Java 1.5 donations

[Eric Anderson]

John Baldwin wrote:
> 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.

A related question: what's the best way for a company to sponsor work in 
a certain area or for a particular project?  For instance, we could 
*really* benefit from having journaling in UFS, so I'm sure we'd sponsor 
the whole, or a majority of, the cost of having a developer (or 
developers) work this out. 


Eric





-- 
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Eric Anderson        Sr. Systems Administrator        Centaur Technology
Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't.
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