Slashdot Mirror
The FreeBSD Foundation Is Soliciting Project Proposals
Professor_Quail writes "Following a successful 2012 fundraising campaign, the FreeBSD Foundation is soliciting the submission of project proposals for funded development grants. Proposals may be related to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure within the FreeBSD operating system, and will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit, and cost-effectiveness. The proposal process is open to all developers (including non-FreeBSD committers), and the deadline for submitting a proposal is April 26th, 2013."
The foundation is currently funding a few other projects, including UEFI booting support.
Include support of LDAP and static leases. A wizard for requesting & configuring IPv6Tov4 tunnels thru current IPv6 providers would be a major boon
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Smartest thing they could work on right now. Build up some infrastructure NOW for when the SHTF.
Look to:
PirateBox
Byzantine
They should get rid of the insecure and buggy libresolv and replace it with /etc/hosts for all DNS lookups.
Spend it all on marketing, then maybe you'll get more than 5 people to give a crap about FreeBSD. Serious suggestion.
The OGL implementation for example.
stable and installer supported ZFS boot support for the / volume.
I would like to see improved Java support. What we have now is all either hacks based on running the Linux JVM as a compatible ABI, or you have to build a JVM from source due to licensing. I would like to see a commercial JVM run natively. Ideally IBM's.
That's not something FreeBSD can do though, I don't expect.
Catch up to DragonflyBSD, which forked FreeBSD in the direction it SHOULD have gone and now has superior just-about-everything.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I would love to run FreeBSD but it won't run smoothly (or in some cases at all) on my hardware, most Linux distributions run perfectly on these machines, but FreeBSD often won't even boot. The primary focus should be to improve hardware support since nothing else matters if the OS won't boot. After that I'd love to see wider file system support for cross-compatibility and a restoration of the pkg-ng package repository.
Shouldn't they just make it a project to die already?
There I said it.
Red pill, or blue pill. The matrix must decide!
Something to completely restore a machine?
You know those guitars that are like, double guitars?
Having a virtualization solution like VirtualBox available for FreeBSD hosts could help increase FreeBSD's adoption, particularly among developers who often need multiple OSes to run on their box.
I for example am relatively new to FreeBSD but would love to use it as my primary workstation OS, with Windows and Linux as guest VMs as my (development) work requires. This would allow me to maximize the benefit from ZFS, which is a major selling point. The ZFS benefit diminishes greatly if you run it in a VM (awesome guest filesystem gets trumped by the fact its "disks" are just files on a the host's less-robust filesystem).
And of course once FreeBSD became my primary OS, I'd be learning more about it and would probably start finding things I'd like to contribute.
http://www.hashcash.org/
http://pthree.org/2011/03/03/the-sad-state-of-hashcash/
This type of proof-of-work algorithm can ONLY ever catch on if someone seriously tackles the chicken-and-egg problem of ensuring it's supported in all mail agents AND clients.
The world needs:
-client hashcash plugins for: gmail, yahoo, thunderbird, hotmail
-mail agent plugins for: sendmail, postfix, exim etc.
and they all need to be plug-and-play.
If FreeBSD supported more printers and scanners / MFC devices, I'd be back on it tomorrow.
X developers only write for linux kernel hooks. FreeBSD needs to put eyeballs on DRI and X related drivers, and do Wayland.
better documentation.. and not just the by geeks for geeks often incomprehensible code comments and release notes, either. but actual, real documentation of all basic functions..
and oh yea.. the bsd's need a real installer.
Foundations for Wayland, KVM, KMS, systemd, Dalvik. Many of these things should just be a compile away with the right few pieces in place. Don't get left behind & don't let Linux's advancements be an island
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
I'm a busy software developer working for a big company, so I don't have much time to contribute for Open Source and open knowledge projects. Supporting the FreeBSD Foundation, Wikimedia and similar initiatives seems to be a good way to pay for their valuable work. I make a donation every year and invite all /. readers to do the same.
--- Signature? You must be kidding!
Oh, I only have a couple:
* Fix USB device enumeration, you know, like you said you would in 8.1
* Either remove or update storage controller drivers which are no longer maintained and have been
* replace sysinstall outright with something which is more likely to work consistently
* fix the release cycle to have something between "cutting edge requiring a regular rebuild of the system" and "stale binaries released when the release goes STABLE, and more often than not made unavailable completely as soon as they become stable and/or vulnerable".
* Would also be nice if they could make it so the all-too-common upgrade problem where you start an upgrade, but a dependency gets changed while you're upgrading and you end up half-broken (requiring you to run 2+ freebsd machines per release if you want to run one in a production state).
Of course, I'd submit these officially, but like is typical with FreeBSD, "it's your fault, there is no problem, X works fine, moving on" is likely to be the response (if there is one at all).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Two more things. Have one team whose sole purpose is to proliferate FBSD support to as many known peripherals and devices as possible, so that it's as easy to proliferate PC-BSD on as many laptops as possible, w/o worrying about whether it supports all the hardware or not.
Other - have something like Wine for PC-BSD to run XP and Windows 7 programs. Not so well that nobody wants to develop stuff for PC-BSD, but well enough so that the last essential programs that may not have a unix equivalent can be run emulated, while the bulk of other things run on PC-BSD.