However I've just looked up the donors page on the foundation's website and found your company twice.
The donors page has three columns, one for each of the past 3 years. The reason Tarsnap doesn't appear in all 3 years is that my 2010 donation arrived on December 31st 2010, but for my 2011 donation it took a few days for me to do the final accounting and so I couldn't get the money to them until early January 2012. (Similarly, Tarsnap's end-of-2012 donation will actually show up for the Foundation as an early-2013 donation.)
Have you donated both as a person and a company?
I was operating Tarsnap as a sole proprietorship until late 2011, so my 2010 donation was from "Colin Percival (Tarsnap)", while the 2011 donation (appearing in the 2012 column) was from "Tarsnap Backup Inc."
Given cperciva's non-monetary contributions to FreeBSD over many years, I'd say he ought to get a pass, even if he contributed $0. It seems pretty demanding to expect both huge code contributions over a span of many years, plus monetary donations, from an individual who's just getting his company ramped up.
That's not to say it's not awesome that he contributes both, but I certainly wouldn't be "really disappointed" if he didn't.
I was a bit surprised by that comment, but figured that I was mis-parsing it. I really can't claim to have made "huge code contributions", though: I'm responsible for portsnap and freebsd-update, but those are only a few thousand lines, and aside from those my contributions have been mostly limited to the occasional bug stomping. There are dozens of FreeBSD src developers who have made much larger contributions than I have.
Given the quite high cost of developing and maintaining "a few thousand lines" of pretty heavily used code, I'd say your code contributions have been much more valuable than your monetary contributions. Good programmers often underestimate the value of their code.
But, my primary point was that on the Open Source projects I work on, I'd rather good coders produce great code than contribute money (if the choice must be made, perhaps brought on by having to choose between taking on more non-OSS contract work to make ends meet, for instance). Money is much easier to come by than high quality code. If you're in a position to offer both, then that's awesome. I just thought it really odd to demand the people who work on something to also fund it.
After you shed some different light on my original comment, I have to admit it is phrased weirdly. Apologies for the confusion. It wasn't meant to express the social or any other sort of pressure on Colin's responsibilities as to put the money his company earned into the open source project others also benefit from.
Rather, it was my compliment after seeing how much effort he dedicates to FreeBSD and donating a significant portion of Tarsnap's revenue to the foundation. I reflected on my gut reaction as in `I'd be surprised if a serious contributor wouldn't aid the cause with all the tools he has` and am sorry for the terrible wording.
I'd say your code contributions have been much more valuable than your monetary contributions.
Yes, I'd be inclined to agree there. My financial contributions have been quite modest (and in 2006 I received about $15k of donations from FreeBSD users to let me work on FreeBSD, so in a sense I'm still paying that money back).
I just thought it really odd to demand the people who work on something to also fund it.
Well, I'm not donating as a FreeBSD developer. I'm donating as a company which uses lots of FreeBSD code, and in an attempt to inspire other people and companies to donate.
