March 13, 2015

I’m so excited to announce our spring fundraising campaign. I know it’s not officially spring yet, but it sure feels like it here at Foundation headquarters in Boulder, Colorado. We’re kicking off our fundraising campaign in conjunction with some other exciting events. There’s so much to celebrate. First, we are proud to be a Platinum sponsor of AsiaBSDCon. This is the tenth AsiaBSDCon, with over 140 attendees planned, and 31 talks, providing a venue for all things BSD in Asia. People from around the world attend this conference to learn about the BSD operating systems, share their knowledge and experience, and work together to develop, hack, fix, improve, and document the various BSD operating systems.

The most exciting news we have is that we are celebrating our 15th anniversary supporting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! We have grown from our president and founder, Justin Gibbs, creating a non-profit to support FreeBSD, to an eight member board with 7 staff members. In case you missed it earlier, check out Justin’s interview about the history of the Foundation on BSDNow.

As the first employee, 9 years ago, I’ve witnessed incredible growth in our ability to support the Project and community. The year we were founded we raised a whopping $7,000. My first year with the Foundation, in 2006, we raised a little over $100,000. And, last year we raised $2,436,194, spending $877,412 on the project.

When we first started out, we focused on funding project development, conference sponsorships, and travel grants. Fifteen years later, we have increased support in those areas and have now grown to providing legal support for the Project; purchasing and helping manage hardware for FreeBSD infrastructure; providing release engineering support for consistent and timely releases; creating marketing literature and presentations that not only inform people of what FreeBSD is, but also provides detailed information on what’s in new releases; attending more conferences to promote FreeBSD; and publishing a professional online FreeBSD magazine, The FreeBSD Journal.

To celebrate our anniversary, we are kicking off a fundraising campaign to help broaden the reach of our mission, by adding 500 new community investors in the next four weeks. What’s a new community investor? An individual or organization that makes their first 2015 donation during this spring campaign.

Why donate to the Foundation? Your donations will help us continue and increase our support in the following areas:

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  • Funding improvement and development projects, including: Native ISCSI kernel Stack, Updated video console (Newcons), UEFI system boot support, Capsicum component framework, IPv6 support in FreeBSD, Auditdistd improvements for FreeBSD cluster, and adding modern AES modes to OpenCrypto (to support IP/SEC).
  • Helping to provide consistent and on-time releases.
  • Educating the public and promoting FreeBSD with tools like our high-quality FreeBSD 10X Brochure and company visits to help
  • facilitate collaboration efforts with the Project.
  • Sponsoring BSD conferences and summits in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the US.
  • Protecting FreeBSD IP and providing legal support to the Project.
  • Purchasing hardware to build and improve FreeBSD project infrastructure.

For the last 15 years, you as a community have allowed us to make an major impact on the FreeBSD Project and Community. Please help us continue and increase our support by making a donation today.

Deb Goodkin, Executive Director