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An interesting bit of that is how small the cash donations are in absolute terms! Giant companies like NetApp and Google have now been out-donated by one indivi

An interesting bit of that is how small the cash donations are in absolute terms! Giant companies like NetApp and Google have now been out-donated by one individual person! A wealthy person, admittedly. But those companies' cumulative donations to the project over 7 years are surprisingly small, basically in the range of what you might expect one wealthy person to donate to a charity or university they support. Given the cost of developers, perhaps that suggests that cash donations are not all that effective a method, and measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time? If you convert the donations to developer-years, companies like NetApp and Google have each donated an average of less than one developer per year over that period in the cash format. Surely there is some company that beats that threshold, if measured in developer-years?

cperciva 12y ago
An interesting bit of that is how small the cash donations are in absolute terms! Keep in mind that those are lower bounds based on which "donation bracket" they fell into. I know there was at least one case where a company donated $200k (which fell into the $100-250k bracket). measuring contributions to FreeBSD is maybe better done in developer time Yes. But that's harder to measure, of course. Also keep in mind that the FreeBSD Foundation != the FreeBSD Project; it is only in the past couple of years that the Foundation has had enough money to hire ongoing engineering staff. For a long time their budget went to project infrastructure and self-contained projects proposed by individual developers.