Contributions, Fundraising, and More
The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)3, United States based, non-profit organization that is committed to supporting and building the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. The Foundation is funded entirely by donations.
We fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, Developer Summits and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. We provide and help maintain computers and equipment that support FreeBSD development and improvements. We also represent the Project in executing contracts, license agreements, copyrights, trademarks, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity.
See below for more about why we use the services we do, and how we use your generous donations to support the Project.
Where does your contribution go?
Donations that The FreeBSD Foundation receives are used for funding various activities to support the FreeBSD Project such as:
- Accelerate OS improvements, including employing our technical staff to maintain and improve critical kernel subsystems, add features and functionality, and fix problems. This also includes funding separate project grants like the LLDB Debugger Improvements, Targeted Linuxulator Compatibility Improvements, and if_bridge Performance Improvement, to make sure FreeBSD remains a viable solution for research, education, computing, products and more.
- Provide outreach and advocacy for FreeBSD, which includes sponsoring many BSD and non-BSD conferences; sending FreeBSD contributors to these conferences; improving the new user experience; supporting work on creating curriculum to be taught in schools and universities; publishing the high-quality FreeBSD focused magazine, The FreeBSD Journal; and providing more informational and training material.
- Build and improve FreeBSD infrastructure to provide the latest technologies for testing and developing on the FreeBSD platform.
- Provide face-to-face opportunities like developer and vendor summits and company visits to help facilitate collaboration between commercial users and the Project, to help get changes pushed into the FreeBSD source tree, and to create a bigger and healthier ecosystem.
Fundraising Campaign
The Foundation’s fund-raising efforts are essential to keeping FreeBSD free. As the Project grows, so do the costs.
By donating to the foundation, you are helping us fund and manage projects, sponsor FreeBSD events, and provide travel grants to FreeBSD developers. You are also helping us represent the Project in executing contracts, license agreements, copyrights, trademarks, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity.
Why We Use the Different Online Services
We provide three choices for donating online. Here is an explanation of the different services and why we offer them.
The Click & Pledge service gives us added features that the other online services do not support. More importantly, it automatically integrates with our donor database, allowing us to spend more time helping the FreeBSD Project! You can make monthly, quarterly, or yearly donations automatically with this service. Click & Pledge allows you to add 2.75% to your donation to cover our cost of using this service. We have also added fields to allow you to tell us what projects you’d like us to fund as well as give us any feedback you’d like.
PayPal is probably the most popular for our donors. The features are limited for us. But, they only charge us for each transaction, so there is no cost to keeping this option available.
By popular request, we’ve also added the Bitcoin option. As mentioned above, it may take up to 5 days for Bitcoin donations to appear on the donor page.
If you do not want to make your donation online, you can still mail us a check or wire-transfer funds to our bank.