17 ms·

WhatsApp Co-Founder Donates $1M to FreeBSD Foundation

1230 points by swills 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
epistasis 12y ago
> Find out more about Jan's reasons for donating here. https://www.facebook.com/jan.koum?fref=nf&pnref=story https://www.facebook.com/jan.koum?fref=nf&pnref=story That page is inaccessible to me, does somebody have a mirror?
- mikeevans 12y ago
  "Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life. I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do. I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative."
  - bluedino 12y ago
    A true rags to riches story. Which, going by the majority of posts here on HN when it comes to that subject, doesn't actually happen.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Nice move. I think it is awesome when folks do that. Has anyone thought what an 'opensource' endowment might look like? I'm thinking an endowment manager and a policy for distributing 2% of the endowment annually to folks who contribute and against costs (like hosting repos and mailing lists etc.) The thought being you end up with some "project" with a $100M - $250M endowment and it operates 'in perpetuity' on a budget of $2 - $5M annually.
- pokpokpok 12y ago
  in my opinion, (although the counter-argument is clear), the reason to donate to the FOS movement in the short term instead of long term endowments is because it feels like we are at a critical turning point in the history of technology with respect to its role as an equalizer or a way for the powerful to become more powerful. A large push now is worth more than a small push every year for infinity.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- vegabook 12y ago
  just remember though that interest rates are currently 0%, even the 10y treasury bond is only marginally above 2%, so giving away 2% a year at least for the near to medium term assumes capital growth in riskier forms (equities, more donations) well above distribution levels. This is why explicit payments on a recurring basis are more important than ever, even more so than the (certainly still brilliant) 1m donation. Endownments that have been used to payout ratios of the order you mention have relied for most of the past 50 years on long term treasury yields (30y) well above 5%. We're now nudging 3% for the first time since the dawn of the computer era. Tough times.
  - cperciva 12y ago
    I don't know about the US, but Canadian universities spend 3.5-4% of their endowments annually and expect this to preserve the real (inflation-adjusted) value of the endowments. So they're expecting between 5.6% and 6.1% nominal annual return over the long term. Nobody ever invests an entire endowment in bonds; even aside from the lower rate of return, the inflation risk is much too dangerous.
debacle 12y ago
It's always intriguing to me how critical the BSDs and BSD programmers are to the Linux ecosystem, even though their user base is fairly small.
- epistasis 12y ago
  Every time I spend some time in BSD land I'm pleasantly surprised with how well-designed, featureful, and well documented everything is. For dedicated server systems that developers don't access, it's pretty much perfect. I kind of wish that the developer world had standardized on that rather than GNU/Linux, though perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward.
  - byuu 12y ago
    > perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward. That's exactly how I feel about it. You never want too many cooks in the kitchen. They have all they need for a very successful server system already. Right now I'm just hoping for some sort of BSD-based desktop environment∗. Doesn't have to be a Windows/OSX/GNOME/KDE killer, just something functional. I suspect the usage of Linux GUI environments is going to become increasingly volatile in the future with so much Linux-only tech being pushed in as dependencies to absolutely everything these days. (∗ I don't mean something like Lumina, I mean from the display server up. Xorg is moving to Wayland/Weston, GTK3 is pretty much becoming GNOME-only, which is becoming systemd only. I'd like to see a new BSD-style lightweight, modular, minimal display server, widget toolkit, and desktop. Run the whole thing on either VESA or barebones EGL.)
    - pnathan 12y ago
      I believe Gentoo is able to run with a BSD kernel.
      - valarauca1 12y ago
        Gentoo is largely kernel agnostic. So once you remove that your left with GNU utils. Which can compile on most posix plateforms. For example I can run GNU bash on an HPUX system.
lamby 12y ago
Good grief, that's a statement. And bravo. (However, what can they really do with that money? Operating systems aren't the sexiest of free software projects to work on, so I would be tempted to think that manpower is FreeBSDs biggest limiter.)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- debacle 12y ago
  You can find their last two budget reports on the foundation's website. This looks like a huge cash injection and if they put it aside it will pretty much double their assets.
- bictorman 12y ago
  I don't know their hosting costs or if they have any need for more. But that money (or the investment returns) could be well spent on marketing for the project.
  - emaste 12y ago
    To date the FreeBSD Project has benefited from the generosity of a number of users of FreeBSD who donate data center space and connectivity. Some examples are Yahoo!, NYI, ISC, and Sentex. The point about the need for and value of marketing is well taken; Anne Dickison joined the Foundation as Marketing Director earlier this year.
- emaste 12y ago
  The Foundation's financials are open, so you can see how the money has been used in the past. The short version is that our 2014 budget was on track to spend about half that amount (i.e., approaching half a million) on funded project development, through permanent staff and development contracts. The other portion goes into supporting conferences, hardware purchases for the FreeBSD cluster, and staff time to support the FreeBSD project. Keep in mind that this donation won't be spent in one year; we'll be able to find qualified uses for this money.
rodgerd 12y ago
Neat.
drawkbox 12y ago
A great example to others who have success because of open source. It should be a common thing that once you find the coveted golden parachute in the sprawling game of life, you give a percentage back to OSS as a tradition to others on the adventure.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  Isn't the expression "golden parachute" typically reserved for excessive payouts when an employee gets fired/made redundant/laid off/etc? As far as I know Jan Koum still works as CEO for WhatsApp, so this isn't from a "golden parachute" payment.
  - drawkbox 12y ago
    Yes it is but it is also used for acquisitions where the money is so big that the person suddenly never has to worry about anything ever again related to money, a golden parachute. Typically though most acquisitions founders/co-founders will leave after their couple years of vesting as with new money they have more opportunities, doesn't always happen but usually. The recent Facebook buys of Oculus and WhatsApp may be different and more like Amazon's Zappos and Twitch acquisitions. Here I was using it more as a game item that you get so much money from a successful product that you don't really have to worry about anything again. I usually hear it with technology acquisitions and founders leaving later after the money than with termination as there are only golden parachutes for failure in the financial industry. I should have said funding or freedom, as the funding from WhatsApp sale now gives Jan Koum the freedom to work on many ideas and support important projects like BSD.
    - hayksaakian 12y ago
      I hate to be pedantic, but I think the phrase you're looking for is "golden handcuffs"
      - nandemo 12y ago
        It's not even pedantic. Golden parachute: you're forced out (by a lay-off or takeover) but they're obligated to give you a pile of money. Golden handcuffs: you volunteer for corporate servitude (by being acquired) in exchange for a big pile of money.
tiffanyh 12y ago
From the announcement: >>"This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago" First, I'm extremely excited to see this announcement. FreeBSD is fantastic and extremely underrated. Secondly though, isn't it sad to hear that in FreeBSD existence - this is the largest donation ever ... given that Yahoo use to run it's entire company on it, OS X is based on it, Juniper is based on it, Netflix deploys on it, NetApp, EMC, etc. Edit: typo
- jmsdnns 12y ago
  Apple somewhat gutted the FreeBSD team to build Darwin, too.
  - tiffanyh 12y ago
    Great point. Here's a link to one of many articles that addresses your statement, for those uninformed [1]. Just imagine how many Apples products exist today that go back to FreeBSD roots (Mac, iPad, iPod, iPhone's, etc). [1] http://www.macworld.com/article/1018184/apple.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1018184/apple.html
- swills 12y ago
  If you read the commit messages you will often see a "Sponsored by:" line, and it's not uncommon to see those companies referenced, so they are supporting FreeBSD, just in the form of developer time. And I believe they also donate to the foundation as well.
  - tiffanyh 12y ago
    I'll bite. Core FreeBSD has 272,082 commits [1] Of those, only 9,244 commits [2] have the word "Sponsored" in their commit message; however, 3,486 were sponsored by "The FreeBSD Foundation" [3]. So only a net total of 5,758 commits were company sponsored. Said another way, that means just 2.1% of all commits ever made to FreeBSD, in it's 21 year existence, were companies sponsoring and submitting patches. So no, I think it's safe to say that FreeBSD is primarily run and operated by lone individuals who do it because they personally love FreeBSD. Edit: typo, fixed stats. [1] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q= https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q= [2] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=Sponsored https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=Sponsored [3] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=%22The+FreeBSD+Foundation%22 https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=%22The+FreeBSD+Foundati...
pessimizer 12y ago
"With this donation, and the generosity of all those who have donated this year, we have shattered our 2014, million dollar fundraising goal! But this does not mean we can stop our fundraising efforts. Only by increasing the size and diversity of our donor pool can we ensure a stable and consistent funding stream to support the FreeBSD project." Is this very, very dry humor? edit: So nobody thinks that there's anything funny about reaching a million dollar fundraising goal, but noting that they might want to expand the size and diversity of the donor pool in future after getting a million dollar donation from a single person. Of course they reached the goal, and of course they might want to raise the size of the donor pool it took to reach the goal [one person] and the diversity [the donors that put them over the top all have the same Social Security number.] Feel free to interpret the comment as "why donate to them, they just got a million dollars" or whatever bizarre impression people are getting, but if I meant that, I would have just said that.
- drderidder 12y ago
  Not unless the fact that organizations have recurring annual funding requirements is funny.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    If I make a joke about soldiers, am I saying that war is funny?
- jlgaddis 12y ago
  Um, no? Why would you think that?
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    For obvious reasons.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      The downvotes suggest that it's not obvious to other people. FreeBSD get a huge donation. They let people know about this - it's a great piece of publicity. But that carries a risk. Some people will think that FreeBSD doesn't need any more donations because of this single huge donation, so FreeBSD needs to talk about the importance of regular donations from a broad group of supporters, not just huge donations from a tiny group or purely corporate donations. I fail to see how any of that could possibly be part of some humorous comment.
otterley 12y ago
Looks like the mantle has passed from Yahoo! being FreeBSD's biggest advocate and sponsor (not in direct cash donations, but employing their maintainers) to WhatsApp. Nice to see the Y! alumni are keeping the tradition alive.
- jaxx456 12y ago
  It's good to see any large company remembering the important software their company is built on. I don't know if companies like Yahoo or Google could have ever been started without free and open source software.
jaxx345 12y ago
I'm really excited to see the community gain more traction, especially financially right now.
jaxx345 12y ago
Why don't other large companies also contribute to FreeBSD? I know Netflix is a large consumer. It seems they would want to contribute more.
- allanjude 12y ago
  Netflix does contribute, in addition to money paid to the foundation, they also have quite a few developers working on FreeBSD almost full time. You can see lots of commits with 'Sponsored by: Netflix'. nginx and Yandex also do a lot of commits. http://freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix http://freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix
datashovel 12y ago
While donations from corporations is great, my hope is that developers will jump on the micro-payment bandwagon. If every developer who uses FreeBSD in one capacity or another donated $1 per month, the FreeBSD Foundation would likely never need to ask for donations again. I currently do quarterly donations to FreeBSD Foundation and Apache Foundation, and some hand-picked developers in the technologies I use regularly, whom I would consider indispensable in the open source community. While it's not $1M, if everyone were doing it, none of those groups would depend on corporate donations. I have even thought of a project that I may bring to life one day, if enough interest exists. Find the most indispensable members of the open source community and put crowdfunding efforts together to buy them out. In other words, put enough money on the table that they won't need to work for 1,2,3 years at a time. Working tirelessly on open source projects is something these people have already proven they love to do, and will almost certainly continue if suddenly they came across a windfall like this. My guess is these kinds of things have been attempted, but for one reason or another have never really gained the support they would need.
- kev009 12y ago
  Diverse donations are also necessary for 501c(3) status in the US, so yes everyone please give a few dollars every year!
- ErrantX 12y ago
  Given that the freeBSD foundation receives approx. $400,00-500,000 in donations from less than 20 corps/individuals... I think rather a lot of developers would have to donate :) Are there 42,000 FreeBSD developers willing to contribute?
  - Taek 12y ago
    $1 per month is an incredibly trivial number. Less trivial is how difficult it is to set up payment in this fashion. If getting payment was as simple as convincing developers that it was worth $1 per month, I'm sure you could get to $1m per year (many would do much better than $1 per month).
  - datashovel 12y ago
jason_slack 12y ago
This inspires me to give FreeBSD another shot. I haven't used it in a few years in favor of CentOS. There was a point I had my laptop running FreeBSD as my main OS.
Siecje 12y ago
Interesting that he got more value out of FreeBSD (Job at Yahoo!) than Erlang.
sandGorgon 12y ago
There are lots of comments on how sad it is that nobody donates to the FreeBSD foundation. Part of the blame lies with the foundation itself - they don't know how to ask! Fundraising is a full time, yet unsexy job...and very few people do it well. The key thing is to be top of mind by asking frequently and nicely. Personally, when the time comes, I default towards Wikipedia because Jimmy Wales does a great job of asking. This is a problem not just with FreeBSD, but many others like OpenSSL,etc. If nothing else, I wish these guys just run a yearly kickstarter just for outreach.
vayarajesh 12y ago
>> "This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago" Al though it is awesome that they have received this donation but it is such a shame it took 15 years to get a $1M donation for such a great work they are doing.. and on the other side silly small apps get millions of funding which go in total waste and those apps might be using FreeBSD for their production servers or development Its nice to see FreeBSD getting appreciated
vidoc 12y ago
I wonder how much money a million dollar for this guy would be for me.. I'm thinking it should probably be in the neighborhood of $.10 Either way, brilliant business plan from this whatsapp co-founder :P
- estrabd 12y ago
  .005% of your approximate net worth (1m/19b)
jmiller_com 12y ago
This is great news. People bashing other companies, keep in mind some of them employ people that work near full-time on FreeBSD. But, some deserve the bashing.
beartime 12y ago
So in a way, thanks Facebook
dummyfellow 12y ago
Companies like Facebook, Google should give 100$ to each employee to donate, will be petty cash for them, but will reach many project the company is really benefiting from.
FractalNerve 12y ago
What will they do with that huge amount of much money? Personally: I hope they make an UI to FreeBSD on par with OS X, because it already seems to be so stable that no change except security fixes is neccessary in my naïve eyes ☺ Sorry, if this was asked before.
pnathan 12y ago
Congratulations to FreeBSD; mad props to WhatsApp's founder.

1230 points by swills 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

> Find out more about Jan's reasons for donating here. https://www.facebook.com/jan.koum?fref=nf&pnref=story https://www.facebook.com/jan.koum?fref=nf&pnref=story That page is inaccessible to me, does somebody have a mirror?

mikeevans 12y ago
"Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life. I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do. I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative."
- bluedino 12y ago
  A true rags to riches story. Which, going by the majority of posts here on HN when it comes to that subject, doesn't actually happen.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Nice move. I think it is awesome when folks do that. Has anyone thought what an 'opensource' endowment might look like? I'm thinking an endowment manager and a policy for distributing 2% of the endowment annually to folks who contribute and against costs (like hosting repos and mailing lists etc.) The thought being you end up with some "project" with a $100M - $250M endowment and it operates 'in perpetuity' on a budget of $2 - $5M annually.

pokpokpok 12y ago
in my opinion, (although the counter-argument is clear), the reason to donate to the FOS movement in the short term instead of long term endowments is because it feels like we are at a critical turning point in the history of technology with respect to its role as an equalizer or a way for the powerful to become more powerful. A large push now is worth more than a small push every year for infinity.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
vegabook 12y ago
just remember though that interest rates are currently 0%, even the 10y treasury bond is only marginally above 2%, so giving away 2% a year at least for the near to medium term assumes capital growth in riskier forms (equities, more donations) well above distribution levels. This is why explicit payments on a recurring basis are more important than ever, even more so than the (certainly still brilliant) 1m donation. Endownments that have been used to payout ratios of the order you mention have relied for most of the past 50 years on long term treasury yields (30y) well above 5%. We're now nudging 3% for the first time since the dawn of the computer era. Tough times.
- cperciva 12y ago
  I don't know about the US, but Canadian universities spend 3.5-4% of their endowments annually and expect this to preserve the real (inflation-adjusted) value of the endowments. So they're expecting between 5.6% and 6.1% nominal annual return over the long term. Nobody ever invests an entire endowment in bonds; even aside from the lower rate of return, the inflation risk is much too dangerous.

debacle 12y ago

It's always intriguing to me how critical the BSDs and BSD programmers are to the Linux ecosystem, even though their user base is fairly small.

epistasis 12y ago
Every time I spend some time in BSD land I'm pleasantly surprised with how well-designed, featureful, and well documented everything is. For dedicated server systems that developers don't access, it's pretty much perfect. I kind of wish that the developer world had standardized on that rather than GNU/Linux, though perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward.
- byuu 12y ago
  > perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward. That's exactly how I feel about it. You never want too many cooks in the kitchen. They have all they need for a very successful server system already. Right now I'm just hoping for some sort of BSD-based desktop environment∗. Doesn't have to be a Windows/OSX/GNOME/KDE killer, just something functional. I suspect the usage of Linux GUI environments is going to become increasingly volatile in the future with so much Linux-only tech being pushed in as dependencies to absolutely everything these days. (∗ I don't mean something like Lumina, I mean from the display server up. Xorg is moving to Wayland/Weston, GTK3 is pretty much becoming GNOME-only, which is becoming systemd only. I'd like to see a new BSD-style lightweight, modular, minimal display server, widget toolkit, and desktop. Run the whole thing on either VESA or barebones EGL.)
  - pnathan 12y ago
    I believe Gentoo is able to run with a BSD kernel.
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      Gentoo is largely kernel agnostic. So once you remove that your left with GNU utils. Which can compile on most posix plateforms. For example I can run GNU bash on an HPUX system.

lamby 12y ago

Good grief, that's a statement. And bravo. (However, what can they really do with that money? Operating systems aren't the sexiest of free software projects to work on, so I would be tempted to think that manpower is FreeBSDs biggest limiter.)

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
debacle 12y ago
You can find their last two budget reports on the foundation's website. This looks like a huge cash injection and if they put it aside it will pretty much double their assets.
bictorman 12y ago
I don't know their hosting costs or if they have any need for more. But that money (or the investment returns) could be well spent on marketing for the project.
- emaste 12y ago
  To date the FreeBSD Project has benefited from the generosity of a number of users of FreeBSD who donate data center space and connectivity. Some examples are Yahoo!, NYI, ISC, and Sentex. The point about the need for and value of marketing is well taken; Anne Dickison joined the Foundation as Marketing Director earlier this year.
emaste 12y ago
The Foundation's financials are open, so you can see how the money has been used in the past. The short version is that our 2014 budget was on track to spend about half that amount (i.e., approaching half a million) on funded project development, through permanent staff and development contracts. The other portion goes into supporting conferences, hardware purchases for the FreeBSD cluster, and staff time to support the FreeBSD project. Keep in mind that this donation won't be spent in one year; we'll be able to find qualified uses for this money.

rodgerd 12y ago

Neat.

drawkbox 12y ago

A great example to others who have success because of open source. It should be a common thing that once you find the coveted golden parachute in the sprawling game of life, you give a percentage back to OSS as a tradition to others on the adventure.

Someone1234 12y ago
Isn't the expression "golden parachute" typically reserved for excessive payouts when an employee gets fired/made redundant/laid off/etc? As far as I know Jan Koum still works as CEO for WhatsApp, so this isn't from a "golden parachute" payment.
- drawkbox 12y ago
  Yes it is but it is also used for acquisitions where the money is so big that the person suddenly never has to worry about anything ever again related to money, a golden parachute. Typically though most acquisitions founders/co-founders will leave after their couple years of vesting as with new money they have more opportunities, doesn't always happen but usually. The recent Facebook buys of Oculus and WhatsApp may be different and more like Amazon's Zappos and Twitch acquisitions. Here I was using it more as a game item that you get so much money from a successful product that you don't really have to worry about anything again. I usually hear it with technology acquisitions and founders leaving later after the money than with termination as there are only golden parachutes for failure in the financial industry. I should have said funding or freedom, as the funding from WhatsApp sale now gives Jan Koum the freedom to work on many ideas and support important projects like BSD.
  - hayksaakian 12y ago
    I hate to be pedantic, but I think the phrase you're looking for is "golden handcuffs"
    - nandemo 12y ago
      It's not even pedantic. Golden parachute: you're forced out (by a lay-off or takeover) but they're obligated to give you a pile of money. Golden handcuffs: you volunteer for corporate servitude (by being acquired) in exchange for a big pile of money.

tiffanyh 12y ago

From the announcement: >>"This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago" First, I'm extremely excited to see this announcement. FreeBSD is fantastic and extremely underrated. Secondly though, isn't it sad to hear that in FreeBSD existence - this is the largest donation ever ... given that Yahoo use to run it's entire company on it, OS X is based on it, Juniper is based on it, Netflix deploys on it, NetApp, EMC, etc. Edit: typo

jmsdnns 12y ago
Apple somewhat gutted the FreeBSD team to build Darwin, too.
- tiffanyh 12y ago
  Great point. Here's a link to one of many articles that addresses your statement, for those uninformed [1]. Just imagine how many Apples products exist today that go back to FreeBSD roots (Mac, iPad, iPod, iPhone's, etc). [1] http://www.macworld.com/article/1018184/apple.html http://www.macworld.com/article/1018184/apple.html
swills 12y ago
If you read the commit messages you will often see a "Sponsored by:" line, and it's not uncommon to see those companies referenced, so they are supporting FreeBSD, just in the form of developer time. And I believe they also donate to the foundation as well.
- tiffanyh 12y ago
  I'll bite. Core FreeBSD has 272,082 commits [1] Of those, only 9,244 commits [2] have the word "Sponsored" in their commit message; however, 3,486 were sponsored by "The FreeBSD Foundation" [3]. So only a net total of 5,758 commits were company sponsored. Said another way, that means just 2.1% of all commits ever made to FreeBSD, in it's 21 year existence, were companies sponsoring and submitting patches. So no, I think it's safe to say that FreeBSD is primarily run and operated by lone individuals who do it because they personally love FreeBSD. Edit: typo, fixed stats. [1] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q= https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q= [2] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=Sponsored https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=Sponsored [3] https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=%22The+FreeBSD+Foundation%22 https://secure.freshbsd.org/search?q=%22The+FreeBSD+Foundati...

pessimizer 12y ago

"With this donation, and the generosity of all those who have donated this year, we have shattered our 2014, million dollar fundraising goal! But this does not mean we can stop our fundraising efforts. Only by increasing the size and diversity of our donor pool can we ensure a stable and consistent funding stream to support the FreeBSD project." Is this very, very dry humor? edit: So nobody thinks that there's anything funny about reaching a million dollar fundraising goal, but noting that they might want to expand the size and diversity of the donor pool in future after getting a million dollar donation from a single person. Of course they reached the goal, and of course they might want to raise the size of the donor pool it took to reach the goal [one person] and the diversity [the donors that put them over the top all have the same Social Security number.] Feel free to interpret the comment as "why donate to them, they just got a million dollars" or whatever bizarre impression people are getting, but if I meant that, I would have just said that.

drderidder 12y ago
Not unless the fact that organizations have recurring annual funding requirements is funny.
- pessimizer 12y ago
  If I make a joke about soldiers, am I saying that war is funny?
jlgaddis 12y ago
Um, no? Why would you think that?
- pessimizer 12y ago
  For obvious reasons.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    The downvotes suggest that it's not obvious to other people. FreeBSD get a huge donation. They let people know about this - it's a great piece of publicity. But that carries a risk. Some people will think that FreeBSD doesn't need any more donations because of this single huge donation, so FreeBSD needs to talk about the importance of regular donations from a broad group of supporters, not just huge donations from a tiny group or purely corporate donations. I fail to see how any of that could possibly be part of some humorous comment.

otterley 12y ago

Looks like the mantle has passed from Yahoo! being FreeBSD's biggest advocate and sponsor (not in direct cash donations, but employing their maintainers) to WhatsApp. Nice to see the Y! alumni are keeping the tradition alive.

jaxx456 12y ago
It's good to see any large company remembering the important software their company is built on. I don't know if companies like Yahoo or Google could have ever been started without free and open source software.

jaxx345 12y ago

I'm really excited to see the community gain more traction, especially financially right now.

jaxx345 12y ago

Why don't other large companies also contribute to FreeBSD? I know Netflix is a large consumer. It seems they would want to contribute more.

allanjude 12y ago
Netflix does contribute, in addition to money paid to the foundation, they also have quite a few developers working on FreeBSD almost full time. You can see lots of commits with 'Sponsored by: Netflix'. nginx and Yandex also do a lot of commits. http://freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix http://freshbsd.org/search?q=netflix

datashovel 12y ago

While donations from corporations is great, my hope is that developers will jump on the micro-payment bandwagon. If every developer who uses FreeBSD in one capacity or another donated $1 per month, the FreeBSD Foundation would likely never need to ask for donations again. I currently do quarterly donations to FreeBSD Foundation and Apache Foundation, and some hand-picked developers in the technologies I use regularly, whom I would consider indispensable in the open source community. While it's not $1M, if everyone were doing it, none of those groups would depend on corporate donations. I have even thought of a project that I may bring to life one day, if enough interest exists. Find the most indispensable members of the open source community and put crowdfunding efforts together to buy them out. In other words, put enough money on the table that they won't need to work for 1,2,3 years at a time. Working tirelessly on open source projects is something these people have already proven they love to do, and will almost certainly continue if suddenly they came across a windfall like this. My guess is these kinds of things have been attempted, but for one reason or another have never really gained the support they would need.

kev009 12y ago
Diverse donations are also necessary for 501c(3) status in the US, so yes everyone please give a few dollars every year!
ErrantX 12y ago
Given that the freeBSD foundation receives approx. $400,00-500,000 in donations from less than 20 corps/individuals... I think rather a lot of developers would have to donate :) Are there 42,000 FreeBSD developers willing to contribute?
- Taek 12y ago
  $1 per month is an incredibly trivial number. Less trivial is how difficult it is to set up payment in this fashion. If getting payment was as simple as convincing developers that it was worth $1 per month, I'm sure you could get to $1m per year (many would do much better than $1 per month).
- datashovel 12y ago

jason_slack 12y ago

This inspires me to give FreeBSD another shot. I haven't used it in a few years in favor of CentOS. There was a point I had my laptop running FreeBSD as my main OS.

Siecje 12y ago

Interesting that he got more value out of FreeBSD (Job at Yahoo!) than Erlang.

sandGorgon 12y ago

There are lots of comments on how sad it is that nobody donates to the FreeBSD foundation. Part of the blame lies with the foundation itself - they don't know how to ask! Fundraising is a full time, yet unsexy job...and very few people do it well. The key thing is to be top of mind by asking frequently and nicely. Personally, when the time comes, I default towards Wikipedia because Jimmy Wales does a great job of asking. This is a problem not just with FreeBSD, but many others like OpenSSL,etc. If nothing else, I wish these guys just run a yearly kickstarter just for outreach.

vayarajesh 12y ago

>> "This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago" Al though it is awesome that they have received this donation but it is such a shame it took 15 years to get a $1M donation for such a great work they are doing.. and on the other side silly small apps get millions of funding which go in total waste and those apps might be using FreeBSD for their production servers or development Its nice to see FreeBSD getting appreciated

vidoc 12y ago

I wonder how much money a million dollar for this guy would be for me.. I'm thinking it should probably be in the neighborhood of $.10 Either way, brilliant business plan from this whatsapp co-founder :P

estrabd 12y ago
.005% of your approximate net worth (1m/19b)

jmiller_com 12y ago

This is great news. People bashing other companies, keep in mind some of them employ people that work near full-time on FreeBSD. But, some deserve the bashing.

beartime 12y ago

So in a way, thanks Facebook

dummyfellow 12y ago

Companies like Facebook, Google should give 100$ to each employee to donate, will be petty cash for them, but will reach many project the company is really benefiting from.

FractalNerve 12y ago

What will they do with that huge amount of much money? Personally: I hope they make an UI to FreeBSD on par with OS X, because it already seems to be so stable that no change except security fixes is neccessary in my naïve eyes ☺ Sorry, if this was asked before.

pnathan 12y ago

Congratulations to FreeBSD; mad props to WhatsApp's founder.