Funding An Individual BSD Developer

PuceBaboon writes "Poul-Henning Kamp,a committed FreeBSD developer (the main contributor to "jails", one of my favourite features) has lost his main contract and is appealing for funding to enable him to work on FreeBSD exclusively for the rest of the year."

Re:Picture of developer

[noselasd]

Link is broken. A real picture is here [freebsd.org].

Re:Not asking for much...

[dotz]

And, as phk says, you'll get much more, than just some binary updates [freebsd.org].

Re:He wants HOW much?

[phkamp]

I have to pay my income tax, which here in Denmark is roughly 2/3, and that means the number you are looking at is a $22K/year net salary.

Depending on the jobdescription, my normal salary would be at least $75K, so I tend to think that the FreeBSD users are getting a pretty good deal here.

(And before anybody falls into the other ditch: For that tax we get full healthcare, free schools (incl university) and a practically non-corrupt political system.

Re:He wants HOW much?

[CaptainPinko]

First it would be $66K gross not net since this is taxable income.

Second Linus does not work for free either and I wonder how much he gets paid.

Third $66k is not that much. Teachers make that, and one of my professors pulls in a $104k. Upper management positions can easily pull that much in and a lot more. This may seem a lot for someone working minimum wage or as a receptionist, entry level web designer but that comparison is invalid. We are talking about a proven, experienced, relaible hacker. A fairer comparison would be comparing to surgeons lawyer and other specialist positions.

If you don;t like the deal don't donate and he'll take his time elsewhere at a great to not just FreeBSD but to the entire OSS community.

Re:He wants HOW much?

[Anonymous Coward]

To put it in perspective -- $66K would be less than half what an experienced UNIX kernel engineer would be making in the Valley or Boston.

Of course, *BSD work is now few and far between. You have Apple, and maybe some maintenance jobs at Yahoo.

Re:BSD-wide lack of time

[molnarcs]

somewhat related: I filed only ports-related bug reports. 3 of them. One was a disaster as far as writing a pr goes - it was my very first one, and forgot to fill out the how to reproduce the error part. I never expected a reply to that one, but eventually, someone after 2 months replied :)

The replies to the other 2 PRs were more than exemplary. I got replies (and patches) in less than 2 hours for my reports on wine not compiling [freebsd.org] and amarok using using up all kern.maxproc [freebsd.org]. This, of course, doesn't mean that src folks are as much diligent as ports folks are, but the few times I browsed the -current and other mailing lists, devs. seemed friendly and helpful most of the time. Just my 2cents.

Re:BSD-wide lack of time

[scottj]

I've only had excellent experiences with the core team of developers. Every well-crafted PR that I've submitted has been treated to a solution in less than one week. The team is very responsive and is quick to escalate a problem when necessary. I've never received such dedicated attention on a paid support contract. These guys deserve every penny we donate to them.

Re:BSD-wide lack of time

[cperciva]

The team is very responsive...

Yes, well... (*ahem*).

To be perfectly honest, you've been lucky. Ports PRs tend to get resolved fairly quickly; src PRs often get lost in the shuffle. The big problem is that most PRs are poorly written, either lacking necessary information or lacking coherant English; as a result, most src committers won't take the time necessary to comb through the database in order to find the relatively few good PRs.

Prior to getting a commit bit of my own, I often had bug fixes sit in the PR database for months... the trick, as I learned, is to send in the PR with a patch, wait a couple weeks, and then start sending emails to committers.

Dealing with PRs is certainly a major issue which we'd like to improve upon, but in the end it's all a question of time and money; reading through PRs is rather dull work, and if we're not going to pay people (and there isn't any money available for this) then there simply isn't enough committer-time to do as well as we should.

Beer-ware

[Piquan]

A fair bit of phk's code is under the Beer-ware license:

/*
* "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
* <[e-mail]> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
* can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
* this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
*/

(Some formatting changed for the lameness filter)

In all likelyhood, I'll never meet phk, so I reckon I can donate instead of buying him a beer directly.

Matt Dillon's (dFBSD lead) opinion on this matter

[weekendwarrior1980]

From dragonfly.kernel:

:By the way i suppose everyone is aware of the fundraising campaign by
:phk to be able to precisely work on vfs for> FreeBSD-5 (please, i don't know
:if mentioning this name here is kosher, don't flame me ...). By reading his :memo :http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/plan.html
:i cannot refrain remarking some similarities between the work he wants to
:engage into, and your own agenda on vfs. Isn't it appearing as some sort of
:duplication of work in a domain where very unfortunately resources are
:scarce? :
:--
:Michel Talon

I came across that but I really doubt that our visions are even remotely similar. Our work is going to be based on our well tested LWKT stuff. FreeBSD-5 does not have any LWKT stuff, or anything remotely similar to it. It also strikes me odd that it should require money for work to progress. I realize that there are potentially many people who would like to work on open source to the exclusion of their normal jobs, but the meager amounts of money that can be raised by our projects does not come close to replacement income for even a single person. Money also severely skews the governance structure, creating pressures and consequences that can result in a failure of the normal open source peer review process. In fact, I believe this is precisely what has occured in the FreeBSD project, on multiple occassions, in the last few years. -Matt Matthew Dillon

Re:More explanation about the work and a plan?

[CryBaby]

Here [freebsd.org] are the details. Pair.com didn't give him $20,000 USD to just make something up as he goes along.

Yahoo! and Apple already contribute to FreeBSD (core team interview [osnews.com]).

Re:I/O out from under Giant lock

[adri]

There's at least one Y! employee working pretty much on FreeBSD and making it happy on fast, modern hardware.

There were more than one in the past but its been a while since I've spoken to them all.

I believe Y! also provide some resources to the FreeBSD developers.

Basically, Y! have put in their 2c.

Congratulations!

[kace]

According to the fundraising page (see cheesy HTML bar graphs here [freebsd.org]) 98.7% of the goal for 6 months funding has already been reached.