Dear FreeBSD Community Member,
Welcome back to the Foundation’s newsletter, shining a light on the work we are doing to help further the advancement of FreeBSD and supporting the community! We’ve been here in the trenches all along, providing updates through blog posts, social media, and the FreeBSD Quarterly Status Reports. But, as you may have noticed, it’s been awhile since we sent out a newsletter.
In this issue, you’ll read about our efforts to grow our team, and what was accomplished by these efforts! This involved hiring 3 full-time software developers and a project manager to help improve the desktop experience, review code changes, fix bugs, and implement technologies defined in our roadmap that you’ll find published in this newsletter. We also increased our FreeBSD advocacy work by bringing on a marketing coordinator and technical writer. In the Advocacy article below, you’ll read about how we increased community engagement, virtual summits, and blog posts highlighting work to improve FreeBSD.
I’m extremely proud of our team, and their commitment to FreeBSD and the community. But, we can’t do the work we are doing without funding. We are 100% funded by donations, and we need your help. You can read more about our fundraising efforts, in the Fundraising Update below. Thank you for your support, and please consider making a donation today!
Enjoy!
—Deb
Foundation Highlights
Technology Roadmap
Much like any other organization navigating the future during very uncertain times, the FreeBSD Foundation team spent the last year increasingly focused on how best to support its mission and goal – how best to support the FreeBSD Project. We held strategy sessions with the Foundation Board and FreeBSD Core team, reviewed the results of the FreeBSD core team’s user and developer surveys, and held conversations with developers, users and other members of the FreeBSD community to determine where to focus our efforts. The overall goal is to expand and enhance the efforts of the technology team.
With FreeBSD’s ongoing migration to git from subversion, the system for updating FreeBSD from source has adapted. This guide will cover getting sources from git, updating them, and how to bisect those sources. It is meant as an introduction to the new mechanics for general users.
Register today for the November 2021 FreeBSD Vendor Summit
Join members of the FreeBSD vendor and developer communities for the online November 2021 FreeBSD Vendor Summit. The event will consist of virtual, half day sessions, taking place November 18-19, 2021. It’s free to attend but we ask that you register via eventbrite to gain access to the meeting room. In addition to vendor talks, we will also have a separate hallway track. The event will also be live streamed and recorded. Check out the current schedule for more information.
Fall 2021 Advocacy Update
Advocacy remains an important part of the Foundation mission. Our advocacy efforts include highlighting important and interesting FreeBSD work, producing informative literature, promoting FreeBSD at events, and giving talks on FreeBSD. We are continually working on new training initiatives and updating our selection of how-to guides to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD. Be sure to check out our blog posts to get software development project updates, event reports, and more. Read More
Fundraising Update
Summer is typically a slow month for bringing in funding and last quarter was no exception. It did, however, allow us some time to reflect on the work we are doing to improve FreeBSD and support the community, and prepare for our Fall Fundraising Campaign. We kicked off that campaign at the end of September. So far, the responses I’m hearing are extremely positive, and I’m hopeful that we will reach our fundraising goal this year.
As of this writing, we’ve raised $180,000 towards our $1,250,000 goal for 2021. Why do we need so much money? Well, last year we decided to make more significant software contributions to FreeBSD. In order to do that, we had to grow our team. We developed a technology roadmap from input we were receiving from individual and commercial users as well as market trends. Based on the roadmap, we identified positions we needed to fill.
Meet the 2021 FreeBSD Google Summer of Code Students
The FreeBSD Project is proud to have participated in the Google Summer of Code program since its inception in 2005. Now that the 2021 session has been completed, the Foundation asked a few of our GSoC students to share more about themselves and their experience working with the Project.
I recently attended my first in-person conference since March 2020! It was quite the experience with strict Covid protocols to follow, including proof of vaccination and daily health checks. Those efforts helped make it feel a little more comfortable being around people again. One reason I chose this conference was because they’ve always provided a large venue. Plus, they had accepted my FreeBSD talk, and I was keen on giving it in person.
The July/August 2021 issue of the FreeBSD Journal is now available! This issue focuses on FreeBSD as a desktop operating system. Don’t miss articles on the FreeBSD Desktop, The Panfrost Driver, Updating FreeBSD from Git, and more. Read the Journal
Why Choose FreeBSD
FreeBSD’s incredible security posture and updates, network performance, along with excellent IO and memory management make running this large, traffic heavy and mission critical application a much easier process. The operating system does a lot of the heavy lifting meaning my engineers can focus on product evolution rather than server maintenance.
– Jonathan Eastgate, Chief Technology Officer, simPRO
