June 2023 Fundraising Update

It’s June and for many of us in North America, we’re starting to see a glimmer of summer peaking around the corner. I cherish all the seasons, even the cold of winter, but summer is by far my favorite season of the year. Kids are out of school, giving them a chance to explore and just be kids. We grown ups get to spend more time outside doing fun activities like going on leisurely long runs and nurturing our gardens.

It’s also a time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished so far this year. We’re not quite half way through the year yet, but next week we will be celebrating a major milestone in the FreeBSD world!

It’s FreeBSD’s 30th Anniversary and we are proud to not only celebrate with the community, but also to be supporting this incredible project for over 23 years now! Over the years we’ve increased our support of the Project in many areas. We’ve also increased our fundraising efforts to fund that work. Where does that funding go? Take a look:

Operating System Improvements – Our staff of 5 full-time software developers, 4 long-term contractors, and 6 interns continuously work on innovations, improvements, testing, and fixing issues. With this large team of software developers we are able to make well-thought out improvements to FreeBSD, while being able to quickly step in to fix issues.

Security Responsiveness – We have staff members assigned to keeping an eye on any potential security issue that may arise, and quickly getting security advisories out to the user community.

Testing and Continuous Integration Improvements – We have resources working full-time following best practices to ensure the stability and reliability of FreeBSD.

Recruiting Young Developers to the Project – We currently have 6 interns on staff that are helping to make significant improvements to FreeBSD in areas such as containers, wifi, OpenStack, Capsicum, and DTrace.

Advocating for FreeBSD – Our team continues to promote FreeBSD at technical conferences around the world, provide how-to guides to make it easier to get folks started with FreeBSD, and help celebrate FreeBSD’s 30th Anniversary with a whole week of information and ideas on ways to celebrate this significant milestone.

Organizing and Running FreeBSD Developer/Vendor Summits – We recognize the value of providing a venue for collaboration and sharing of ideas between developers, contributors, and users of FreeBSD.

We can’t provide this support without your donations! To improve our funding stream, we hired Greg Wallace as our new Director of Partnerships and Research. Greg brings a strong background in business and technical marketing and a long history in the open source world. His key focus will be on strengthening existing, and building new partnerships, with companies that care about security, stability, and innovation for their products and needs. In his research capacity, Greg will be identifying new opportunities for FreeBSD, whether it’s companies that need a business friendly open source licensed operating system, or companies where security is their top priority, he’s helping to showcase why FreeBSD is the right solution.

Read about our new Director of Partnerships and Research.

Learn more about our Partnership Program.

Please consider making a donation today!