It's not exciting to talk about money, but it does often take cash to keep funding the developers that improve code. Congrats to the FreeBSD foundation then, for beating their fundraising goal of $500K by almost 40%. The $690K they raised will go to funding coders, developer conferences, and some limited travel. That bodes well for continued strong support for FreeBSD in general, soon to release version 9.1 (currently at RC3).
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Congratulations are in order, especially considering that on December 9 some "feckin' eejit" submitted the story to Slashdot with the following summary:
"Perhaps a sign of our troubled times or a sign that FreeBSD is becoming less relevant to modern computing needs [...] But with the end of this year fast approaching, it has raised just over $280,000, far short of its target."
Yes, FreeBSD is dying and Netcraft confirms it, yadda yadda yadda, but the poster "forgot" to mention that the Fundraising Campaign had been only announced on December 5 and, therefore, collecting more than 280.000 USD in just four days should have been regarded as a very promising start. And don't get me started about the people that (as usual) hijacked the thread to blame the BSD license for this "failure"!
Anyway, congratulations are certainly in order to anyone involved, and that includes the donors who, rather than argue about the merits/pitfalls of this license or the other, did the right thing and preferred to contribute something tangible -- me included. *grin*
Oh, and even though FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE has not been announced yet, it's been available for a good couple of weeks: clicking on the links leads to the official ISO images (and tar balls) rather than those for RC3 -- at least this is what happens in my part of the world.
RT.
Edited 2012-12-30 13:20 UTC
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In hindsight, I wonder if the "Oh no, they're not getting any money" article was a very clever troll. It spurred me into action and I also sent them a donation. If so, a very clever article indeed.
BSD doesn't get enough credit, I think. It's still somewhat of a hassle to install it on a desktop, but as a server OS it's worth the money. I run http://www.dictatorshandbook.net on it, and it's really truly been rock solid, and comes with a default configuration that already chooses safety over features. That's cool.
Edited 2012-12-30 14:28 UTC
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The supposed down side of the BSD license is that companies can just take the code, close source it, and release (cough Apple cough). The good part is that then those companies want to continue to take advantage of the development done by the open source community, so they'll throw some money at BSD to keep the dream alive (to the tune of $250,000 it seems).
If Apple wants to "steal" code that's being given away in return for the WebKit and Clang, great. If companies are willing to give big bucks to open source development because they think it's cheaper than hiring coders outright, that's fine by me. Here's to truly open source software, and all the BSD haters can shove it!
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Would be interesting to know the breakdown of the donators. Is it laregely private individual contributions .. or a few large corporate donations?
If it is corporations would be useful to know who is backing (and I suspect using) FreeBSD. I was surprised that my blu-ray player's documentation had a copyright notice for netbsd.... !
Member since:2005-07-06
See for yourself at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml Looks to me like a healthy mix of corporates and individuals. Some anonymous corp donated a quarter million dollars all in one, but there are hundreds of individuals who gave from $5 and up.
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Virtualbox works perfectly. Xen Dom0 support will come with 10.0. Check out http://xenbits.xen.org/people/attilio/presentations/FreeBSD_develop... for more info on the state of Xen support.
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Another option for virtualization on FreeBSD 10 - bhyve 
http://bhyve.org/
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