Others (e.g. HP) choose to donate hardware to the Project and most of its infrastructure is hosted (gratis, IIRC) by Yahoo!, ISC, NYI, and Sentex.
Side note: Tarsnap is listed at the same level as Juniper (2013) and VMware (2014); I have mixed feelings about that.
If you look at the donors listed in each category for 2008-2014 (why those years? Because that's what I scraped the website for) then Tarsnap comes after Anonymous (one or more people giving $250k+, $250k+, and $50k+), NetApp ($450k+), Cryptography Research ($250k+), Hudson River Trading ($250k+), Google ($180k+), LineRate ($150k+), NetFlix ($75k+), iXsystems ($70k+), Swisscom ($40k+), McAfee ($35k+), and John Baldwin ($30k+). And of course WhatsApp, who aren't on the donors list yet for some reason. Part of the reason that Tarsnap always looks like one of the largest donors is that Tarsnap's donation always arrives a few weeks into the new year, while other companies are faster and get their money in at the end of the previous year.
Not to say that Tarsnap doesn't contribute, of course; just that other companies contribute far more over the long run.
We can sometimes give more than money. (Colin is insanely bright too, so he is a true asset)
Colin Percival could crash the entire bitcoin economy with the amount of bitcoins he's accidentally mined in his head, while sleeping.
Sorry, I was afraid that remark would be misinterpreted.
As a long-time FreeBSD (and previous Tarsnap) user, I'm certainly appreciative of the fact that you donate to the Project (in addition to your other contributions). That's the "happy feeling".
The "disappointment feeling" comes from wishing that Juniper and VMware's donations were of an amount that would put them in a much higher category.
In other words, my thinking was along the lines of "These two [huge, public] companies are donating roughly as much as Colin himself is". (I realize that, technically, Tarsnap is the entity donating but the fact is that that would be extra money in your pocket otherwise.)
Well, it would always be nice to see more and larger donations, but I wouldn't be too harsh on them. As far as I know, VMware doesn't use FreeBSD at all; and while Juniper certainly uses FreeBSD a great deal, they also contribute a lot of developer hours -- vastly more than I ever have.
Given the cost of developers, perhaps that suggests that cash donations are not all that effective a method, and measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time? If you convert the donations to developer-years, companies like NetApp and Google have each donated an average of less than one developer per year over that period in the cash format. Surely there is some company that beats that threshold, if measured in developer-years?
Keep in mind that those are lower bounds based on which "donation bracket" they fell into. I know there was at least one case where a company donated $200k (which fell into the $100-250k bracket).
measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time
Yes. But that's harder to measure, of course.
Also keep in mind that the FreeBSD Foundation != the FreeBSD Project; it is only in the past couple of years that the Foundation has had enough money to hire ongoing engineering staff. For a long time their budget went to project infrastructure and self-contained projects proposed by individual developers.