As another year comes to an end, I wanted to share some of the work we accomplished this year that helped increase the use and growth of FreeBSD. December 31 also brings an end to our 2020 fundraising efforts. We recognize it’s been a challenging year for all of us, and that won’t end with the new year. However, the new year does bring hope and new beginnings. With that, we will be growing our team to focus on significant software development and educational efforts. I will talk more about that in my fundraising article below. Before we close out the year, I do want to ask you once more to consider making a donation to help us fund these efforts. We’re grateful to those who have already donated. Now, please take a moment to read about our software development work, how we advocated and educated people on FreeBSD, and the upcoming virtual events in the newsletter below. On behalf of the Foundation, I wish you a happy and healthy 2021, and hope to see you in person later next year!
Enjoy!
—Deb
This Month’s Highlights
Your Impact on FreeBSD in 2020
The Foundation has faced some challenging years during my tenure here, but I’d say 2020 is hands down the winner. Running a non-profit is challenging in itself. However, I can easily say, running a donation-driven, non-profit whose sole purpose is to support a free and open source computer operating system, during a pandemic, is extremely difficult! That being said, I can’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished this past year to help make FreeBSD the secure, reliable, and high performance operating system you rely on.
It’s that time again. We’re looking back at how we advocated for FreeBSD over the past year. We began the year like any other with many in-person events on the horizon, celebrations planned for our upcoming 20th anniversary and energy that comes with introducing new people and companies to FreeBSD. Then March rolled around, and well, you know rest. Thankfully, the Foundation team has been able to work together on new and expanded ways to spread the word about FreeBSD. Take a look at what we’ve been doing.
FreeBSD Essential to Bringing CHERI and ARM’s Morello Processor to Life
Exciting news coming out of ARM, the University of Cambridge, and SRI today. Cambridge and SRI released their CHERI software stack, based on FreeBSD, for ARM’s forthcoming experimental Morello board. Dr. Robert N.M.Watson, Reader in Systems, Security, and Architecture at the University of Cambridge shared the news in his blog post this morning:
Wow, what a year 2020’s been. Despite the challenges of the global pandemic, the Foundation’s software development efforts proceeded apace, and we’ve made significant contributions across a number of functional areas in FreeBSD.
Since the beginning of 2020 in the FreeBSD src repository we’ve had 838 commits tagged as being sponsored by the FreeBSD Foundation, across 12 different authors. This is a little over 30% of the commits that identify a sponsor. This includes work by project grant recipients, by the Foundation’s own staff, as well commits made on behalf of the 6 University of Waterloo co-operative education students who worked for the Foundation over two terms during the year. In addition, and in contrast with previous years many more contributions are now being made to third-party projects under Foundation sponsorship. This includes LLVM’s LLDB debugger, OpenBroadcaster-Studio software, Firefox, and others.
Here I’ll recap the Foundation-sponsored work started and/or completed over the past year.
It’s been an epic year in many ways. As I reflect on this past year, I’m so grateful for all the individuals and organizations that stepped up to help fund our efforts. First, I want to thank the Koum Family Foundation for recently awarding us a grant to help fund our software development efforts next year. I also want to send a heartfelt thank you to Arm, NetApp, Netflix, Juniper Networks, Beckhoff, VMware, Stormshield, Tarsnap, Google, and employees of Ngnix who all gave us generous donations this year. Finally, I want to say thank you to all the individuals who gave us financial support. These donations are especially meaningful to us! Why? As individuals ourselves, we know what it means to give some of our hard earned money to charities, especially when there are so many in need this year. Thank you for including us in your charitable giving. We really couldn’t do what we did without you!
As of this writing, we have received $1,194,746 to fund our 2021 efforts. For those of you who haven’t made a contribution this year, we appreciate any amount you can contribute to help us step up our support next year!
The free October/November 2020 issue of the FreeBSD Journal is now available. The issue focuses on Contributing and Onboarding to FreeBSD. Don’t miss articles on Code Review, Writing Good Commit Messages, Becoming a Doc Committer, and more. Read the Journal
Why Choose FreeBSD
NetApp proudly uses FreeBSD as a core component of our ONTAP storage operating system. With FreeBSD, we are able to deliver high performance products with the reliability, security and supportability that our customers expect. As a part of the FreeBSD community, NetApp is able to collaborate with industry leading technology companies. The FreeBSD Foundation has done a great job of driving FreeBSD innovation and facilitating cross corporation and industry collaboration. Your continued success contributes to the successes of all users of FreeBSD. Thank you.
