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Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686k in FreeBSD Infrastructure Modernization
- M95D 2y agoThis isn't generosity. They probably need it for a bank or something.
- dtx1 2y ago> Sovereign Transportation Fund to invest €686,400 into Highway Infrastructure This isn't generosity. They probably need it for a Hospital or something.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoIt's not generosity, it's investment in infrastructure.
- senectus1 2y agowho cares if its generosity or not... it furthers the OS platform. Provided the money has no strings about the license...
- roenxi 2y agoMotivation can be important. After Mozilla started taking Google's money they lost a lot of urgency about competing with Chrome to offer a different view of the internet. In this case there don't seem to be any concerning dynamics and generosity or lack thereof is irrelevant. It'll be good for FreeBSD.
- qwytw 2y agoHow could Firefox as a company afford to compete with Chrome or do anything without any revenue? Unfortunately Google's money is almost the only reason why Firefox is still a thing...
- dmurray 2y agoIt's better that it's not funded out of generosity. Now the OS projects can have two revenue streams: one funded by generosity, one by self-interest.
- tux3 2y agoThank god. Generosity really doesn't align with any of my values. Where's the growth in that.
- gonzo41 2y agoand your point?
- cpach 2y agoWhat is generosity? Does the word even apply to organizations?
- hnlmorg 2y agoI’m not sure that needs specifically pointing out because nowhere in the title nor article does it call this a donation. It’s clearly described as an investment. The end result is the same though: everyone who uses FreeBSD benefits from this investment.
- darkamaul 2y agoIs anyone aware of similar funds or structures from different countries? Sovereign Tech Fund is German, but I did not find (albeit not looked too much) any in other European countries.
- the-dude 2y agohttps://hn.algolia.com/?q=nlnet https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nlnet ?
- WhyNotHugo 2y agoNLnet is somewhat similar: https://nlnet.nl/ https://nlnet.nl/
- omnimus 2y agoNlnet gets funding from NGI https://ngi.eu/ https://ngi.eu/ and unfortunately there have been insider reports that EU commission gave top priority to AI and from 2025 cut all funding of NGI to free up money for the AI initiative. Of course this is pretty lame and terrible as lot of good independent projects got funding there.
- Vinnl 2y agoFor context, NLNet's NGI0 programs are EU-funded (for now [1]). [1] https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI
- razakel 2y agoEvery country has some sort of quango that throws money at "weird" projects.
- catanama 2y agoFreeBSD is not weird, it's a good and very reliable OS, I'm very happy this happens.
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- rahen 2y agoI am interested in the details, particularly how they plan to reduce the technical debt. Are there any additional resources available?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cyberpunk 2y agoPresumably it means paying people to work on all the painful crap they’re not getting contributions for. Most people who want to help out a project like FreeBSD will work on something that interests them; I have an hard time imagining that many people out there want to work on some libtool removal or cleaning up deep in the plumbing of buildworld or such. Plenty of people are happy to be paid to do such tasks tho, and this pays for that. We all win :)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- carstenhag 2y agoInteresting, the first time I've heard of the https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ . They have funded a variety of tooling, including curl, ffmpeg, gnome, php, etc: https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech
- i80and 2y agoMy favorite part is they're funding making home directory encryption a first-tier integrated feature of GNOME[1] [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/STF/homed/-/issues/42 https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/STF/homed/-/issues/42
- NekkoDroid 2y agoI've been personally most excited for this, simply because I've personally been looking at making my own image based system to daily drive and having an empty (and possibly read-only) /etc/ is kind of a prerequisite, which passwd and shadow kinda make difficult. For anyone that doesn't know, homed allows using different mechanism as backing storage (e.g. directory, luks loopback, btrfs subvolume, separate drive and more). It stores user information usually store in passwd and shadow in a signed ~/.identity file allowing it to be entirely portable. Changes need to be done via homectl as it needs to be resigned by a system specific key (same for when a new home dir is added) and some changes are limited to admin only, while others can be done by the user themselves.
- oytis 2y agoWhy FreeBSD? How did they decide that it's worth supporting? What return is expected? I don't even know a reason to use FreeBSD these days apart of being a FreeBSD enthusiast.
- cyberpunk 2y agopfsense is fairly widely deployed in a lot of 'secure' infrastructure.
- BSDobelix 2y ago>I don't even know a reason to use FreeBSD That's funny because i don't even know a reason to use Linux these days. And since there is the Linux-Foundation who invests whopping 5% of their money into the Linux Kernel, an opensource alternative is always good to have. Edit: Correction it's not 5% but less then 3%
- christophilus 2y agoI’m a big fan of the BSDs, but if you’re talking about the desktop, Proton and Steam, WiFi support, and (for me) Niri. You can get Niri working, probably, with some effort, but it comes out of the box on Fedora and Arch. The case of Niri is representative, in my limited experience, of the general case. The dev tooling I use always supports Linux as a 1st class citizen, but rarely supports the BSDs.
- BSDobelix 2y agoWell there is proton and steam on FreeBSD and i can even play Elden Ring and X4 for 2 minutes.....then my machine resets because there is no way to adjust the AMD-GPU fans, so i made a bhyve Win11-VM with passthrough to the discrete GPU and Bluetooth (PS4 controller), and now i can play everything, even my beloved Gold-Box Games with the GBC. >WiFi support Yeah that's really a problem, but i just use my Laptop for work so ~6 MB/s is good enough for me, otherwise i would use FreeBSDWifibox it's a hack but hey we use Unixes right? ;) >Niri is representative See what Niri is for you, ZFS is for me, i could say that the ZFS-module is representative (on mainstream distros) for Linux and we are both right, FreeBSD and Linux are both not perfect. BTW Niri is already in ports since ~9 month: https://www.freshports.org/x11-wm/niri https://www.freshports.org/x11-wm/niri >dev tooling I use always supports Linux as a 1st class citizen, but rarely supports the BSDs. I don't know what "1st class citizen" means, if it works it works, i often use dev-tools where Mac and Windows seam to be the "1st class citizen" but if they work they work. So yes, there are problems like the Overheating AMD-GPU and Wifi but apart from that i am super happy with FreeBSD, and most important everyone is happy with the OS/Distro choice one made.
- ruthmarx 2y agoThis seems like a strange use of money, surely? Nothing against FreeBSD, but Linux is where most of the focus already is. People using FreeBSD are doing so due to preference or legitimate need due to their software somehow specifically being BSD dependents. Not that this isn't 'nice', but is that the goal here? I would have thought it would make more sense to put this money toward something underfunded but still useful for the government.
- strken 2y agoHow do we know it's not useful to the German government? Without context, I would have assumed that "infrastructure, security, regulatory compliance, and developer experience" meant they were trying to secure FreeBSD's builds because they were using them and identified them as a weak point.
- cpach 2y agoYou have a point, and I agree that these days, for most people, Linux is where the action is. But it might not be desirable to end up in a future where Linux is the only game in town. Therefore it could be wise to support other FOSS operating systems, to keep some kind of competition.
- ruthmarx 2y agoIs this not an argument against vendor lock in? I'd argue that doesn't really apply to a FOSS project like Linux, and that BSD isn't sufficiently different to help diversity. If that was the goal, there are a ton of smaller OS projects that I think would make sense to fund. Like ReactOS.
- tristor 2y agoI am really surprised by all the negative comments in this thread about FreeBSD by people who seemingly use Linux and think this is an appropriate way to behave. There are many reasons why someone might use BSD, and it has several specific advantages over Linux for some use cases. That aside, even in cases where Linux is "better", FreeBSD is more than sufficient. There is no downside and many upsides to having multiple free operating systems that are aligned around the same core standard (POSIX) with tooling for software portability. Thank you Germany for helping fund open source.
- spiderfarmer 2y agoYou're surprised by negative comments on HN?
- jmclnx 2y agoI am not. When I used Coherent OS, Linux was starting out and Linux people were spamming comp.os.coherent on USENET incessantly. The very few BSD people who posted were respectful of people on that group. Seems over the years, times have not changed :( And yes, a big thank you to Germany.
- elric 2y agoI'm not surprised, but I am a little disappointed. Some random tech fund gives a small amount of money to a project that can put it to good use, and even plans specific useful things with said money, and then some ninnies come along to complain about it? Why? Is it their money? Do they dislike FreeBSD benefiting from things? Are they jealous because their pet project didn't get any money in this particular instance? I'm sure some money goes towards silly things and could be spent on more worthwhile things, but this doesn't strike me as a waste of money...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- vegadw 2y agoOn the one hand, this sounds like a lot of money, on the other, it's ~765k USD. If you just go off the rough assumption that 1 engineer/100k USD/yr then it's either a team of 7 for a bit over a year or a single engineer for a decade or so. I don't know if that's enough to make a significant impact? I'd like to think so, but a project that big, once it gets funding, is sure to have some tech debt that needs paid before anything new, so, will new things come of this?
- _mlbt 2y agoThere are a few exceptions, but overall the BSDs have very well engineered and maintainable code. They don’t move as fast as Linux distros do partly due to less manpower and partly due to taking the time to do it the right way. There is much less churn and they don’t have the cruft of supporting obscure UNIX flavors that have faded into distant memory like GNU utilities do. Take a look at some FreeBSD code and their GNU and Linux equivalents and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
- vegadw 2y agoInteresting! Does that make it perform worse on some modern hardware due to having, say, worse scheduling for CPUs with multiple CCXs or worse graphics drivers? I'm obviously wandering a bit outside my knowledge here.
- _mlbt 2y agoYes FreeBSD does generally benchmark lower than Linux. The BSDs typically prefer correctness and maintainability to aggressive micro optimizations. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but I can usually follow FreeBSDs code much easier than I can GNU coreutils or the Linux kernel for example. The BSDs also have excellent documentation. Every utility, kernel module, and system configuration file have robust man pages.
- Gud 2y agoWhere are you getting this from? Most benchmarks I’ve seen put FreeBSD on par with linux. https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-threadripper-7980x/4 https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-threadripper-7980x...