Welcome to our November newsletter, where you can read about some of the work the Foundation has accomplished to support the FreeBSD Project and community. Check out our plans to help commercial FreeBSD users comply with US Government secure software development reporting requirements and how Metify is amplifying their use of FreeBSD. Take a look at the trip reports both from the staff and some of our travel grant recipients. Advocating at open source events and helping other community members do the same is a key part of our mission. Additionally, you can get the highlights of our work in Q3 to better support you, the FreeBSD community.
In our more recent research efforts and discussions with over 20 current and potential commercial FreeBSD users, we are finding there is an increased interest in security, performance, and reliability, along with a business-friendly license. We have also identified numerous opportunities for FreeBSD and are accelerating our growth plans to ensure FreeBSD is the operating system of choice for these new opportunities. To achieve this goal, we are ramping up our efforts to provide resources to implement crucial features in FreeBSD, while increasing our advocacy for FreeBSD to broaden the awareness about its capabilities.
In order to increase this support, we need your donations and sponsorships. Stay tuned for our year-end fundraising appeal that will highlight how we spent your funding in 2023, and what our plans are for 2024.
New SSDF Program for Commercial Foundation Partners
At the recent FreeBSD Vendor Summit in San Jose, CA, The FreeBSD Foundation announced a new service to aid commercial users of FreeBSD with the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF).
Once SSDF is in effect, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) require that all organizations licensing software to the US government self-attest that their own software and any open source components they use conform with the SSDF.
Given the broad use of FreeBSD to power innumerable solutions used by the US Government, this new Foundation service is designed to make it easy for vendors and cloud providers to attest to the secure development practices of the FreeBSD software they use.
We were really gratified to get supporting quotes for this announcement from Metify, NetApp, and NIST.
To ensure access to commercial users of all sizes, the FreeBSD SSDF Attestation report is available to all FreeBSD Foundation partners regardless of donation level: Silver, Gold, or Platinum. To learn more, please contact partnerships@freebsdfoundation.org
Why FreeBSD: Metify Showcases How Moving to FreeBSD Enhanced Two New Products
The FreeBSD Vendor Summit always provides an excellent opportunity to learn more about how and why companies are using FreeBSD. Metify, the company behind the award-winning Mojo Platform, showcased two new groundbreaking products Friday, at this year’s Summit.
Metify Mojo is a virtual appliance that discovers, provisions, and maintains servers from anywhere. Ian Evans, Metify’s CTO, will discuss FreeBSD’s critical role in creating Mojo.
What the Dev Podcast: The Evolution of the FreeBSD Project
Foundation Executive Director Deb Goodkin sat down with SD Times Editor-in-Chief David Rubinstein on the What the Dev Podcast to talk about the 30th Anniversary of FreeBSD and how it’s grown and changed over the years.
Tomorrow, November 28, is #GivingTuesday. Now in its 11th year, #GivingTuesday is a global day of giving that brings together diverse communities to foster generosity.
The Foundation is calling on the community to channel your passion for FreeBSD into helping us increase our efforts for the Project in 2024. During this #GivingTuesday, we also want to remind you that when you support the FreeBSD Foundation, you’re not only giving back to what is important to you, you are also investing in the future of FreeBSD. Your funds directly impact the success of the operating system. Your investment ensures that FreeBSD stays the relevant, secure, and sustainable operating system you’ve come to rely on.
Spread the word! Share reminders to donate on your social media networks. Share your favorite FreeBSD stories, et colleagues and friends know that you support FreeBSD, and why they should too. Sample tweets/toots, posts, and graphics can be found here.
Your actions directly affect the growth of the FreeBSD Project. Help us make an even bigger impact in 2024. If you’re able, please consider supporting the Project and sharing the Foundation’s 2023 #GivingTuesdayFreeBSD Campaign.
Q3 Conference Reports
Attending conferences is a valuable way for the Foundation to advocate for FreeBSD across the world. It gives us a chance to interact with experienced FreeBSD users who are excited to share stories about their history with FreeBSD and with developers and users who are new to FreeBSD. Whether it be at general open source, BSD, or commercial conferences, having these conversations is imperative for learning more about how folks are and want to be using FreeBSD.
We also recognize the importance of bringing members of the FreeBSD community face-to-face to both further development of the Project and spread the word about FreeBSD. To that end, the FreeBSD Foundation also provides Travel Grants for those who need assistance to attend conferences related to FreeBSD development and advocacy. FreeBSD developers and other community members (committers, kernel hackers, ports maintainers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc.) are eligible to apply. Being able to work together in person to solve problems, ask questions, and collaborate on projects has proven to be a successful formula for making swift progress within the FreeBSD ecosystem.
Last quarter we helped FreeBSD celebrate its 30th anniversary! This excitement has propelled us to accelerate our efforts to move FreeBSD forward in growth and innovation, which has focused us on identifying key areas we can invest our resources. At our board meeting in September, we refined our goals to focus on increasing FreeBSD adoption and visibility, diversifying our funding stream, and investing in the community health and long-term stability of Project. We are in the process of identifying the key audiences and markets we are targeting, while putting measurable outcomes to these goals.
In this status report, you’ll read more about our work to help further FreeBSD’s growth and innovation. We’ll highlight all the technical work we are doing to improve FreeBSD, both by our internal staff of software developers, as well as external project funding efforts. You’ll read about our advocacy work to promote FreeBSD to audiences outside of our community. Finally, you’ll see the great efforts made to connect with current and potential commercial users.
FreeBSD keeps Unix-like OS alive, boosts security and performance with v14
Ed Maste, senior director of technology for the FreeBSD Foundation sat down with SDxCentral to talk about FreeBSD 14, the first major version number update for the open-source operating system since 2021.
The September/October 2023 issue of the FreeBSD Journal is here! This issue is all about Ports and Packages. Articles are now available in both HTML and PDF. Best of all? It’s Free!
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.
