November 17, 2014
The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce it has received a $1,000,000 donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp. This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago, and serves as another example of someone using FreeBSD to great success and then giving back to the community. Find out more about Jan’s reasons for donating below. We’re now in the process of working together as a team to decide how best to use this gift to serve the FreeBSD community. That plan will combine financial investment, to ensure the effects of this donation are felt for many years to come, and an acceleration of the Foundation’s growth into new capabilities and services. FreeBSD has a tremendous impact on our world. Our mission is to increase that impact through educational outreach, advocacy, community support, and technical investments. More information on how we serve each of these areas can be found on our website. With this donation, and the generosity of all those who have donated this year, we have shattered our 2014, million dollar fundraising goal! But this does not mean we can stop our fundraising efforts. Only by increasing the size and diversity of our donor pool can we ensure a stable and consistent funding stream to support the FreeBSD project.
Please help us continue to grow FreeBSD’s reach and impact on our world. Donate today!
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Update: The following contains the full text from Jan’s Facebook post on 11/17/2014:
Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life.
I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do.
I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative.
–Jan Koum