User Thank You

Brandon Gooch, a system administrator at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, recently wrote the Foundation to express his gratitude towards FreeBSD developers in general and the recent wireless work in particular. The Foundation is always looking to collect appreciations and success stories, as well as pain points, that if addressed, could assist in FreeBSD adoption. When was the last time you pinged a developer on IRC or sent them a quick email to let them know how much you appreciate their work? It only takes a minute to let someone know that their hard work is being put to good use by others.

With Brandon’s permission, his email text is re-posted here:

I’d like to thank Rui Paulo and Bernhard Schmidt, and Sam Leffler SO much for working so hard on the 802.11 stack and driver support. In my observations, wireless networking support (or lack of) from the OS seems to be one of the biggest deal-breakers when people I know try FreeBSD (from Linux or even Windows).

Driver support in general is a Good Thing and when one of my co-workers installs FreeBSD and his or her wireless card “just works” — it looks really good for the project.

I’m sure there are still many issues left to resolve and still more features to implement. I believe that even better support is on the way. I also know that an OS can’t be “all things to all people”, but the solid code and great support from the developers and community make it a real pleasure to take part in the FreeBSD ecosystem.

I’m also very proud of the efforts of the FreeBSD Xorg devs (Robert Noland in particular) and the VirtualBox devs (Bernhard Froehlich and Co.). They have helped me implement several FreeBSD-based solutions at work due the the excellent features and performance of both Xorg and VirtualBox.

I look forward to opportunities to evangelize the FreeBSD project both in my professional and personal life. Thank you for making that task much easier.