November 25, 2010

Justin Gibbs, President of the FreeBSD Foundation, writes about the end-of-year fundraising campaign:

As the year is winding down I’m writing this note to remind you of the motivation behind the FreeBSD Foundation’s work, its benefits to you, and to ask for your financial assistance in making our work possible.

Ten years ago, I created the FreeBSD Foundation to repay a debt I owe to the FreeBSD project. While working on FreeBSD I learned the fundamentals of sound software design, how to successfully manage a large code base, and experienced the challenges of release engineering. Beyond the benefits of this education, FreeBSD has provided a robust platform that has allowed me to build several successful commercial products while being well paid to work on an operating system I love.
Today, through my volunteer work with the FreeBSD Foundation, I’m still paying down this debt.

This year, despite the slow pace of the economic recovery, the FreeBSD Foundation has an impressive list of accomplishments:

  • Provided $100,000 in grants for projects that improve FreeBSD in the areas of:
    – DTrace support
    – High availability storage
    – Enhanced SNMP reporting
    – Virtualization and resource partitioning
    – Embedded device support
    – Networking stack improvements
  • Allocated $50,000 for equipment to enhance FreeBSD project infrastructure.
  • Sponsored 8 FreeBSD related conferences.
  • Funded 16 travel grants giving increased community and developer access to conferences.
  • Provided legal support to the FreeBSD project.

How do our activities benefit you? If you are a company using FreeBSD, our work to strengthen the FreeBSD community ensures the continued viability of FreeBSD and a large pool of developers to tap into. If you are an end user, our work brings you new features and access to conferences. And if you are a FreeBSD developer, the FreeBSD Foundation is providing the resources needed to make your next innovation possible.

The FreeBSD project thrives through the hard work of our community, but it also requires financial backing. This year we set a fund-raising goal of $350,000. We are pleased to report that we are half way there, but we need your help to reach our goal. Every donation, no matter its size, helps to make our work possible. As a non-profit with very low overhead, your donation is the best way to invest in FreeBSD. Please make that investment today.

You can make a donation (including recurring subscriptions) here.