Yearly FreeBSD Foundation Fundraising Campaign Is On 83
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."
Stop and consider... (Score:4, Interesting)
FreeBSD probably isn't useful to you every day. Maybe some of your net traffic will go through a FreeBSD box, but that box could be replaced by just about anything really. However, I'm not trying to say that FreeBSD is useless or irrelevant - what I want to say is that FreeBSD has some excellent out-of-band uses.
I think people should consider the value of the educational, developmental, experimental and competitive opportunities that FreeBSD provides. We need projects and communities which have low hanging fruit for beginners and we need projects that are ready to give different approaches to problems a go - so that the rest of us on whatever OS can learn from it regardless of the success of the implementation.
The same goes for my favourite alternative OS - Haiku [haiku-os.org] which also contains some bits and pieces from FreeBSD for networking/wireless IIRC. (BTW, it has package management now and a lot of improvements to the native browser, and more.)
Re:For surely (Score:2, Interesting)
My (Free)BSD desktop works very well, and it doesn't constantly guess incorrectly about what I want it to do.
"fucktard"? Really? Is that you again Linus?