December 30, 2024
This is my favorite week of the year, this short period of time between Christmas and New Years! It’s almost a magical time, where days are blurred, whether you are working or not. In my case, I’m mixing some days off with some quiet work days, reflecting on what we’ve accomplished this past year.
We move so fast, tackling countless challenges to support FreeBSD, that we sometimes overlook how much we’ve achieved, focusing only on the next problem to solve. But as I sit at my desk, overlooking the beautiful Boulder, Colorado Flatirons, I am filled with both gratitude for all we’ve accomplished and excitement for what lies ahead in 2025. Everything we have accomplished is because of your support and belief in FreeBSD and the Foundation. Every software improvement we make, technical content we write, summit and conference we sponsor, travel grant we provide, legal engagement, user relationship we form, and collaboration we help facilitate, is all because of your support and passion for FreeBSD, working together as a community.
To our incredible FreeBSD community: thank you. Whether you’ve contributed financially, fixed a bug, improved documentation, or created a video, you’ve made a positive difference.
I know sometimes it feels like what you are doing is a thankless job, but we see you. We see the bug reports, blog posts, YouTube videos, thoughtful and sometimes funny donation comments, and the insightful and kind responses on mailing lists, forums, and social media. We also see strong friendships that grow over the years at events, and new contributors being welcomed to the community.
There is a famous phrase attributed to Aristotle that says, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” Our vibrant and diverse project exemplifies this. We work together to create the amazing community and operating system that is FreeBSD.
Individual donors play a significant role in maintaining the Foundation’s public charity status. We are a US-based 501c3 public charity and every contribution, no matter the size, shows the US government that we are here for the public good. It also shows that FreeBSD matters. You can see many of the 2024 individual contributors here.
I also want to thank our corporate donors, who we also refer to as partners. These are corporations that make a contribution of $10,000 or more to support our efforts. We refer to them as partners, because we work together to support the long-term sustainability of FreeBSD. Their funding allows us to hire developers, writers, project managers, and administrators to keep FreeBSD secure and relevant for the long term. As we started tracking the growth in partnerships over the years, 2024 has stood out as a banner year: we grew from an average of 10 partnerships annually (2019–2023) to 15 in 2024, with more companies expressing interest for 2025.
Your financial contributions help us fund many areas to support the long-term sustainability of FreeBSD. Below are just a few of the significant areas we worked on last year, with efforts continuing into 2025:
- Laptop Support and Usability Improvements: You’ve been asking for improvements with FreeBSD on the laptop, so we kicked off a multi-year project that will include adding/improving support for enhanced WiFi, power management, graphics, hardware, and audio. This is a $1,000,000+ project, with funding from Quantum Research Labs and the Foundation.
- Expanded Advocacy Efforts: You are doing amazing work improving FreeBSD, and we are here to shine a light on it! We increased our advocacy efforts to promote this work and the benefits and strengths of FreeBSD. We’ve increased the visibility of FreeBSD with more blog posts, articles, press, interviews, use cases, user stories, and social media posts.
- Security and Infrastructure Support: FreeBSD is the foundation of the global digital infrastructure and keeping it secure is essential. To do so, we have a staff of four developers working on security, one working on infrastructure and testing, and we have invested over $100,000 to purchase new hardware and pay system administrators to update the hardware at the new NYI Chicago facility.
- Vital Collaborations: A lot of the work we do is behind the scenes. We are participating in and leading working groups within and outside the Project; we applied for and won two significant grants (Alpha-Omega Fund and Silicon Valley Community Fund). We applied these grants and additional investments to improve FreeBSD security, audit critical FreeBSD components, reduce technical debt, modernize FreeBSD infrastructure, and collaborate on a guide to provide best practices for securing FreeBSD (CIS Benchmark). Finally, we lead programs such as GSoC, internships, and workshops to recruit new software developers to FreeBSD.
Of course, this is just a snippet of all the efforts we made to support FreeBSD in 2024. Be sure to check out our blogs that go into more detail on the work and projects we are funding, including what we are doing and why.
2025 is the year of opportunities for FreeBSD. Whether in AI, edge computing, storage, enterprise, networking, quantum computing, research, or education, we will be working with you to ensure FreeBSD is the best option when critical decisions are being made. The future is bright for FreeBSD, but we need your financial support to continue and increase our efforts.
Every donation makes an impact and together we can ensure FreeBSD will be the operating system of choice for the long-term. If you haven’t contributed yet this year, please consider making an investment today to help us continue our important work.
Thank you for being a part of the wonderful FreeBSD Community and Happy New Year from the FreeBSD Foundation!
— Contributed by Deb Goodkin