

All Tarsnap profits for Dec '09 will be donated to the FreeBSD Foundation - cperciva
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-12-08-supporting-FreeBSD.html

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dannytatom
I hate commenting when I have nothing of real value to add, but I just wanted
to say this is wonderful and I hope you get some new customers out of it.

~~~
cperciva
Thanks! It's always nice to know that things like this are appreciated.

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a2tech
This is extremely generous and couldn't go to a more deserving group of hard
working programmers.

Makes me wish I had my own company to match his generosity!

~~~
cperciva
Well, you know, I've decided that I don't particularly like ramen, so I
figured that I'd go without this month. :-)

In all seriousness, I was planning on making a donation anyway, but I figured
that I could afford to make a bigger donation this way. If I'm lucky, this
will bring in new users, and the lack of profits this month will be balanced
out by increased profits in the following months... but even if nobody new
uses Tarsnap because of this, I'll be glad that I've supported the FreeBSD
Foundation.

~~~
natfriedman
What a great way to do something good and generate business for your company
at the same time.

------
Ixiaus
I'm a dedicated FreeBSD user and never see press like this; FreeBSD f'ing
rocks and I think your idea is great. It's an excellent way to get some press
and help the project financially.

~~~
Ixiaus
This may be a bit off topic from the actual post, but, I just looked at
Tarsnap and think it is awesome (you got a customer out of this).

Have you done any/many blog posts on the technology behind your service? It is
put together very well and the copy on your website is professional, clear,
and abundant. Great job.

~~~
cperciva
_Have you done any/many blog posts on the technology behind your service?_

I've written lots of blog posts which touch on various aspects of Tarsnap, but
the two which fall most closely into the category "technology behind Tarsnap"
are

[http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-12-14-how-tarsnap-
uses-...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-12-14-how-tarsnap-uses-
aws.html) [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-05-09-scrypt-key-
deriva...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-05-09-scrypt-key-
derivation.html)

A few others which sort of fall into that category are
[http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-06-29-high-
performance-...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-06-29-high-performance-
simpledb.html) [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-11-10-tarsnap-public-
be...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-11-10-tarsnap-public-
beta.htmlhttp://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-02-04-tarsnap-
checkpointing.html) [http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-04-18-tarsnap-
prepaid-b...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-04-18-tarsnap-prepaid-
billing.html)

~~~
Ixiaus
Great, I will check it out!

------
wmf
Does FreeBSD accept donations in picodollars?

~~~
cperciva
No -- but for tax purposes I need to round numbers to an integer number of
cents anyway. For some reason the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency only
allows space for two digits after the decimal place on all of their tax
forms...

------
scottlu
Colin, thanks for your ongoing contributions to FreeBSD!

------
andrewljohnson
How much money is he donating?

~~~
cperciva
_How much money is he donating?_

That's between me and the FreeBSD Foundation. I don't feel that me making a
charitable donation should require me to divulge what I consider to be private
personal information.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Well, you certainly don't have to divulge anything, but it's not the charity
that makes that so.

Also, it occurs to me that if this were a truly charitable act (instead of a
partially charitable act along with a plug for your business), then you would
have done it and not told anyone, or at least you wouldn't have asked people
to buy TarSnap at the end of your article.

So, as long as you are marketing me your product, please do tell me how much
money you think this donation amounts to so I can judge your corporate giving
appropriately.

~~~
icey
I'm honestly taken aback by the poor taste of this comment.

There's no such thing as a "partially charitable act", FreeBSD can use the
help - Colin shouldn't feel compelled to disclose his company's financials
because someone on the internet feels that he somehow deserves that
information.

I guess if you needed some sort of baseline by which to base your donation
(assuming you actually intend to make one instead of just being snarky on the
internet), I'd suggest starting with donating significant portions of your
time to the FreeBSD project as Colin has done.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I just think it's reasonable to ask how much he plans to have his business
donate.

And the fact that it is a business making the donation means that it isn't
personal information, it's information about the business, so I didn't think
his response was a reasonable answer.

The reasonable answer is "I'm not telling," not "I'm not telling and it's none
of your business because this is a personal charitable contribution," which it
isn't.

I don't think it's a bad thing he's trying to help FreeBSD, or make a profit.
I just don't feel the same reverence for the act that the other people in this
thread seem to, particularly since I have no way to judge how much FreeBSD
will make, or how much he will profit on the increased sales.

All in all a good PR stunt... whether it's all that charitable of an act,
we'll never know.

~~~
cperciva
_the fact that it is a business making the donation means that it isn't
personal information, it's information about the business_

I didn't notice this bit when I replied earlier. If Tarsnap were a traditional
startup company and there were cofounders and investors, I'd agree with you;
but Tarsnap isn't that. Rather, Tarsnap is 100% owned by me, and the profits
Tarsnap makes -- when I'm not donating them to the FreeBSD Foundation -- are
my income.

To me this moves it from "business information" to "personal information":
You're basically asking how much money I earn -- and while I know many people
are happy to discuss that, the way I was raised makes me treat discussions of
someone's income as only slightly less taboo than discussions of their sex
life.

------
rottencupcakes
As much as I like FreeBSD, and as much as I prefer the BSD license to the GPL,
everytime I think about it, I reach the same conclusion: the BSD License is
flawed.

Because of the GPL, Linux has companies like Red Hat committing 25% of the new
code base. Companies have to improve the product, and Linux can evolve without
direct funding.

The BSD license allows Apple and others to shamelessly rip code out of the
product and put very little in, thus relying on a small community of
developers and donations to keep running. It's a shame really, since FreeBSD
is such a better product with so much potential. And all we can really do is
support it through programs like this.

~~~
cperciva
_Because of the GPL, Linux has companies like Red Hat committing 25% of the
new code base. Companies have to improve the product, and Linux can evolve
without direct funding._

There's two routes for money to take:

1\. People donate money to the FreeBSD Foundation, which then funds FreeBSD
development.

2\. People pay for RHEL, and then RedHat uses that money to fund Linux
development.

Is there really any significant difference between these?

~~~
munchhausen
There is indeed a significant difference between the two - people paying for
RHEL get support in return for their money.

BSD benefactors get a good feeling and a word of thanks for their
contribution.

The difference in the amounts of money received by both institutions shows how
much are people willing to pay for the former vs. the latter.

~~~
antonovka2
Colin's statement was in the context of the question of BSD vs. GPL licensing.

RedHat's model it's clearly more effective than simple charity, but I don't
see a difference between RedHat and any other OSS-reliant contributing vendor.
As an example, Juniper funds FreeBSD development based on sales/support of
their high-end networking products, and contributed the MIPS port included in
FreeBSD 8:

[http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3...](http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/news/article.php/3851031/Juniper-
Backs-FreeBSD-With-MIPS-Port.htm)

Blue Coat contributed the new L2/L3 SMP-improved rewrite:

<http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3835746>

The main difference is that these companies make their money by incorporating
FreeBSD into their products, are not required to provide _all_ the source to
their products, and thus can contribute back improvements as they see fit.

