Yearly FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Campaign Is On

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Foundation's annual year-end fundraising drive is currently running. Their goal this year is US$ 1M, and they're currently at US$ 427K. In 2013, the efforts that were funded were from the last drive were: Native iSCSI kernel stack, Updated Intel graphics chipset support, Integration of Newcons, UTF-8 console support, Superpages for ARM architecture, and Layer 2 networking updates. Also various conferences and summit sponsorships, as well as hardware purchases for the Project. The Foundation is a US 501(c)3 non-profit, so your donations (if in the US) are tax-deductible. Some of the larger 2013 (corporate?) sponsors so far are NetApp, LineRate, WhatsApp, and Tarsnap."

Comments

...I need to start my own...

[martiniturbide]

I need to start my fundraising to make an open source clone of OS/2 Warp :)

Re:...I need to start my own...

[dmbasso]

My brother would donate.

Re:...I need to start my own...

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up and take my money!

I've been waiting for a project like this for a long time. OSFree seems mostly abandoned these days, which really sucks. My only condition would be that it should be a true clone of OS/2 Warp- not "OS/2 Warp according to our interpretation". Haiku OS was doing really well as a BeOS clone until they introduced their own convoluted and god awful package management system. It seems like the more they focus on "doing their own thing" (and less of "making a BeOS clone"), the crappier that project gets. I would hate to see the same thing happen to an open source OS/2 clone.

Re:...I need to start my own...

[rjr3]

The mouse pad I use for my Ubuntu machine is an OS2 Warp one.
It works as well as I would assume Warp would still today.

Re:...I need to start my own...

[Anonymous Coward]

To get rich, start your own 1) Religion 2) OS 'foundation'.

I think the quick ticket is choice #1. We'll see how it works out for you!

Corporate donors

[Mr Z]

As I recall, FreeBSD provided some of the key underpinnings to Mac OS X and iOS. Surely Apple can spare some of its $90B back to the effort. $1M is a rounding error compared to $90B...

Re:Corporate donors

[thatkid_2002]

Apple is stripping out all of their GPL based components so that they *don't* have to contribute back. They would strip out any FreeBSD code too if the license required them to contribute back.

Re:Corporate donors

[Mr Z]

Well, there's contributing code back, and there's paying programmers. Donating to FreeBSD would be more like "paying programmers."

Re:Corporate donors

[Mr Z]

Actually... it's not even like paying programmers. It's more like tipping because you like the service.

Re:Corporate donors

[manu0601]

They borrowed from NetBSD and OpenBSD too. Depending on the OS X version, you find more RCS strings from one or the other. X.4 had more from NetBSD than the others, for instance.

Re:Corporate donors

[sabri]

FreeBSD provided some of the key underpinnings to Mac OS X and iOS.

Not to mention JUNOS, the operating system running on Juniper Networks routers. The JUNOS kernel is based on FreeBSD.

Anyone using Facebook, Twitter, AT&T, Verizon (I can go on for about an hour) will have their packets routed through a box runing JUNOS.

Come on Kevin, I'm sure you can donate a bit...

Re:Corporate donors

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know for sure, but I'm not thinking of anyone but Apple that could afford to be the $250,000+ "Anonymous Donor" in 2012 and the $100,000+ "Anonymous Donor" in 2011. Apple is giving back code too, but only the parts they don't consider to be a strategic advantage.

Re:Corporate donors

[Mr Z]

LLVM started outside of Apple. Apple hired some key LLVM developers, and put several of their own on it too. They've kept it public because enough people outside Apple are still contributing, and sure, that's great. So far everyone benefits. If Apple decided to stop publishing their LLVM updates and took it private, FreeBSD would have to fork it or move to another compiler.

But none of that is specific to FreeBSD, and none of those fund core FreeBSD development (which could happen just as easily with GCC or another compiler if LLVM were unavailable). Your point, again?

Re:Corporate donors

[allanjude8027]

And the PlayStation4 is full of FreeBSD.

Re:Corporate donors

[David_W]

They were "silver" sponsors last year. Just wait, I suspect they'll pitch in before the campaign is up.

Re:Corporate donors

[Anonymous Coward]

Kiss dicks? What, the one in your skinny jeans?

Re:Corporate donors

[Bengie]

Apple contributes back A LOT. What they don't want to do is contribute back their trade secret stuff. The other 95% of code they don't have a problem with.

Re:Corporate donors

[Billly Gates]

The reason why it is stripping GPL is because it is unfriendly for corporations including Apple and others to distribute.

The GPL forces to give the source code away even if it is just .0001% of the actual product even if you link it! So if I write a cout "Hello World\n!"; but the iostream.h is GPL then my rights to use my work are hindered.

Whether that is more free is personal flamewar here on slashdot and I do not want to be modded down for taking sides here if corporations should be forced to give out their IP because of a few header files, but that is a big problem for the lawyers of these corporations.

If you do not like it then use Linux. I personally feel it is very unfair and dickheadish on RMS part as a a header or link to somehting should not infect the rest of a program. There is the LGPL which allows this but authors do nto know about it and feel and are frankly clueless that corporations can't include or link to their programs.

CLANG is a big pronoent of this movement away from the GPL and why FreeBSD has an old version of GCC pre GPL-3 which includes more restrictions on the authors.

In my personal opinion for the moderators I feel tax funded code should be BSD as corps pay taxes as much as people do. Apple does contribute alot back. Webkit, Apache, SSL, and even Xorg.

Re:Corporate donors

[Billly Gates]

Apple contributes back A LOT. What they don't want to do is contribute back their trade secret stuff. The other 95% of code they don't have a problem with.

Also the GPL flaw is anything linked to GPL must be GPL as well making it viral. I know people love to flame Bill Gates here on this but he has a point and why TCP/Ip in NT is based on BSD and not GnuLinux.

So if iOS is compiled with gcc and glibc with just 1 and I mean ONE .h file that is GPL it would force Apple to give away their whole fucking trade secrets. That is insane and it hurts proprietary app developers who write software for the Mac and iOS. How would I know a source file that I link to in Xcode is contaminated in GNU?

Before the mods want to vote me down I advise you look at the GPL license? LGPL is for linking but most if nto all of glibc is not LGPL, but GPL which means you can't link.

So Apple is doing the right thing for ISVs and itself. Whether that is the morally right choice is up for debate and endless flamewars on whether you feel corporations are evil takers. But Apple is a corp and so are much of its customers who write software.

Re:Corporate donors

[Billly Gates]

I believe Cisco iOS (not apple's) is made from BSD Unix (4.4 tapes from Berkely) or was over a decade ago. I do not know if it still is but BSD is really good at packets.

BSD Unix 4.2 invented TCP/IP and the modern internet from arpanet so it is not surprising. :-)

I guess working with tiny tiny machines compared to today you needed no bloat and very efficient mathmatical data algorithms and structures made by people at Berkely writting master theises papers rather than volunteers growing it in Linux as a weekend project.

Re:Corporate donors

[Anonymous Coward]

> BSD Unix 4.2 invented TCP/IP and the modern internet from arpanet so it is not surprising. :-)

Lay down the crack pipe, bro. BSD was a pioneer in implementing and integrating the TCP/IP stack but it didn't invent any of it. Read some more about the history and the work in IETF.

(As an aside, any sane notion of "modern Internet" would have to include WWW with its European DNA.)

Re:Corporate donors

[TheRaven64]

Apple strips out the GPL stuff because they don't like having to contribute everything back. They like being able to release things on their own schedule. FreeBSD has benefitted quite a lot from Apple (for example, the MAC framework was jointly developed for FreeBSD and Darwin, funded by Apple), but they generally contribute developer time rather than money. The FreeBSD Foundation is on their list for matched donations though, so if Apple employees donate then Apple will also add to the contribution. The donors page is a little bit misleading, because it only counts no-strings donations in money. Yahoo and New York Internet, for example, donate a huge amount in hardware and datacenter space, but don't appear in the list. Juniper was only in the Silver category last year, but if you counted the salaries of the people they paid to work on FreeBSD and upstream changes they'd easily be in the Uranium category.

Re:Corporate donors

[TheRaven64]

Juniper was a silver sponsor last year, but that doesn't tell the entire story. They've also been upstreaming a lot of the JUNOS code over the last couple of years. Most recently, they've started to push their code signing infrastructure (built on top of the MAC framework that was financed by Apple) to FreeBSD. The code is still under review, but should be landing quite soon. They've also spent quite a bit of manpower on some really tedious things, like improving the FreeBSD build process, which makes lots of developers happy but no one wants to do.

Re:Corporate donors

[TheRaven64]

LLVM started as a university project. It wasn't until after Apple hired Chris Lattner and shipped a GLSL stack that other people started contributing in significant amounts. Chris offered LLVM to the FSF before Apple hired him, but they didn't want it. Clang (the C/C++/Objective-C front end, which is the bit most people think of as LLVM) was created in-house at Apple and open sourced, as was libc++. Now, there are about as many Google employees working on LLVM and Clang and a lot of people from elsewhere, so if Apple decided to take their ball and go home we'd still have an actively developed UIUC-licensed compiler.

But if you want to look at other work Apple has financed, take a look at the MAC framework in FreeBSD. There are a few other examples, but that's a nice big subsystem that was entirely developed with funding from Apple.

Re:Corporate donors

[Bengie]

CLANG is a big pronoent of this movement away from the GPL

CLANG was started and heavily funded by Apple. But without GPL, Apple will never give back, right?

Re:Corporate donors

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL then my rights to use my work are hindered.

No. GPL covers distribution, not usage. Get educated, then try again.

Re: Corporate donors

[Anonymous Coward]

GPL 3 covers usage. Please don't say "get educated." The people who say that always just know enough to be dangerous.

Re: Corporate donors

[Bengie]

Developers are users. Their usage is heavily restricted.

Re: Corporate donors

[Anonymous Coward]

The GPL says if you take public GPL code and use it, you have to contribute the changes back to the public. If corporations don't want to give back, then write your own code. Simple solution, to a simple problem, for a simple mind.

Re: Corporate donors

[unixisc]

Very specifically, it says that if you take GPL code and modify & then use it, when while redistributing your changed code, your source code has to accompany it. But it does not say that you have to redistribute it. A company can take GPL3 code and use it purely internally, and it would be no different from buying proprietary code. Problem arises is that a lot of corporations have different divisions that are legally incorporated, so sharing b/w those entities falls in a grey legal area which could either be interpreted as redistribution, or internal use. No issues if it's the latter, but if the former, the T&C of GPL3 would then kick in. Which is why a lot of corporations wouldn't touch GPL3 w/ a bargepole.

Stop and consider...

[thatkid_2002]

FreeBSD probably isn't useful to you every day. Maybe some of your net traffic will go through a FreeBSD box, but that box could be replaced by just about anything really. However, I'm not trying to say that FreeBSD is useless or irrelevant - what I want to say is that FreeBSD has some excellent out-of-band uses.

I think people should consider the value of the educational, developmental, experimental and competitive opportunities that FreeBSD provides. We need projects and communities which have low hanging fruit for beginners and we need projects that are ready to give different approaches to problems a go - so that the rest of us on whatever OS can learn from it regardless of the success of the implementation.

The same goes for my favourite alternative OS - Haiku which also contains some bits and pieces from FreeBSD for networking/wireless IIRC. (BTW, it has package management now and a lot of improvements to the native browser, and more.)

Re:Stop and consider...

[TheRaven64]

You might be surprised at where FreeBSD code ends up. A lot of cheap home routers that run 'Linux' strip out the Linux 802.11 stack and graft on the FreeBSD one.

Re:Stop and consider...

[CronoCloud]

http://www.scei.co.jp/ps4-license/

Re:Stop and consider...

[ducomputergeek]

Fact is just about everything you use today contains parts of FreeBSD. TCP/IP Networking stack. Well Microsoft adopted that from FreeBSD back in the 1990's. There are more parts of Linux that came from the BSD's. Oh and let's not forget the most popular Unix Desktop OS MacOS X & iOS. Oh and now the PS4.

So yeah, FreeBSD is this obscure thing nobody knows about, but pieces of it are everywhere these days.

Re:Stop and consider...

[Anonymous Coward]

My take: OpenBSD works best for the router/firewall role, FreeBSD for a server, and linux for a desktop. Linux has more development but my perception is that this leads to more of a bleeding edge system than a BSD one which should be more stable and tested.

Re:Stop and consider...

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft used the FreeBSD tcpip stack temporarily in Windows 2000 while they were rolling their own. It has long since been removed.

Re:Stop and consider...

[thatkid_2002]

Yep! Case in point!

I'd like an mp3 player with OpenBSD and Truecrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone could make a fortune with something like this!

Re:For surely

[LordLimecat]

FreeBSD isnt for the desktop. Next time you need a quick-deploy firewall with advanced features in a virtual environment, and you stumble across pfSense or m0n0wall, remember to thank FreeBSD for making such a stable system.

My experience with it has been limited to a few appliances (freenas, pfsense, etc), but I've generally found it to be way more stable and better performing than linux alternatives (openfiler, untangle). Im sure there are a myriad of technical and non-technical reasons for that, but either way, I hope the FreeBSD folks keep it up.

And that is true freedom, my friend. True freedom.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people mistakenly think that freedom is all roses and rainbows. It's not. Freedom can be cruel. Freedom can feel unjust. Freedom can be ugly. Freedom can make you want to cry. But if you truly stand for freedom, then you will accept this. In fact, you won't just accept it, but you will embrace it.

Apple's behavior very clearly shows where true freedom lies when it comes to open source software licensing. It is not in the GPL. Contrary to the claims of its advocates, the GPL does not encourage freedom. It clearly does the opposite; it puts some very dictatorial restrictions upon how the software may be used, modified and redistributed. That is not freedom in any sense of the word.

The BSD license is clearly much the opposite. It is about true freedom. It is about allowing people the freedom to not contribute back changes. This may not be the kind of freedom that makes everybody happy, but freedom isn't about happiness. Freedom is about the ability to act independently, as one wishes, without undue interference or restrictions.

Anyone who truly loves freedom won't have a problem with Apple, or anyone else, benefiting from the generosity of the FreeBSD developers. In fact, they'll be happy that the FreeBSD developers have put out such amazing software with so few restrictions on how it may be used, modified and distributed. They'll be happy that a company like Apple is able to use that software as they see fit, in a way that maximizes Apple's freedom.

Freedom is about minimizing restrictions, as the BSD license shows. Freedom is absolutely not about applying restrictions, like the GPL family of licenses attempts to do.

Re:And that is true freedom, my friend. True freed

[Anonymous Coward]

Which side of your ass are you talking out of?

The GPL in no way restricts how you USE software. I can write viruses through GCC, if I want to. Another appl€ apologist. Keep buying your shiny things every year. Corpse Jobs needs the money.

Re:For surely

[Vskye]

Check out PC-BSD sometime. http://www.pcbsd.org/

Re: For surely

[Anonymous Coward]

you make a stupid statement. follow it up with examples of how you haven't used it on the desktop. and then declare your lack of experience.
whaddyuadick?

Re:And that is true freedom, my friend. True freed

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary, the GPL does impose restrictions upon how GPL'ed software is used. Remember, "use" also includes the incorporation of unmodified GPL'ed source code into another library or application. It is not permissible to statically link such GPL'ed code into a non-GPL'ed, closed source product that is then distributed. That's a big part of the reason why the LGPL had to be created, for crying out loud! And enough with the "Apple apologist" crap. The GP explicitly mentioned that this extends well beyond Apple. The comment clearly says "Anyone who truly loves freedom won't have a problem with Apple, or anyone else, benefiting from the generosity of the FreeBSD developers."

Re:For surely

[Anonymous Coward]

My (Free)BSD desktop works very well, and it doesn't constantly guess incorrectly about what I want it to do.

"fucktard"? Really? Is that you again Linus?

Re:And that is true freedom, my friend. True freed

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget about the parent A.C. He's swallowed the Kool-Aid, poor devil...

Re:For surely

[Bengie]

Linus is pretty good at only calling people names when they deserve it, not just to troll.

ClickAndPledge

[phorm]

I can't say that I'm terribly impressed with the pledge interface. You end up with a "transaction completed" page that doesn't detail the transaction nor does it refer you back to the original URL.
When I clicked "back" I hit an autoforward URL, so I'm hoping it was at least smart enough to put in a transaction ID and not attempt the transaction multiple times.

Re:For surely

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's not. Apologist.

Re: For surely

[Anonymous Coward]

Wut? I used to use FreeBSD as desktop OS before switching to OSX.

It's not only a server system. Works perfectly fine as productive desktop system.

Re: For surely

[adri]

Works fine for me on chips supported by dri. The dri2 support is being nailed down now and once that's in it'll work fine on the same bleeding edge Intel hardware Linux does.

I'm the wifi guy. The WiFi is now up to date on Intel and Atheros 11n. I'd like some help with broadcom. I'll do the Intel and Atheros 11ac stuff early next year.

I'm currently evaluating power management. FreeBSD and xorg on my ivybridge lenovo x230 draw 9w when idle. We are ok at using the deep sleep states per core and package but there's room for improvement.

I'm making the turbo boost stuff work out of the box. Powerd is .. Dumb. Modern CPUs are fine at running at the highest clock rate but spending time in c3 and lower. So I'll fix powers to do that on these chips.

I'm using an x230 in vesa mode but it works fine if you use the new DRI and xorg code. I do day to day hacking on the lenovo t400, mostly due to the cardbus slot I still use.

The only thing missing is hotplug express card.

So.. It's not perfect. 10.0 will not be laptop great. I expect 10.1 with updated dri2 and xorg along with Intel WiFi fixes and my power management stuff to be great.

There.

If only BSD were free

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD

Re:If only BSD were free

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean to say that your Linux systems never load firmware at system boot?

Re:If only BSD were free

[Anonymous Coward]

You are such an idiot. Or RMS dick sucker. Which is basically the same.

BSD is free. In every sense.

Re: If only BSD were free

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. Those must be some shitty Linux distros.

Re:If only BSD were free

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct. No firmware gets loaded unless it's freely licensed.

I'm using the Linux-libre kernel which is Linux minus binary blobs.

Re:For surely

[JimSadler]

I'm not a power user but Linux for me is so absolutely stable that it is hard to believe that anyone finds its stability less than perfect. I will say that I want FreeBSD to do well as having strong alternatives is important for all of us. I have used various BSD distros and will say that short of stuffing a grenade in the PC case it is pretty much a rock solid, leave me running forever type of OS.

Re:For surely

[jones_supa]

Yup. If you want to use BSD on desktop, PC-BSD is your ticket. Setting up a desktop on vanilla FreeBSD is not impossible either, but it's a pain in the ass. Just note that PC-BSD recently dropped 32-bit support (P4, early Atom, Core 1 Duo...).

What the hell?

[jones_supa]

FreeBSD is used by very important software projects such as Apple stuff, Juniper routers and Sony PlayStation 4. Can't those companies really whip a dime or two to the project? One would think that keeping the base OS flourishing would be a good business case for them.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know that they don't do that? Anonymously.

Re:What the hell?

[TheRaven64]

Most of those companies don't donate large amounts to the Foundation, but they do employ people to work on code that can be upstreamed. This benefits the system a lot, but the advantage of Foundation donations is that they can be used to work on things that are not directly commercially relevant now - for more strategic projects, or for cleaning up bits of the infrastructure.

Re:What the hell?

[jones_supa]

Because then FreeBSD wouldn't beg for money in this kind of fundraisers.

If only you were Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gnu.org/fun/fun.html#Guidelines

IPv6 status on pFsense?

[unixisc]

So what exactly is the status of IPv6 support on pFsense?

Re:IPv6 status on pFsense?

[LordLimecat]

Pretty sure its golden as of 2.1.

osFree

[unixisc]

Look up http://www.osfree.org/ Such a project is already under development.

Haiku & osFree

[unixisc]

Couldn't Haiku be forked @ the point they diverged? As for OS/2 Warp, I like the osFree model of taking a microkernel - the L4 - and then putting different 'personalities' on it. It was a bit like IBM's late Workplace OS, or OS/2-PPC, which got aborted since it was based on Mach 3, which compared to L4 was horribly slow.

Reasons to reject GPL3

[unixisc]

Total non-sequitur. Apple does contribute to FreeBSD, both in terms of employing some FreeBSD devs, as well as donating certain software to be merged upstream w/ the project. LLVM/Clang being one major example.

Apple is stripping out GPL3 based components, due to certain clauses in the license that make it pretty hostile to business - like the one granting patent rights to everybody in case a certain component uses a certain patent which the contributor holds. But FreeBSD is doing the same - LLVM/Clang has been deprecated in v10, and I believe Samba too might not be included due to its going GPL3 as well.

Re:Reasons to reject GPL3

[TheRaven64]

Apple is stripping out GPL3 based components

More specifically, Apple does not and never has allowed GPLv3 code into the building. They're not stripping out GPLv3 code, they're staying with old versions of projects that switched to GPLv3 until a permissively licensed replacement is finished. This is not a strategy exclusive to Apple - a lot of companies were unhappy with GPLv2 and now find GPLv3 quite scary. We've had quite a few companies start to contribute to FreeBSD and related projects as a result of GPLv3.

Re:For surely

[Anonymous Coward]

How hard is a "pkg_add -r xorg gnome2" to execute?

Re:For surely

[jones_supa]

Hmm? Is it really that simple? Recently I tried setting up an FreeBSD+XFCE combination and I humbly went through all the steps in the handbook regarding setting up and configuring X.org, installing and configuring the font packages and installing the ugly XDM, and finally installing XFCE.

FreeBSD Desktop

[srobert]

I'd have to disagree. I'm using FreeBSD on my laptop right now. I think it makes a great desktop. Linux supports more hardware. But if (and it's a big IF) your hardware is supported by FreeBSD, then you're better off running it.

Re:For surely

[ducomputergeek]

At my last company we developed an online ordering system for restaurants in the mid 2000's and deployed on FreeBSD over Linux using Pair Networks as our server & colo provider. When younger developers who only knew of Linux asked why my response was, "I don't want to waist time with the systems end of things. BSD will sit there and do it's job." Granted a lot of the backend was also written in Perl.

Once the software was written there wasn't a lot of maintenance, especially once we replaced MySQL with PostgreSQL. We'd have to power down one of the cluster to replace a harddrive, or rather Pair handled that, now and then. Maybe have a hardware failure, but we didn't have any problems stemming from the server OS in six years of operation.

Compare that to the point of sale we wrote which was powered on Linux. There was a number of times that changes to the Linux kernel borked something. Unfortunately touchscreen support & BSD was sorely lacking at the time. It got to the point where I considered hiring someone to write a driver.

Re:For surely

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare that to the point of sale we wrote which was powered on Linux. There was a number of times that changes to the Linux kernel borked something.

Considering Linus' stance on breaking userland, and the fact that you wrote the software that was borked in-house, I'm going to ask for a [citation] on this, because it just sounds strange. And, if we're trading anectodes: FreeBSD did a hard lockup on me while attempting to play a .wma file. Impressive.

Re:For surely

[Fweeky]

Note you can turn an existing FreeBSD install into PC-BSD too. Basically a case of switching pkgng to their repository, installing a metapackage and running a few bootstrap commands.

Re:For surely

[Zenin]

Stability comes in many forms, not simply up time.

For example, Linux has a long, long history of badly managed architectural transitions:
a.out to ELF
libc to glibc
virtual memory manager musical chairs
filesystem flavor of the month
32bit to 64bit
package manager du jour
sound
MAKEDEV/devfs/udev.

Stack on top of that the variety of distributions, with their own often wildly different ideas about where things should live and how they should be managed, frequently causes stability issues by introducing human error points. Many of those ideas are also inherently bad and affect stability, such as RedHat and friends throwing everything and the kitchen sink into /usr. -Yes, some packages can be retargeted...but not many, and doing so breaks convention (albeit a bad one) causing the same sort of management stability issues that multiple distros cause just on the local level.

All of that ends up being a make-work program for Linux System Administrators...honestly at leat 50% of your daily job only exists because of the instability of the Linux ecosystem.

Linux (all distros, all of it) is a Configuration Manager's worst nightmare.

Usage

[unixisc]

AGPL covers usage. The others - GPL, LGPL - do not.

Re:For surely

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say GhostBSD is much better