FreeBSD Foundation Receives Another $500,000 USD Gift

[L_A_G]

This year the foundation received $1,509,493 of their $1,200,000 goal

So if they hadn't gotten this donation they would have missed their funding goal for the year by roughly $200.000? I guess that qualifies as a close call...

Still, I wonder who would have this much money available for donations and a good enough reason to donate that much to the project? Sony? Because they'd probably have to spend considerably more moving their future consoles onto a new base OS if FreeBSD crashed and burned.

[uid313]

Still, I wonder who would have this much money available for donations and a good enough reason to donate that much to the project? Sony? Because they'd probably have to spend considerably more moving their future consoles onto a new base OS if FreeBSD crashed and burned.

Maybe Netflix, Yandex or Akamai?
Maybe Apple, since Darwin is based on the FreeBSD kernel?
Maybe some defense company or national military relies on FreeBSD in their systems. China at least used to base their Kylin operating system on FreeBSD.

[LinuxID10T]

funding conventions, project management, and paying for a few full time developers to work on core projects basically as I understand it.

I didn't even know FreeBSD had full time developers...

[GreekGeek]

Whoop!!!! Excellent news :-)

[aht0]

will other *bsd's benefit from the donation somehow?
why freebsd?
why bad?
why not freenas?
why not Linux?
WHY NOT BCACHE-FS??

Most importantly, why not you? :P

So if they hadn't gotten this donation they would have missed their funding goal for the year by roughly $200.000? I guess that qualifies as a close call...

Still, I wonder who would have this much money available for donations and a good enough reason to donate that much to the project? Sony? Because they'd probably have to spend considerably more moving their future consoles onto a new base OS if FreeBSD crashed and burned.

Defense firm or some military. Rich people tend to have equally sized egos so staying anonymous is not usually an option they would voluntarily choose. IT firm which does not want PR mess or multitude of assumptions made from donations (MS?).Tax deduction could also be reason.

[L_A_G]

Maybe Netflix, Yandex or Akamai?

You'd think a publicly traded company would announce donations like this due to the PR value stemming from them. Specially when unlike Sony, they don't try to hide the fact that they're using FreeBSD in their products.

Maybe Apple, since Darwin is based on the FreeBSD kernel?

NeXTSTEP (the basis for OSX) was forked from regular BSD in the mid-late 80's and FreeBSD, which is another fork of regular BSD, wasn't forked until 1993. The two share the same origins, but one is not based on the other.

Maybe some defense company or national military relies on FreeBSD in their systems. China at least used to base their Kylin operating system on FreeBSD.

National militaries rarely develop their own systems, but for a western defense contractor it could very much make sense to use some BSD derived OS for systems where security is critical. As for Kylin, they dropped the FreeBSD kernel 6 years ago.

[dragon321]

Maybe Apple, since Darwin is based on the FreeBSD kernel?

Darwin isn't using FreeBSD kernel nor base on it. Darwin using XNU kernel, which is Mach kernel with some Free/Net BSD components. macOS isn't FreeBSD with pretty GUI.

[Passso]

Of course this not Sony. Billions cash earned thanks to BSD, 0 cent back.

[greyseek3r]

So... Does that mean we can expect better radeon support in 2017? xD

[greyseek3r]

So... Does that mean we can expect better radeon support in 2017? xD