Yearly FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Campaign Is On

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Foundation's annual year-end fundraising drive is currently running. Their goal this year is US$ 1M, and they're currently at US$ 427K. In 2013, the efforts that were funded were from the last drive were: Native iSCSI kernel stack, Updated Intel graphics chipset support, Integration of Newcons, UTF-8 console support, Superpages for ARM architecture, and Layer 2 networking updates. Also various conferences and summit sponsorships, as well as hardware purchases for the Project. The Foundation is a US 501(c)3 non-profit, so your donations (if in the US) are tax-deductible. Some of the larger 2013 (corporate?) sponsors so far are NetApp, LineRate, WhatsApp, and Tarsnap."

Re:For surely

[LordLimecat]

FreeBSD isnt for the desktop. Next time you need a quick-deploy firewall with advanced features in a virtual environment, and you stumble across pfSense or m0n0wall, remember to thank FreeBSD for making such a stable system.

My experience with it has been limited to a few appliances (freenas, pfsense, etc), but I've generally found it to be way more stable and better performing than linux alternatives (openfiler, untangle). Im sure there are a myriad of technical and non-technical reasons for that, but either way, I hope the FreeBSD folks keep it up.

What the hell?

[jones_supa]

FreeBSD is used by very important software projects such as Apple stuff, Juniper routers and Sony PlayStation 4. Can't those companies really whip a dime or two to the project? One would think that keeping the base OS flourishing would be a good business case for them.

Re:For surely

[Zenin]

Stability comes in many forms, not simply up time.

For example, Linux has a long, long history of badly managed architectural transitions:
a.out to ELF
libc to glibc
virtual memory manager musical chairs
filesystem flavor of the month
32bit to 64bit
package manager du jour
sound
MAKEDEV/devfs/udev.

Stack on top of that the variety of distributions, with their own often wildly different ideas about where things should live and how they should be managed, frequently causes stability issues by introducing human error points. Many of those ideas are also inherently bad and affect stability, such as RedHat and friends throwing everything and the kitchen sink into /usr. -Yes, some packages can be retargeted...but not many, and doing so breaks convention (albeit a bad one) causing the same sort of management stability issues that multiple distros cause just on the local level.

All of that ends up being a make-work program for Linux System Administrators...honestly at leat 50% of your daily job only exists because of the instability of the Linux ecosystem.

Linux (all distros, all of it) is a Configuration Manager's worst nightmare.