December 7, 2017

Dear FreeBSD Community,

I want to thank everyone who helped us kick off our year-end fundraising campaign by donating during #GivingTuesday! Your generosity raised over $8,000, from 110 donors. Let’s continue this fundraising momentum by helping us meet our 2017 fundraising goal of $1,250,000.

I’ve had the honor of running the FreeBSD Foundation for 12 years. My unique position has given me insight into not only the Foundation, but also the latest happenings in the FreeBSD Project, corporations, universities, and even other open source communities too. In fact, over the past year, I’ve traveled around the world talking to a wide variety of people about FreeBSD. From my myriad of conversations, I’ve learned what people are working on, why companies are using or switching to FreeBSD, what FreeBSD features and support is desired, and what are the long-term interests from government, universities, and companies. All of this information has not only validated the important work that we’re doing to advance FreeBSD, it has also helped us determine the areas the Foundation will focus on in 2018.

In 2017, your support helped us advance the Project through: 

  • Increasing the software development projects we are managing and funding, by internal and external software developers, including the OpenZFS RAID-Z Expansion project, Broadcom Wi-Fi infrastructural improvements (bhnd(4) driver), increasing Intel server support, and extensive progress towards a fully copyfree toolchain.
  • Growing the number of FreeBSD contributors and users from our global FreeBSD outreach and advocacy efforts, including expanding into new regions like China, India, Africa, and Singapore.
  • Keeping FreeBSD secure and reliable by having staff members fill leadership roles on the Security and Release Engineering teams.
  • Starting up nascent internship/stipend programs by participating in the University of Waterloo Co-op program, where we are hiring interns for four-month periods to work directly on FreeBSD, and the University Politehnica Bucharest, where we are providing stipends to students doing research projects with FreeBSD.
  • Providing face-to-face opportunities such as developer and vendor summits and company visits to help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and FreeBSD developers,as well as helping to get changes pushed into the FreeBSD source tree, and creating a bigger and healthier ecosystem.
  •  Utilizing a full-time staff member to ensure stability, reliability and high performance via ongoing maintenance and bug fixes.

We have big plans for 2018 including, increasing our software development work, improving FreeBSD testing and infrastructure, bringing FreeBSD representation into more universities, providing additional educational and training material, recruiting more contributors and users, and promoting FreeBSD at even more conferences around the world.

I’m excited about the work we’ve accomplished this past year, but more importantly about what we can do to grow the community and make FreeBSD even better. We need your support to continue and increase the work we are doing.

Please help us spread the word and consider making a donation today!

Sincerely,
Deb Goodkin
Executive Director, FreeBSD Foundation

P.S. If your company uses FreeBSD, please consider sharing information on our Partnership Program. Together we can accomplish even more for FreeBSD.