July 6, 2023

Written as part of the FreeBSD Project’s 2nd Quarter 2023 Status Report, check out the highlights of what we did to help FreeBSD last quarter:

Fundraising

During this quarter, we made significant progress in engaging with commercial FreeBSD users. To enhance our partnerships with existing and potential commercial users, we hired Greg Wallace as the Director of Partnerships and Research. His primary objective is to expand our collaborations with commercial users. Since assuming this position, Greg has hit the ground running, meeting with numerous companies in just one quarter. These interactions have provided valuable insights into how FreeBSD is being utilized, the challenges faced by users, and areas where the Project can improve. By understanding these aspects, we can make informed decisions on where to allocate our funding and recognize FreeBSD’s unique strengths. Additionally, the role involves conducting research to identify target markets, explore new opportunities for FreeBSD, and ensure our voice is heard in relevant discussions. For more details on Greg’s objectives and accomplishments, you can refer to his status update below.

The Foundation extends its heartfelt gratitude to everyone who made financial contributions to support our work. Besides many individual contributions, we were pleased to receive larger donations from NetApp and Blackberry. In addition, we received FreeBSD Developer Summit sponsorships from Tarsnap, iXsystems, and LPI. These sponsorships greatly assist in offsetting our expenses and enable us to offer affordable registration fees to attendees.

This year our budget is around $2,230,000, which includes increased spending toward FreeBSD advocacy and software development. More than half of our budget is allocated toward work directly related to improving FreeBSD and keeping it secure.

By having a dedicated individual focused on partnerships, we can effectively emphasize the significance of investing in our efforts and underscore the long-term viability of the Project to companies.

Your support plays a crucial role in our mission, and we deeply appreciate your commitment to the FreeBSD community. Please consider making a donation toward our 2023 fundraising campaign! https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

For more prominent commercial donors we have the FreeBSD Foundation Partnership Program, which was established in 2017.

Partnership Program

Hello FreeBSD community. My name is Greg Wallace. I joined the Foundation as Director of Partnerships and Research in early April. This blog introduced me and the role. For Partnerships, I am focused on building connections with companies that use FreeBSD. I have met with several companies to learn about how they use FreeBSD. Some of these meetings have generated discussions about potential partnership. I continue to find out about interesting companies using FreeBSD and I am reaching out to them.

My objective is to get in touch with every company building with and using FreeBSD to listen to their stories. If this is you and we have not yet connected, please schedule a call on my calendar.

Some other partnership-related activities this quarter:

  • I created these slides about how partnering with the Foundation helps advance FreeBSD. If you have ideas for how I can improve these slides, or would like me to present them to your organization, please send me an email, or schedule a call. And please feel free to share the presentation liberally, in whole or in part.
  • I worked with my Foundation colleagues to create a number of industry-specific use case slides for a presentation to an industry analyst.
  • I am also pursuing grant opportunities with bodies including:
    • NSF Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC)
    • Sovereign Tech Fund
    • NGI.

In terms of research, my broad aim is to make sure that all of the expertise in this community is reflected in the global conversations on computing performance, security, and energy efficiency. As a community, we have much to bring to this work.

So far, I have been tracking and plugging into the following threads:

If you have research ideas or are interested in working together in this area, please send me an email, or schedule a call.

OS Improvements

During the second quarter of 2023, 339 src, 155 ports, and 20 doc tree commits identified The FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor. Some of this and other Foundation-sponsored work is described in separate report entries:

Here is a sampling of other Foundation-sponsored work:

  • Bug fixes for fsck_ffs(8)
  • Bug fixes for killpg(2)
  • Improvements to hwpmc
  • Improvements to vmm
  • Port fixes and workarounds for LLVM 16 and OpenSSL 3.0
  • Port kinst to RISC-V and related DTrace work
  • Update of libfido2 to version 1.9.0
  • Various LinuxKPI 802.11 improvements
  • Various RISC-V improvements
  • Vendor import and update of tcpdump from version 4.9.3 to version 4.99.4.

The status of current and past Foundation-contracted work can be viewed on the Foundation Projects page.

Members of the Foundation’s technology team presented at the Developer Summit held in Ottawa, Canada from May 17-18. This included hosting the GSoC, FreeBSD Foundation Technical Review, and Workflow working group sessions. Pierre Pronchery spoke about driver harmony between the BSDs and En-Wei Wu discussed wtap work completed under contract with the Foundation.

Continuous Integration and Quality Assurance

The Foundation provides a full-time staff member and funds projects to improve continuous integration, automated testing, and overall quality assurance efforts for the FreeBSD project. You can read more about CI work in a dedicated report entry.

Advocacy

Much of our effort is dedicated to the FreeBSD Project advocacy. This may involve highlighting interesting FreeBSD work, producing literature and video tutorials, attending events, or giving presentations. The goal of the literature we produce is to teach people FreeBSD basics and help make their path to adoption or contribution easier. Other than attending and presenting at events, we encourage and help community members run their own FreeBSD events, give presentations, or staff FreeBSD tables.

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing knowledge, working together on projects, and facilitating collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the Project. We are grateful to be back to attending events mostly in person. In addition to attending and planning events, we are continually working on new training initiatives and updating our selection of how-to guides to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD.

Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did:

We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously, the FreeBSD Journal is now a free publication. Find out more and access the latest issues at https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/journal/.

You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at https://www.FreeBSDfoundation.org/news-and-events/.

Legal/FreeBSD IP

The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the core team to investigate questions that arise.

Go to https://www.freebsdfoundation.org to find more about how we support FreeBSD and how we can help you!