: FreeBSD, Wikimedia Raise Buckets of Development Money
mbadolato writes "On December 9, 2012, Slashdot reported that the FreeBSD Foundation was falling short of their 2012 goal of $500,000 by nearly 50%. For all of those that continued to echo about how FreeBSD is dying, it's less than three weeks later and the total is presently nearing $200,000 OVER the goal. Netcraft continues to be wrong."
And reader hypnosec adds another crowdfunding success story: "The Wikimedia Foundation has announced at the conclusion of its ninth annual fund-raiser that it has managed to raise a whopping $25 million from 1.2 million donors in just over a week's time. ... As compared to last year's fund-raiser, which got completed in 46 days, this year's was completed in just nine days."
Give me money!
how much do i have to pay to get this freebsd to convert everything to c++?
Thank you FreeBSD, for having a useful ZFS implementation. Countless devices around the world exist because of you.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
All this proves is that some people are willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to things that are important. If only we/they would do the same with some political contributions to those who are trying to change things for the better (human rights, privacy rights, less spying, copyright/patent reform, tort reform, etc, etc, etc).
You can't change the system from the outside. Getting players on the inside requires playing the current incarnation of the game. That requires money.
I can feel it in my bones, this is the year of FreeBSD! I"ve always had a soft-spot in my heart for BSD of any flavor. Fond memories of running NetBSD on my Mac LCIII are coming back!
Netcraft has nothing to do with this.
"Nearly $200,000 over" is actually "$180,000" over. I guess 90% is "nearly 100%".
Whatever. FreeBSD will continue to be developed regardless of whether the Foundation
can send people to conferences at no cost to them.
This was never news for geeks and it's still not news for geeks.
All those moneyz are for funeral!
Good, also don't forget to help NetBSD if you can, they haven't reached anywhere near expectations.http://www.netbsd.org/donations/
Maybe the Linux Foundation (or someone else, they're the first that come to mind) could do a similar thing to raise money for improving the Linux graphics and wireless stacks? How much improvement could we get for a million USD? Or perhaps there are individual developers out there who would do what Poul-Henning Kamp did? I'd be happy to contribute to such an initiative. Kickstart it?
I donate (small amounts) to FreeBSD almost every year, and I don't even use their software currently. They have an important place in the history of Unix-like operating systems, and I have used their software for some great projects in the past.
Wikipedia is so obnoxious with their fundraising, I've stopped donating. The local news recently reported that the most visited page on Wikipedia was "Facebook", and I rarely use it. I did get a kick out of their previous campaign where the staffers photos were above the article - deceptively close to the subject. Searches returned some pretty funny results.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
Wikimedia is different -- a huge directory of public domain images and other media. I use it for just about every school paper I write. There's no inherent bias in "This is a picture of milk thistle"
Wikimedia is doing FSM's work and is well deserving of your support.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
this article is misleading and upside down.
if an entity has the following charactoristics:
1- good product (quality)
2- product is appreciated (demand)
3- costs are reasonable (feasibility)
4- has a consumer base with spending power (viability)
then it will NECESSARILY meet it's goals. this is basic economics of supply and demand. didn't we all learn this in highschool?
let me fix this article:
"corporations with crap products who raise money with psychological tactics are increasingly finding it difficult to get funding because of the internet."
i would also add: "projects such as netbsd and openbsd that add enormous value to the lives of every human being are underappreciated because the consumer is ignorant of them, and so they fall short of funding goals some times, and it befalls us as responsible technologists to make sure that they continue to protect our interests with the same selfless, joyful, gracious generosity that we have been able to enjoy for so long without giving much in return"
typing this message just left a bad taste in my mouth. to realize that somehow everyone doesn't get this stuff is sad.
may I see your RAW thistle cheese?
That's the difference.
>> There's no inherent bias in "This is a picture of milk thistle"
Sorry but there is. What format is the image stored in?
Told ya so!
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't still donate! ;-)
--libman
Why convert? UNIX is C, period.
But UNIX isn't forever...
Next-gen OS projects are slowly beginning to start up, and would rethink ye olde POSIX concepts from scratch. Using C++ is rather stupid, however, if you can get the same performance from much more productive and secure languages like Go, Rust, Nimrod, etc.
--libman
Good on both counts. Congratulations.
There are many more pieces of software that has an important place in the history of Unix-like OSes. Why donate to this specific one?
Should I point out that at the point that the FreeBSD fundraiser was on Slashdot as being a failure, it had only been running for 4 days and had reached nearly half of it's goal...?
If you can see it in your browser you can convert it to any format you wish. And the license even lets you do that, if you care about that sort of thing.
So if you feel like having your images in dual-interleaved alpha-channeled bitplany goodness, you can! Personally, I'll stick to jpeg for photos and png for illustrations. Unless it's vectors, then I'll take PostScript please. (warning, bias: SVG implementations suck donkey balls)
And also to haiku OS. They all were useful or fun' and still are.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Now maybe there will be some decent intel graphics support so I can run it on my laptops :/ FBSD10, I'm watching you.
Wow, just wow ...
Your statement pretty much proves why wikipedia shouldn't even be allowed anywhere near school research. No bias? Are you 8?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The picture of the milk thistle inherently encapsulates many of the social dynamics inherent in plant propagation. Clearly the fact that it has etiolated somewhat is also indicative of the effects of global warming on cloud cover. These two spheres of influence create a disparity between the public world of global climatography and the private world of Milk thistle propagation. The author proposes that to properly asses the relationship of these spheres, more funding is needed, as well as the examination of other spheres, both similar and dissimilar.
Read it again, I said wikimedia not wikipedia. Wikimedia is a great place to get public domain media.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Since FBSD has deprecated gcc and moved to LLVM/Clang, can't the OS be written in Objective-C?
Thank you, FBSD, for being a pioneer not only in implementing IPv6, but also producing possibly the first IPv6-only implementation of an OS. I hope that Monowall and pFsense develop advanced IPv6 specific security and routing features that makes them fully usable for that purpose.
In fact, I wish that PC-BSD, if not FBSD, adds support for Wayland, and allows DEs that implement their Window managers in Wayland to run on top of it. While FBSD may want X11 for legacy reasons, I doubt that the same is as true about PC-BSD.
maybe they'll develop a desktop OS now.
alive to the universe, dead to the world
I'm hoping that DragonFly BSD's HAMMER FS, when it's ready, will be ported to FreeBSD, and then to all other OS'es. It already has some advantages over ZFS, like reduced memory requirements, and is planning to add a lot of additional features (ex. clustering) in the near future.
By the virtue of its copyfree license, HAMMER can spread like wildfire to all OS'es, including proprietary and copyleft ones! Imagine never having to convert your home partition, and always having optimal FS features and performance, as you switch from OS to OS to OS!
--libman