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."

Not asking for much...

[cperciva]

RedHat charged people $60/year for access to binary updates (the company which has taken over supplying updates to old RedHat releases also charges the same rate). MandrakeClub costs at least $60/year, with a "Recommended level" of $120/year.

As phk wrote, "Imagine if some of our users sent $1/month for each FreeBSD machine they were running." There are a lot of people and companies running FreeBSD, and it wouldn't take much from each of them to pay for several people to work full-time on FreeBSD.

Re:He wants HOW much?

[zulux]

I don't have to fear the pan-handlers, insane and other strays because we actually have a social care system that works.

You *ALSO* have the benifit os a stable socioty that has set expectations on behaviour.

We Americans come from so many parts of the world, that we Americans can have many views of other Americans...

One person's "Gun Nut" is another person's "2nd Amemendment Fan."
One person's "Dirty Hippy" is another person's "Free Sprit."

America *is* the land of pan-handlers, insandes and strays.

I like it that way - it's interesting.

(PS Thanks for all your previous work with FreeBSD - 4.9 is polised perfection and the 5.0 series is facinating)

Re:He wants HOW much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, I've been to Europe and I have many friends from Asia. From what I hear, Asian big cities are the worst. I honestly can't tell the difference between San Fran and Paris (except for the armed military guys walking around Paris... WTF are they doing with automatic rifles in the subway?!). There are homeless, there are people walking over each other, it smells, you tell me the difference.

Interview

[CaptainPinko]

Maybe in a few weeks someone should have an interview with this guy and maybe it could even make it to the front page? That should get more exposure and if includes a line like we are already 75% of the way there then I'm sure that will help the donatations role in. I suspect that some people are worried about not making the minimum and just having their donation get lost there as opposed to some real important work getting done.

My bet: if the minimum gets met than at least two of the months will go too since it will prove that this works.

Re:BSD-wide lack of time

[molnarcs]

Well, I am not a programmer, that's why I've been reluctant to send in PRs - for the reasons you cited: I didn't/don't want to congest their database, which seems to be overloaded all the time btw. Not that poorly written PRs are their fault... They have excellent guidelines [freebsd.org] useful for us noobs as well.

On the other hand, (good) PRs are very important. I've been (I am still) very critical about the quality of gentoo (my roommate uses it, and since he is a *nix novice, I had the pleasure/pain of figuring out some stuff in gentoo), but I saw on their forums developers (ebuild-maintainers to be precise) complaining about the lack of bugreports.

So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.

Re:BSD-wide lack of time

[cperciva]

So I was thinking about how us non-ubergeeks could contribute in a helpful way, and I think a separate section on bsdforums (say "PR Candidates") could be created, where we, users would test out some things to make 100% sure it is really a bug, it is reproducable, etc. before we submit it. Originator would be bsdforums, the threads could be used as reference, and thread participants would volunteer to test out the patches sent back.

That would be great; but much less than that would still be helpful. Having someone go through and identify PRs which
1. Report a reproducible bug, and
2. Contain a patch which fixes that bug
would be useful just by itself.

More explanation about the work and a plan?

[itsmarcos]

Quoting his FAQ: "So this email is an appeal to the FreeBSD user community, to try to raise money for three to six months of my time to make our filesystem and disk-I/O subsystem work properly on both single-user and multi-processor systems."

I believe that if he puts up a small work plan with the following items he will convince more funding from corporations such as Yahoo!, Apple, etc.

More details on the work he wants to do.

A description of the benefits from the output and who will benefit most.

Milestones and a rough timeline.

A priorities list on the work.
Just my opinion...

100 % funding reached

[erik_norgaard]

According to the donation page, the funding goals has been reached. This took about ... uhm, two weeks? It is interesting to see that posting an appeal for funding can raise so much money so quick. Was it /.? Or was it because the project had well defined goals? (Resolving certain buffer related issues). Was it the phk karma? I have no idea of the funding the freebsd foundation gets, but maybe they would be able to raise more money quickly if they announced specific projects with specific funding needs, project description, expected timelines and milestones. Personally, I am more likely to sponsor a concrete project with clear goals. It gives a sence of knowing what you get for the money and that this money is not swallowed by administration or other borring tasks. I think this should raise a discussion in the community as to how funding is raised and used.