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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
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
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.
"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
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
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
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.
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
maybe they'll develop a desktop OS now.
alive to the universe, dead to the world