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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I was rather hoping Amazon would spend and contribute more. But it seems they basically only want to pay for the minimum FreeBSD support.

Amazon isn't even on FreeBSD sponsors [1]. And Google only sponsored $9K last year. Apple isn't there. Edit: And Credit to Microsoft being at least on the list! And forgot to mention Meta / Facebook missing from it as well.

I would have expect them to sponsor FreeBSD and OpenBSD annually by default given they use and continue to benefits the work out of both.

[1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...

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I'd love to see Amazon contribute more, of course; but the fact they don't show up as donors to the FreeBSD Foundation doesn't mean they're not supporting FreeBSD. The money they paid me didn't flow through the Foundation, for example; I'd guess that Foundation-funded development is maybe 10% of all corporate-funded FreeBSD development. (It's an important 10%, especially because it can be focused on "what does FreeBSD need" rather than "what does company X need" -- but it's still a small minority.)

This comment does not present the full picture.

First, it presents the snapshot of donations within a given year to the Foundation. The history of donations is not represented by definition.

Second, it does not present contributed development. Those are typically summarily available on the release notes of each release [1].

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/

Has Amazon donated more to FreeBSD than Notch the Minecraft guy?

I wonder for what reason Microsoft funds them. Their Hyper-V extensions are not as complete as Linux. There's no Microsoft-supported port of .NET. I can't think of any services that run on *BSD from Microsoft, cloud or otherwise.

I don't know, but Microsoft has some developers working on Hyper-V for FreeBSD. They've even come to FreeBSD developer summits.

There are customers that run FreeBSD on Azure and Microsoft officially supports it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/lin...

My thought process was that it is such a small amount of money for Advertisement or marketing to have your logo on some prominent Open source project to at least try and redeem / make themselves look good.

I wonder if this is a very, very, very long-term holdover from the Hotmail team having some expertise, and Microsoft wanting to be able to offer something a bit nix-y that wasn't Linux

I don't know if this explains all the funding. But there definitely was a year where the employees at Microsoft voted to give funding to FreeBSD. I don'w know if it's a thing, but apparently Microsoft had this thing where every year, or quarter, employees could sort of nominate and vote on open source projects that Microsoft would donate to[1]. And FreeBSD one year won some funding out of that.

[1] https://resources.github.com/open-source/microsoft-foss-fund...

But yea, I'm not sure if they have a reoccurring donation to FreeBSD or not. Looking at the FreeBSD Foundation, they are listed as sponsors for 2025/2024/2023. So my guess is that they do have some form of reoccurring donation.

Amazon does the least for FOSS out of the FAANGs.

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