December 28, 2021

First, I’d like to say thank you to all the individuals and organizations who gave us a financial contribution this year. I believe that it shows you value the work we are doing supporting FreeBSD and that your trust in us on how we will invest your money in the Project.   Without your donations, we couldn’t have grown our team which enabled us to increase the support we provided to more areas of FreeBSD. We are a 501c3, public charity, for the public good. In addition, we are 100% funded by donations from individuals and organizations like yours.

As of this writing, we’re in the final week of our 2021 fundraising effort! By December 27, we had raised $1,180,662 towards our goal of $1,250,000. We’re grateful to be so close, but still need your support to reach our goal!

Why do we need this much money? Last year we made a decision to increase our software development efforts and make more significant software contributions to FreeBSD. In order to do that, we had to grow our team. We developed a technology roadmap from input we were receiving from individual and commercial users, as well as market trends. Based on the roadmap, we identified positions we needed to fill.

This year we hired three full-time software developers, one full-time Arm kernel developer, and one project manager. In addition, we are funding wifi work full-time and some other projects to help improve FreeBSD on the desktop. We believe this will help attract new users and contributors to the Project.

Our growth wasn’t just in our technology team, but in our advocacy team too. We hired a marketing coordinator and technical writer to provide more educational and informational content. From Advocacy in Review and quarterly status reports, you’ll see all the work we did to promote FreeBSD, as well as provide community engagement, education opportunities, and informative content to help pave the path to getting started with FreeBSD.

With these additional resources we’ve been able to step in more often to implement and improve major features in FreeBSD, review patches and bug reports, implement bug fixes, and support the security efforts. This helps keep FreeBSD the innovative, secure, and reliable operating system you rely on. It also allows us to provide more documentation to assist new and seasoned FreeBSD contributors to get the information they need.

For more specific information on what your support allowed us to do, read through our quarterly status reports and upcoming impact report where  you’ll find updates from the various areas we support. 

As we continue with our 2021 Fundraising Campaign, please remember that we are completely funded by donations and your support will help us directly improve FreeBSD through:

  • Operating System Improvements: Providing staff to immediately respond to urgent problems and implement new features and functionality allowing for the innovation and stability you’ve come to rely on.
  • Security: Providing engineering resources to bolster the capacity and responsiveness of the Security team providing you with peace of mind when security issues arise.
  • Quality Assurance: Improving and increasing test coverage, continuous integration, and automated testing with a full-time software engineer to ensure you receive the highest quality, secure, and reliable operating system.
  • New User Experience: Improving the process and documentation for getting new people involved with FreeBSD, and supporting those people as they become integrated into the FreeBSD Community.
  • Training: Supporting more FreeBSD training for undergraduates, graduates, and postgraduates. Growing the community means reaching people and catching their interest in systems software as early as possible. More training provides job seekers an additional set of in-demand skills and employers a bigger pool of skilled candidates.
  • Face-to-Face Opportunities: Facilitating collaboration among members of the community, and building connections throughout the industry to support a healthy and growing ecosystem and make it easier for you to find resources when questions emerge.

I know we say it a lot, but we truly can’t do it without you. Please consider making a donation to help us continue and increase our support for FreeBSD.

In addition, don’t forget about our Partnership Program! It provides additional benefits for our larger commercial donors. Find out more information and share with your companies!