

FreeBSD Foundation exceeds target for 2012 - owe
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml

======
cperciva
There's something very interesting going on here: A week ago the total jumped
by $100k from an anonymous donation. Now the total just jumped by another
$150k, and the donors list is showing "Anonymous Donor" in a new $250k+
category. Did Mr. Anonymous send in a $100k check and then change his mind and
add another $150k a week later?

~~~
enduser
US public charities (which means donations from the public are tax-deductable)
are limited in the percentage of their income they can receive from private
foundations and families. The amount of the large donation may have been
contingent upon receiving enough funds from a broader base of sources. Too
large of a donation could have caused the FreeBSD Foundation to fail their
public support test for the year and be reclassified as a private foundation.

IANAL, but I am the chairman of a 501(c)(3)

~~~
cperciva
I don't think that's a problem here. I've been looking at the donors list and
the sizes of donations for the past few months with an eye to where the public
support test ends up, and by my arithmetic they could have given the $250k
earlier in the year without ever putting the Foundation at risk of failing the
public support test.

For what it's worth: Over the 2008-2012 window, the 2%-of-total-support cap on
the amount of each donor's contribution which counts as "public" is currently
at almost $40k; and there are five donors (Anonymous, NetApp, Hudson River
Trading, iXsystems, and Google) which are currently above that limit. As a
result, each new dollar donated by someone not on that list else counts as
$1.10 towards the "public support" amount, since it increases by 5 x $0.02 the
amount of "public support" from those five largest donors, in addition to the
$1 itself counting as public support.

------
sdfjkl
FreeBSD seems to emphasise doing things right over doing them in a hurry and
therefore may at times be a bit behind the curve in terms of support for the
latest hardware and features. But when those features do come, they tend to be
of superior quality (GEOM, Netgraph & bhyve for example) and rock solid. For
serious server and and networking use (often in the guise of pfSense), that
makes it my OS of choice. Glad to see some hardware vendors think the same
way.

------
JeremyMorgan
Very Cool.

I feel that the OS has somewhat fallen behind the times, and fallen out of the
limelight, so I'm glad to see some support for it still out there.

It's not the most popular OS in the world but it sure is a nice one.
Everything I've ever used it for worked great once I got it dialed in.

~~~
merlincorey
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; FreeBSD amd64; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0

------
insertnickname
Screw the naysayers who said FreeBSD wouldn't make it.

~~~
codewright
Don't think there are any.

~~~
housel
I don't know if they count as serious naysayers or not, but:
[http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?76208-FreeBSD-
is-D...](http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?76208-FreeBSD-is-Dying)

~~~
codewright
Why does anybody care what some forum troll on Phoronix says? I was replying
to a statement that made it sound like Linux users had declared jihad on
FreeBSD.

~~~
gonzo
Why does anyone care what Eric S. Raymond says?

'cause he thinks FreeBSD is a turd, too.

[http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538&cpage=1#comment-229100](http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=538&cpage=1#comment-229100)

~~~
X-Istence
Meh, this is the same guy that wrote a nasty gram to some Microsoft recruiter
when an simple email saying "no thanks" would have sufficed:

esr.ibiblio.org/?p=208

------
nimrody
Now that FreeBSD had exceeded their target, you might want to consider
donating to Haiku (<https://www.haiku-os.org/>).

Unlike FreeBSD which is targeting servers (much like Linux), Haiku is designed
for personal computing and emphasizes responsiveness and ease of use.

~~~
cperciva
_Unlike FreeBSD which is targeting servers_

FreeBSD isn't just targeting servers. There's also a lot of work happening on
embedded systems, and one of the larger projects the FreeBSD Foundation funded
recently was strictly desktop-oriented -- providing support for Intel graphics
chipsets.

------
BadDesign
Seems like FreeBSD is _not dying_ after all.

