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FreeBSD has to beg for funding http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/12/12/09/1726222/freebsd-project-falls-short-of-year-end-funding-target-by-nearly-50 http://bsd.sla

by fafner 13y ago

FreeBSD has to beg for funding http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/12/12/09/1726222/freebsd-project-falls-short-of-year-end-funding-target-by-nearly-50 http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/12/12/09/1726222/freebsd-proje... I think the BSD's are not a good example here in general. Most commercial Unices use bits and pieces from BSD without contributing much back. Just look at Linux where companies are forced to contribute back and thus the momentum it gained. Certainly there are big projects under BSD-style licenses which get plenty of contributions back. But I think it's far more interesting how smaller projects do. For a big project it's in many cases better to contribute back because then upstream has to maintain your changes. Small libraries and tools however are quickly copied and dumped into the code base and nobody even bothers trying to send anything upstream. YMMV

profquail 13y ago
FreeBSD doesn't need to "beg" for funding. They do however, need more awareness about the project to get more people and companies involved. That story about falling short of their fundraising goal -- I submitted it both here and on Slashdot, not realizing that most people/companies who donate money to the FreeBSD Foundation do so in the last two weeks of the year (for tax reasons or whatever). As it turned out, thanks to the huge amount of traffic they received from those stories, they raised 50% more than their goal and are now funding project proposals, sponsoring conferences, and much more: http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/04/raise-million-spend-million.html http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/04/raise-million-... I agree that small libraries and tools could be quickly copied into the codebase and forgotten about, but I question whether this is as much of an issue for any languages/platforms where you can dynamically link/load binaries (e.g., JVM, .NET) and you have decent package managers available (e.g., NuGet). In those cases, I think it's so simple to pull in outside libraries and use them that it's just easier for companies to contribute any fixes upstream instead of doing the work to maintain their own separate forks.

by fafner 13y ago

profquail 13y ago

FreeBSD doesn't need to "beg" for funding. They do however, need more awareness about the project to get more people and companies involved. That story about falling short of their fundraising goal -- I submitted it both here and on Slashdot, not realizing that most people/companies who donate money to the FreeBSD Foundation do so in the last two weeks of the year (for tax reasons or whatever). As it turned out, thanks to the huge amount of traffic they received from those stories, they raised 50% more than their goal and are now funding project proposals, sponsoring conferences, and much more: http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/04/raise-million-spend-million.html http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/04/raise-million-... I agree that small libraries and tools could be quickly copied into the codebase and forgotten about, but I question whether this is as much of an issue for any languages/platforms where you can dynamically link/load binaries (e.g., JVM, .NET) and you have decent package managers available (e.g., NuGet). In those cases, I think it's so simple to pull in outside libraries and use them that it's just easier for companies to contribute any fixes upstream instead of doing the work to maintain their own separate forks.