February 24, 2009

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Accepting Project Proposals

Do you have a great idea for improving FreeBSD? Do you need funding to get the job done? We are currently accepting project proposals until March 10. We will consider work relating to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure with the FreeBSD Operating System. A budget of $30,000 was allocated to fund multiple development projects. Click here to find out more.

Conference Travel Grants

Do you want to attend AsiaBSDCon or BSDCan, but don’t have the funds? Take advantage of our travel grant program. We have allocated $22,000 this year for providing travel grants for FreeBSD developers and contributors to attend the various FreeBSD related conferences. Click here to find out more about our travel grant program. If you do want financial assistance for attending AsiaBSDCon, please submit your application soon!

Foundation Provides USB Analyzers

The foundation provided two Beagle 480 USB Analyzers to FreeBSD developers. We are very grateful to TotalPhase for donating one of the analyzers to us. The board believes the analyzers will be a useful tool for our developers to use in diagnosing problems and doing performance analysis.

“The analyzer will be used for not only developing the USB framework, including the NEWUSB and USB device drivers, but also debugging problems found by users,” commented Weongyo Jeong, FreeBSD developer.

“The Foundation grant for a USB analyzer will help me provide better support for existing devices, profile the USB stack to ensure the bus is fully utilized, and make it easier to add drivers for new hardware,” said Andrew Thompson, FreeBSD developer.

Conference Sponsorship

We were a sponsor for DCBSDCon in February and are a sponsor for AsiaBSDCon in March and EuroBSDCon in September. We allocated $30,000 towards conferences and meetings this year. If you’re planning a conference or meeting, like a FreeBSD developer summit, then you need to submit a request application to be considered to receive funding.

Fundraising Update

We set our 2009 fundraising goal to $300,000. This is an ambitious goal considering the economy right now. But, we want to continue the same level of support to the project that we’ve provided for the last few years. One way of achieving our goal is to approach more companies that use FreeBSD. If you know of a company that uses FreeBSD that we should approach please let us know. A contact would be very helpful too.

To make a donation, Click here.

Thanks again for supporting the Foundation and FreeBSD!

The FreeBSD Foundation