September 1, 2022
First, I’d like to send a big thank you to everyone who gave a financial contribution to our efforts this year! We are 100% funded by your donations, so every contribution helps us continue to support FreeBSD in many ways, including some of the work funded and published in this newsletter.
Our goal this year is to raise at a minimum $1,400,000 towards a spending budget of around $2,000,000. As I write this report, we’ve brought in under $200,000 towards that goal. So, we definitely have a long way to go. However, instead of focusing on our fundraising efforts, we’d much rather spend our precious time talking to folks in our community on how we can help you. We’d much rather help create content to recruit more users and contributors to the Project, and we would most certainly rather spend time understanding challenges and pain points that individuals and organizations have in using FreeBSD, so we can help improve those areas. Asking you for money to invest into the continued success of the Project is not on that list, but the reality is, it’s the only way we can fund the above efforts!
So, what does your financial support mean for FreeBSD? It allows us to do the following:
Operating System Improvements: Provide a team of software engineers who can immediately respond to urgent problems and implement new features and functionality allowing for the innovation and stability you’ve come to rely on.
Security: Provide engineering resources to bolster the capacity and responsiveness of the Security team providing you with peace of mind when security issues arise.
Quality Assurance: Improve and increase test coverage, continuous integration, and automated testing with full-time software engineers to ensure you receive the highest quality, secure, and reliable operating system.
FreeBSD Advocacy: We shine a light on FreeBSD at conferences, share the benefits of FreeBSD to organizations and individuals, provide tutorials and how-to guides to encourage new users and contributors to the Project.
New User Experience: Improve the process and documentation for getting new people involved with FreeBSD, and supporting those people as they become integrated into the FreeBSD Community.
Training: Support 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: Facilitate 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.
Support FreeBSD Infrastructure: Provide hardware and software to support the Project’s infrastructure to folks around the world.
We need your donations to provide the needed support to keep FreeBSD the secure, innovative, and performant operating system you depend on! Please consider making a donation today at https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.
Do you work at an organization using FreeBSD? Please check out our Partnership Program for larger commercial donors. You can find out more at https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/