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 f

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.