Strong Foundations: FreeBSD, Wikimedia Raise Buckets of Development Money 113
mbadolato writes "On December 9, 2012, Slashdot reported that the FreeBSD Foundation was falling short of their 2012 goal of $500,000 by nearly 50%. For all of those that continued to echo about how FreeBSD is dying, it's less than three weeks later and the total is presently nearing $200,000 OVER the goal. Netcraft continues to be wrong."
And reader hypnosec adds another crowdfunding success story: "The Wikimedia Foundation has announced at the conclusion of its ninth annual fund-raiser that it has managed to raise a whopping $25 million from 1.2 million donors in just over a week's time. ... As compared to last year's fund-raiser, which got completed in 46 days, this year's was completed in just nine days."
All This Proves Is ... (Score:0, Interesting)
All this proves is that some people are willing to put their money where their mouth is when it comes to things that are important. If only we/they would do the same with some political contributions to those who are trying to change things for the better (human rights, privacy rights, less spying, copyright/patent reform, tort reform, etc, etc, etc).
You can't change the system from the outside. Getting players on the inside requires playing the current incarnation of the game. That requires money.
Donate what you can. I give 20 bucks, maybe 40. (Score:2, Interesting)
I donate (small amounts) to FreeBSD almost every year, and I don't even use their software currently. They have an important place in the history of Unix-like operating systems, and I have used their software for some great projects in the past.
Wikipedia is so obnoxious with their fundraising, I've stopped donating. The local news recently reported that the most visited page on Wikipedia was "Facebook", and I rarely use it. I did get a kick out of their previous campaign where the staffers photos were above the article - deceptively close to the subject. Searches returned some pretty funny results.
Re:non-Oracle ZFS FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
That's my use case as well. I gave them some cash, lord knows I've used their efforts enough.
My surprise when setting up the ZFS server was in how well everything has worked so far. ZFS has also caught corruption a few times, so I'm going to give it props. It has me wondering if it is possible to get the same kind of data integrity on Mac or Windows. As a stopgap, I sync everything important with Unison so that I can see bitrot on the Mac/PC side. I once caught a really nasty corruption in the middle of my Photos directory that rendered several jpegs useless. More recently I caught another, though this time it was just in the preview image so it wouldn't have been a big deal. It makes me wonder what is going on in the directories that I don't sync!
Re:All This Proves Is ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Told ya FreeBSD would make it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Told ya so! [slashdot.org]
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't still donate! ;-)
--libman
Re:c++ (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the things I like about FreeBSD is their openess to languages (in contrast to OpenBSD, who think C is the only language around...)
Throughout the years, FreeBSD developers reached out for what they thought were the best languages for the job: Modula-3 (for cvsup, though now deprecated), Forth on the boot loader (ideal, right? Can drop you into a little Forth shell), Ruby for ports infrastructure. In that way, they are not prejudiced about programming languages. Users contribute a great deal too. All the things you get in Debian (lots of languages).
FreeBSD developers also have ported important innovations that are open-sourced but lacking in Linux, because of pure ideology (the GPL doesn't play well with others): Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (a framework that implements concurrency *correctly*), and LLVM (which as a side effect, brings C blocks [wikipedia.org] (effectively, closures for C).
Additionally, many vendors support FreeBSD. I, for instance, run Eiffel on FreeBSD (for the world's best introduction to Object Oriented Programming: A Touch of class [touch.ethz.ch]. Common Lisp has vendors that support FreeBSD (LispWorks, Franz), and so has Smalltalk (Cincom, Smalltalk/X). All these vendors have free products and commercial support.
There's nothing stopping anyone from doing whatever they want with C++ on FreeBSD. But seriously, C++? Shouldn't you be looking at D?
Re:non-Oracle ZFS FTW (Score:4, Interesting)
I use mine for a few things:
- Media server. This uses surprisingly little space, though that may change when I switch to high-def.
- Backup. This is where all the space disappears to. The 3 computers in the house all target it.
- CrashPlan. Every time a friend or relative has me touch their computer, they get CrashPlan pointed to my server.
- Services. My photos, music, and some other data get shared via various services.
It also makes a nice machine to throw a VM on when you need to.