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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."
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.
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!
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?
"Nearly $200,000 over" is actually "$180,000" over. I guess 90% is "nearly 100%".
It's currently $184,905K over, and was before TFA was posted. If you're going to be pedantic about rounding, then you probably shouldn't round in your own comment. There are also a few large pledges (e.g. from Netflix), which may or may not arrive in time to be counted towards the 2012 total. If they don't, then the 2013 total will get an early boost. If they do, then they'll easily push it over the $200K-over mark.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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 must be an absolute blast to hang out with, if on hearing good news, you feel compelled to whine about lack of involvement in unrelated areas.
Happy Man: I got tickets to go see
Whiner: All that proves is that some people are willing to pay to hear live music. If only we/they would do the same for theatre!
Happy Man: I had to study three evenings a week for years, and now I finally got my degree!
Whiner: All that proves is that people will put in time for things important to them. If only we/they would do the same in cleaning up litter in the neighbourhood.
Happy Man: I had to speak up on this one. It's shameful that women are being denied access to birth control.
Whiner: All that proves is that people will speak up on things that matter to them. If only we/they would do the same for Internet whiners who find themselves derided in posts such as this one.
This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
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?
>> There's no inherent bias in "This is a picture of milk thistle"
Sorry but there is. What format is the image stored in?
"This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes." the poster is pointing out that if this is considered newsworthy in the sense that it is surprising and it should make people happy, we are in a sad state. we should really be complaining that freebsd had to suffer on the path to meeting it's goals, and it took an uprising of good hearted doners to compensate for neglect. this is why the OP is upset, and that comes across. so to talk to you in your own language: you're not being helpful. this is very bad news for consumers and humanity in general. go somewhere and do something intelligent. if youwan't to live in your happy world with happy people go look at some lolcats.
Told ya so!
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't still donate! ;-)
--libman
Crowdfunding really is gathering some serious momentum though, I'm seeing a lot more projects rapidly exceeding their goals now than a few years back. The word is spreading. Maybe the end of the VC era?
Good on both counts. Congratulations.
Why convert? UNIX is C, period.
It's a lot of C, but not all C. According to the FreeBSD mirror on GitHub the FreeBSD distribution contains the following types of code:
C 78.2%
C++ 12.9%
Shell 5.1%
Perl 1.2%
Other 2.4%
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...?
Next-gen OS projects are slowly beginning to start up
Like Plan 9 and Inferno? These have started up a loooong time ago. ;-)
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.
Using C++ is stupid even if you can't. The tools support for C++ is outrageous by definition. By the time you have a parser for C++, you have written half a compiler. Give me a break.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
One of the things I like about FreeBSD is their openess to languages (in contrast to OpenBSD, who think C is the only language around...)
Throughout the years, FreeBSD developers reached out for what they thought were the best languages for the job: Modula-3 (for cvsup, though now deprecated), Forth on the boot loader (ideal, right? Can drop you into a little Forth shell), Ruby for ports infrastructure. In that way, they are not prejudiced about programming languages. Users contribute a great deal too. All the things you get in Debian (lots of languages).
FreeBSD developers also have ported important innovations that are open-sourced but lacking in Linux, because of pure ideology (the GPL doesn't play well with others): Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (a framework that implements concurrency *correctly*), and LLVM (which as a side effect, brings C blocks (effectively, closures for C).
Additionally, many vendors support FreeBSD. I, for instance, run Eiffel on FreeBSD (for the world's best introduction to Object Oriented Programming: A Touch of class. Common Lisp has vendors that support FreeBSD (LispWorks, Franz), and so has Smalltalk (Cincom, Smalltalk/X). All these vendors have free products and commercial support.
There's nothing stopping anyone from doing whatever they want with C++ on FreeBSD. But seriously, C++? Shouldn't you be looking at D?
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
On Mac OS X, Unix is a whole lot of Objective-C.
It has the semantics of the purest of OO languages (Smalltalk), but you can mix and match with C. That allows for speed and fast development without the pain and the bugs. It's probably the number one factor for the success of Mac OS as the number 1 Unix out there for users (power users included). No, actually, number 1 OS, period.
If you ask me, Steve Jobs was wright.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
But will you still be laughing after you finish your undergraduate degree?
This isn't 'good news', its more of a 'look you stupid BSD is Dying morons, once again you dont' fucking get it' as to refute the last retarded article claiming that BSD had fallen utterly short of its goal.
This is more of a finger to Linux fanboys on slashdot than anything else.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No, not the end of the VC era. Crowdfunding as it stands now via the popular implementations such as kickstarter is not investing, its just donations and its not even new. Its only new because some silly projects get massive amounts of money when any VC person would know better than to invest. Ouya as an example. Ridiculous amounts of donations for a project that offers no reason what so ever that it will be anymore than just another Android device, and not even a particularly impressive one at that.
VC is crowd-investment. A bunch of people get together, make a fund and invest in a bunch of businesses knowing 9 out of 10 will go belly up but that 10th one is going to make far more than enough to cover the loss of the others.
The only thing different is because you're doing it on a website from your livingroom with very little effort, you think its new and doing something different.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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
OSX is the FreeBSD for your laptop. Yes, I know its not FreeBSD per say, but FreeBSD isn't trying to be everything, and its certainly not putting much effort into being an awesome desktop.
If you want a fast server with an awesome filesystem or the fastest TCP/IP stack on the planet, then you want FreeBSD. If you want a desktop GUI OS, you want something else.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It is doing something different, you pointed out the differences yourself.
VCs earned the nickname "vulture capitalists" because they have a tendency to pump up companies as quickly as possible and then reap the benefits - the dot com bubble was largely a VC creation. Anytime I see a company with a staff of fifty doing a job that could be done by five, sure enough there's a VC trying to float/seeking rounds of investment from bigger fish behind it. The latest buzzword is "nano", the sexier it sounds the more interested they are. Also to the contrary, crowdfunding isn't just donations, its more like preordering, and is used for this purpose by many companies.
Bottom line is a lot of companies are getting started without having to depend on loans or VCs, which can only be a good thing. The next stage in the evolution will be to allow microinvestment, where instead of donations people can actually buy shares in new ideas, true public investment, and I believe legislation is currently being cleared to allow that.
Desktop or laptop? Try PC-BSD - "PC-BSD® is a user friendly desktop Operating System based on FreeBSD." http://www.pcbsd.org/
The fact that plan9/etc failed to gain popularity doesn't mean UNIX will be the final idea in operating systems until the heat death of the universe...
For me, they didn't fail. I think they nicely demonstrated that a lot of cute ideas actually work. That's hardly a failure.
I wouldn't call everyone who ever used C++ (which is the majority of major game and app projects) stupid
Neither would I, it's the fact that people had little choice that is stupid, not the people.
Ezekiel 23:20
On Mac OS X, Unix is a whole lot of Objective-C.
...except for the parts that actually implement Unix behavior, which are mostly C with some amount of C++ and perhaps a small amount of Objective-C.
No, he'll be to busy working on his custom xmonad config while he's watching anime and posting about lolis.
"This is very good news for FreeBSD and BSD in general. Go somewhere and do something to help your pet causes." the poster is pointing out that if this is considered newsworthy in the sense that it is surprising and it should make people happy, we are in a sad state. we should really be complaining that freebsd had to suffer on the path to meeting it's goals, and it took an uprising of good hearted doners to compensate for neglect. this is why the OP is upset, and that comes across. so to talk to you in your own language: you're not being helpful. this is very bad news for consumers and humanity in general. go somewhere and do something intelligent. if youwan't to live in your happy world with happy people go look at some lolcats.
In their own words, it's normal that 50% of their fundraising comes during their end of year campaigns. Where does the suffering come in to this? Fortunately they're looking to change this.
It is good news in the sense that a group run on donations can't assume those donations will magically come, and in this instance they exceeded their target by a pretty decent margin. I've no idea where you arrived at that interpretation of the ACs post. By my reading it's about people generally being unwilling to put money in to important causes, and I agree that it's difficult to get people to pony up time or cash to causes that are indeed important. However that should detract from cases where it does happen.
In an ideal world a majority, or even a large minority, of users would be donating code, cash or other resources to projects. We'd be calling our elected representatives to keep them in line, and we'd be sickened by the injustices that afflict our societies. In reality, that doesn't happen nearly as often as it should. We seem to struggle to really care about people distant to ourselves, at least in any kind of sustainable way. When crowds are involved, we're individually inclined to assume that someone else will take action, so we don't have to. That's why I think it particularly impressive when people do step away from the herd to take a stand. In the case of fund raising, it's going to be about knowing the right strings to pull - not just assuming that people will pay their "fair share".
It's good news when a project can get people to donate in any kind of serious way. I call that a healthy mixture of optimism and pragmatism - not living in some imaginary lolcat soothed happy world.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
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.
Sure, PC-bsd is desktop focused, may do it well. May do fine on a laptop as well, I stopped tying to have a bsd desktop years ago and a lot has changed.
I really just meant fbsd isn't so much workstation centric as server centric.
I love Fbsd, haven't had a day without it in my home and office since I switched from Linux and started using 2.2.x back in the day :)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
We currently have a few C++ things in the base system:
In a few days, there will also be a BSDL replacement for the GPL'd device tree compiler landing. This is a simple tool that converts between source and flattened device trees, and since it is doing a lot of stuff that involves building maps I decided to use C++ and std::map rather than reinvent the wheel or do something ugly involving macros. Performance isn't an issue, since it's intended to parse input files that are typically under 12KB and produce output that is even smaller, so even without optimisation it uses around 10KB of RAM and under a tenth of a second of CPU time. A higher-level language might have been appropriate, but it's also potentially important to be able to include a statically linked copy for recovery, which rules out most high-level languages.
Note that none of the kernel, and no userland utilities essential for operation are written in C++.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ruby for ports infrastructure
The ports infrastructure is written in make, not Ruby. You are probably thinking of portupgrade, which is a (deprecated) third-party tool for managing potrs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Intel GPU support is in 9.1 and -CURRENT (10.0). nVidia support is available from their blob. The Nouveau stuff is apparently not much effort to port, but no one has done it. The big omission is AMD, because it depends on TTM, which is not yet implemented in FreeBSD.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
Implement the resource management using the RAII techniques of C++ or lose in the long run.
That's a false dichotomy, if I've ever seen one.
Ezekiel 23:20
We probably shouldn't trust anything anyone who says "developper" says about programming, anyway.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
Yes, portupgrade is separate from the base system, available through the ports system itself. It's only "deprecated", however, in that it used to essentially be "the standard" for ports system front ends, and has been edged out in that regard by portmaster. There are other front ends as well, though, and they're there to provide choices, as is portmaster.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
maybe they'll develop a desktop OS now.
alive to the universe, dead to the world
It's glad to see that at least some OS people in the FOSS community pick tools based on how well they are at the particular task at hand, as opposed to their ideological biases ("C good, C++ bad" etc).
Then again, FreeBSD development was always much more pragmatic than Linux, from what I've seen.
The tools support for C++ is outrageous by definition. By the time you have a parser for C++, you have written half a compiler. Give me a break.
Once the compiler is already written, though, why is it an issue?
Tools support for C++ took a long time coming, but it's finally here. There are IDEs out there that do 100% accurate code completion on arbitrarily complex C++ code, for examples (templates and all).