I was surprised Colin has to ask random strangers on the internet to sponsor his work on FreeBSD for EC2 instances. You'd think Amazon would be interested in this, they seem to have more than enough cash if they're making their own CPUs.
Same would likely be true if they had evidence lots of customers used FreeBSD on their platform anyway. They wouldn't release architecture that couldn't run Linux, for example.
> they seem to have more than enough cash if they're making their own CPUs.
That's actually a cost saving exercise for AWS. The OpEx cost of a rack is a very large part of the cost of running cloud services. CapEx, staffing etc. makes up only a tiny fraction of it. The Graviton Arm chips are cheaper to run by quite a bit than Intel or AMD chips of comparable performance. Any expense spent in designing and producing their own chips is easily and quickly paid for by the OpEx savings.
I continue to hope that some day they'll invent some sort of "part-time contractor" position to provide me with ongoing funding for FreeBSD/EC2 work, but I certainly understand the argument that they should pay for EC2 specific work (like ENA) but not for FreeBSD development.
I might be wrong though (and a counter point is I assume Colin hosts Tarsnap/FreeBSD at AWS).