July 29, 2016

I’m pleased to announce the kickoff of our mid-year fundraising campaign! We are more than halfway through the year, but we’ve only raised $265,000 towards our goal of raising $1,250,000. We are reaching out to you, the FreeBSD community, to help us promote our work and to make a donation so we can continue supporting FreeBSD.

Last year, we raised $656,594 and spent $1,093,204. After reviewing where we spent our money to determine our budget for 2016, we decided to continue
investing in areas of the Project that are important for continuing its path of growth and innovation.

Our purpose is to help enable the success of FreeBSD as a platform for product development, education, research, and end-users. We’re doing this by providing assistance to the Project in critical areas and roles, outreach and advocacy, facilitating community collaboration and engagement, and helping to keep FreeBSD secure, stable, and reliable.

Your donations will directly support FreeBSD by helping us:

  • Provide outreach and advocacy for FreeBSD, which includes sponsoring many BSD and non-BSD conferences; sending FreeBSD contributors to these conferences; improving the new user experience; supporting work on creating curriculum to be taught in schools and universities; publishing the high-quality FreeBSD focused magazine, The FreeBSD Journal; and providing more informational and training material.
  • Make OS improvements, including employing our technical staff to maintain and improve critical kernel subsystems, add features and functionality, and fix problems. This also includes funding larger projects like the arm64 port and toolchain work, to make sure FreeBSD remains a viable solution for new platforms and technologies.
  • Support the security team by improving processes and policies, and by bolstering the operational capacity of the team.
  • Organize and run vendor summits and visit companies, to help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and the Project, to help get changes pushed into the FreeBSD source tree, and to create a bigger and healthier ecosystem.
  • Improve developer infrastructure to help modernize the tools and make contributions more efficient.
  • Provide full-time release engineering support, resulting in on-time and reliable releases.

This community is amazing and I want to thank you for your commitment to FreeBSD. I see the work many of you do first hand, not only from talking to you at conferences around the world, but by engaging with you over email and working with our FreeBSD community here in Boulder, CO. I’ve seen community members help others out in time of crises, and form lasting friendships. You provide your knowledge and experience to review code, mentor and help new contributors get involved, implement better solutions for current processes, debate on best practices and solutions, teach others, and keep the standards high on the work we do.

Your passion is what helps drive us to do the work that we do.

Please consider making a donation today, talking to your company to make a donation, and spreading the word about our fundraising campaign.

Thank you for your support – we can’t do this without you!

Deb Goodkin
Executive Director
FreeBSD Foundation