Let’s Talk About Foundation Funding

Since its inception in 2000, the FreeBSD Foundation’s mission has been to support the FreeBSD Project and community. Support comes in a myriad of ways, one of which is funded development work. We provide staff to immediately respond to urgent problems, review code,  and implement new features and functionality. Two thirds of the Foundation’s program budget goes towards software development work.  In addition to staff, we provide grants to folks outside of the Foundation to work on projects beneficial to the improvement of FreeBSD. Project grants range from $1,000 US to upwards of $50,000. They can run in multiple stages or be a one-off contract. Examples of recent contracts include wifi updates, LLDB improvements, and the Raid-Z Expansion for ZFS. While there are specific times of the year when the Foundation sends out an RFP,  proposals are welcome at any time of the year. The proposals must be for work relating to any of the major subsystems within the FreeBSD operating system. They will be evaluated based on desirability, technical merit and cost-effectiveness. The objective of the proposal is to identify what is to be done, explain why this needs to be done, and convince the Foundation that:

Other determining factors may include competition with the above mentioned development gaps that need to be filled and also what each year’s development budget may look like. Recently, the Foundation created a Technology Roadmap to help guide the funded development work over the next few years.  

The Foundation regularly asks for community feedback on which areas we might be able to support and new project proposals are always welcome. For more information on what is requested in each proposal, check out the Project Proposal Overview that includes submission guidelines and other ways to get help with your proposal. The list of current and past projects can be found here.

As always, we are only able to fund this work because of financial support from our community. Thanks to a few large donations, a few years ago, the board made the decision to slowly increase our fundraising goals and borrow money from the long term investments to cover any differences. Doing so, allows us to increase the software development work so vital to the Project. If you’re able to help us continue our support of FreeBSD, please consider making a donation today.

Please reach out with any questions and we look forward to your proposals