Java 1.5 donations

John Baldwin jhb at freebsd.org
Fri Mar 17 12:56:45 UTC 2006


On Thursday 16 March 2006 11:06 pm, Michael Vince wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I been seeing a lot of VM crash reports posted to this mailing list and
> I was thinking how it would be great if this project got funding,
> everyone knows doing work for reward is better then doing it for free.
> I just wanted to state my personal opinion and thoughts about this topic.
> I was thinking that methods like Andre Oppermann seem to give a good
> example of how a (arguably) small amount of money $18k US can go to
> greatly help the FreeBSD project.
> http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html
>
> I was wondering if anyone knew if there was any details such as a time
> frame and a rough figure of how much it would cost to get some good
> results (or even full Sun Java certification) happening 1.5 Java on
> i386/amd64 as I was hoping maybe I could persuade the company I work at
> to donate. I also did notice that there was recently a funding
> announcement for Java 1.5 on FreeBSD on the FreeBSD foundation web site
> which is good news.

Yes, the Foundation is the place to donate to for Java 1.5 as they already
have experience with Java 1.4 including Sun certification.

> I have been looking at the FreeBSD web page to judge how good it is in
> enticing donations and I think its a bit ordinary, If you go to the
> entry page of the main FreeBSD web site http://www.freebsd.org  its hard
> to see any sign of a donations page,  The donations page is hidden away
> under the 'about' area. http://www.freebsd.org/about.html which
> ultimately has a link going to the FreeBSD foundation page
> http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/ if you want to donate money,
> personally I don't think thats very good way to entice people to give
> money to the FreeBSD foundation.
> If you look at the OpenBSD web site http://www.openbsd.org/ you can see
> that all they really have on their entry web page is right in the middle
> front page is the encouragement of buying either CDs/Tshirts or straight
> donations which is a effective method of encouragement of donations.
> Some people could be mistaken (or just prefer) to think that FreeBSD
> foundation don't really care about donations which is not ideal.
>
> I think in the main entry FreeBSD web site page there should be an extra
> tab for "Donations" or even in place of either the "About" or "Support"
> links. It could be worded in a similar way OpenBSD have it, where it
> could have more of a guilt factor in there such as 'if your company uses
> FreeBSD then you are encouraged to give back and donate to the FreeBSD
> foundation'.

I think this is a good idea.  I've cc'd marketing@ to see if they can offer
some better feedback.

> I think this is especially true for big companies, I mean I don't know
> how much Apple or Yahoo give back for using FreeBSD but I think if it
> isn't large then having a web page that puts a bit of pressure on all of
> us including big companies to drive a guilt factor could go a long way.
> I did touch on this topic a little while ago and some one flamed me
> saying  Apple gave a lot back by giving back some source patches to the
> GCC project, I don't see any argument other then that is more giving
> back GNU then to directly FreeBSD.

I can't speak for Apple, but note that Apple isn't running FreeBSD directly,
more that they have borrowed bits and pieces of it.  The same can be said
(though perhaps to a lesser extent) of NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Dragonfly and
vice versa (that is, all the *BSD's tend to borrow code from each other).  I
will say that Yahoo! graciously hosts the freebsd.org cluster including all
the bandwidth and power costs, and provides much (most?) of the hardware for
the cluster.  They also provide some hardware to developers, and employ
several committers full time (ps@, mohan@, peter@, etc.).  My employer (The
Weather Channel) employs me full-time and allows me to spend 80 to 90
percent of my time hacking on FreeBSD as well.  Given that, I do think there
is evidence of companies providing a lot for FreeBSD even if it isn't very
visible.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org


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