Thank HN: You helped the FreeBSD Foundation raise over $43K in three days | Hacker News Reader

Thank HN: You helped the FreeBSD Foundation raise over $43K in three days

freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com

169 pointsprofquail24 comments

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$200k more to go -- if you're building a startup using FreeBSD, please consider donating. Tarsnap donates every year.

I'd be really disappointed if Tarsnap wouldn't do that. ;)

However I've just looked up the donors page on the foundation's website and found your company twice.

Have you donated both as a person and a company?

However I've just looked up the donors page on the foundation's website and found your company twice.

The donors page has three columns, one for each of the past 3 years. The reason Tarsnap doesn't appear in all 3 years is that my 2010 donation arrived on December 31st 2010, but for my 2011 donation it took a few days for me to do the final accounting and so I couldn't get the money to them until early January 2012. (Similarly, Tarsnap's end-of-2012 donation will actually show up for the Foundation as an early-2013 donation.)

Have you donated both as a person and a company?

I was operating Tarsnap as a sole proprietorship until late 2011, so my 2010 donation was from "Colin Percival (Tarsnap)", while the 2011 donation (appearing in the 2012 column) was from "Tarsnap Backup Inc."

Given cperciva's non-monetary contributions to FreeBSD over many years, I'd say he ought to get a pass, even if he contributed $0. It seems pretty demanding to expect both huge code contributions over a span of many years, plus monetary donations, from an individual who's just getting his company ramped up.

That's not to say it's not awesome that he contributes both, but I certainly wouldn't be "really disappointed" if he didn't.

I was a bit surprised by that comment, but figured that I was mis-parsing it. I really can't claim to have made "huge code contributions", though: I'm responsible for portsnap and freebsd-update, but those are only a few thousand lines, and aside from those my contributions have been mostly limited to the occasional bug stomping. There are dozens of FreeBSD src developers who have made much larger contributions than I have.

Given the quite high cost of developing and maintaining "a few thousand lines" of pretty heavily used code, I'd say your code contributions have been much more valuable than your monetary contributions. Good programmers often underestimate the value of their code.

But, my primary point was that on the Open Source projects I work on, I'd rather good coders produce great code than contribute money (if the choice must be made, perhaps brought on by having to choose between taking on more non-OSS contract work to make ends meet, for instance). Money is much easier to come by than high quality code. If you're in a position to offer both, then that's awesome. I just thought it really odd to demand the people who work on something to also fund it.

After you shed some different light on my original comment, I have to admit it is phrased weirdly. Apologies for the confusion. It wasn't meant to express the social or any other sort of pressure on Colin's responsibilities as to put the money his company earned into the open source project others also benefit from.

Rather, it was my compliment after seeing how much effort he dedicates to FreeBSD and donating a significant portion of Tarsnap's revenue to the foundation. I reflected on my gut reaction as in `I'd be surprised if a serious contributor wouldn't aid the cause with all the tools he has` and am sorry for the terrible wording.

I'd say your code contributions have been much more valuable than your monetary contributions.

Yes, I'd be inclined to agree there. My financial contributions have been quite modest (and in 2006 I received about $15k of donations from FreeBSD users to let me work on FreeBSD, so in a sense I'm still paying that money back).

I just thought it really odd to demand the people who work on something to also fund it.

Well, I'm not donating as a FreeBSD developer. I'm donating as a company which uses lots of FreeBSD code, and in an attempt to inspire other people and companies to donate.

Since they use the FreeBSD userland, it seems appropriate for Apple to kick in a little cash to the FreeBSD Foundation. The remaining ~$150k is an utter bargain considering how important those pieces are to iOS and Mac OS X ...

They give us code, which is even better than money, really.

Not to say that we wouldn't appreciate monetary donations too, but Apple doesn't "owe" us anything.

> Apple doesn't "owe" us anything.

That's the beautiful thing about BSD-style licenses. Once the code is out there, nobody ever has to reinvent the wheel for legal reasons again - only technical.

And the beautiful part of it is that the incentives work in the right way. The reason for that is pretty simple - code that you submit to projects is code you don't have to maintain when the next upgrade come.

I find it embarrassing that you don't have corporate sponsors that give you guys carte blanche at this point. Not only do you guys deserve it, but your efforts are on a piece of software with an incredibly liberal and corporate friendly license.

I mean how doesn't Apple/Sony benefit from keeping FreeBSD incredibly healthy?

FreeBSD has corporate sponsors. In addition to the many companies who hire FreeBSD developers and let them loose to hack code and the companies which provide lots of hardware and hosting infrastructure (Juniper, Yahoo, NYI), the FreeBSD Foundation has been receiving large donations every year from NetApp and Hudson River Trading, as well as smaller annual donations from iXsystems, Google, McAfee, and SwissCom. And then there was the anonymous $100k donation last year... I don't know where that came from (obviously) but I'm guessing it was a large corporate FreeBSD user.

My guess, Microsoft.

Could be, but I don't know why they'd want to be anonymous. My guess is that it's a company which is using FreeBSD but doesn't want to announce that publicly -- it's not uncommon for companies to consider "using FreeBSD" to be a tactical advantage they don't want their competition to know about.

> Since they use the FreeBSD userland

...let's be very grateful they didn't rewrite everything from scratch...

OSX userland is a wild mix of outdated GNU and BSD tools.

Interesting to see the year-to-year changes among big donors (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml). Looks like NetApp and Google upped their contributions significantly, but Hudson River Trading dropped theirs (or is possibly waiting until the very end of the year). Also, there was a $50k+ anonymous donation in 2011.

HRT always donates in the last couple of weeks of the year; no reason to think they won't be doing the same this time.

The anonymous donation in 2011 was $100k.

I wish I could donate more than 50...

Every bit helps. If every FreeBSD user gave $50 the Foundation would have lots and lots of money.

Every year I donate at least 50$ to Mozilla, I've just added FreeBSD to my yearly donations as well.

They had this same thing over at Slashdot (reworded of course). Good work all the same.

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