Monday, November 17, 2014

Updated! - FreeBSD Foundation Announces Generous Donation and Fundraising Milestone

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce it has received a $1,000,000 donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp. This marks the largest single donation to the Foundation since its inception almost 15 years ago, and serves as another example of someone using FreeBSD to great success and then giving back to the community. Find out more about Jan's reasons for donating below. We're now in the process of working together as a team to decide how best to use this gift to serve the FreeBSD community. That plan will combine financial investment, to ensure the effects of this donation are felt for many years to come, and an acceleration of the Foundation's growth into new capabilities and services. FreeBSD has a tremendous impact on our world. Our mission is to increase that impact through educational outreach, advocacy, community support, and technical investments. More information on how we serve each of these areas can be found on our website. With this donation, and the generosity of all those who have donated this year, we have shattered our 2014, million dollar fundraising goal! But this does not mean we can stop our fundraising efforts. Only by increasing the size and diversity of our donor pool can we ensure a stable and consistent funding stream to support the FreeBSD project. 

Please help us continue to grow FreeBSD's reach and impact on our world. Donate today!
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Update: The following contains the full text from Jan's Facebook post on 11/17/2014:

Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life.
I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do.
I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative.
 --Jan Koum

29 comments:

  1. Well deserved, finally justice has been made. Congratulations.

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  2. Congratulations, what fantastic news!!! So deserving. Don't spend it all in one place, unless that is with the OSI ;-)

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  3. You should accept bitcoin! Paypal is a plague.

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    Replies
    1. We do: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/bitcoin.

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  4. Thank you Jan. I was 16 and living in government housing with a bunch of thugs for roommates. After being denied a job flipping burgers, Jan's reference helped me land my first real infosec job.

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  5. Congratulations! FreeBSD still has a spot in my heart as my first real OS.

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  6. Congrats!! This is great news! I hope we can see the effect of all this money, among other things, in progress for the use of FreeBSD on the dekstop.

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  7. Now I hope FreeBSD Foundation will grant the making VIMAGE production ready.

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  8. Congratulations! Indeed it can help to implement many useful features and stabilize the existing ones...

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  9. Thank you, your contribution makes a big difference for the FreeBSD Project

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  10. Hopefully this will go towards the following:

    Live Jail migration technology (VPS):
    http://www.7he.at/freebsd/vps/

    Hybrid cluster like capabilities:
    http://www.hybridcluster.com/technology/system-overview/

    http://www.hybridcluster.com/technology/

    ZFS + pNFS (shared clustered filesystem)

    http://www.panasas.com/products/pnfs-overview

    ilumnos has it:
    https://www.illumos.org/documents/3

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  12. We will wait for IPv6-Jail RACCT/RCTL, VIMAGE (vnet) for GENERIC-kernel.

    CBSD - FreeBSD Jail Management Tools ( http://www.bsdstore.ru/en/about.html )
    Support: Cluster replications jails machines, Encrypt jails with a run, bhyve, Web/GUI-Tui, Qemu. Fast deploy, replication.

    i915kms_load="YES" - broken server load with a kern.vty=vt FreeBSD 10.1 not fixed yet:
    - https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/need-help-to-recover-from-bug-193613.48934/

    FreeBSD 10 Desktop How-to: https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/
    I'm having problems loading the encrypted freebsd, without ip-kvm/ipmi impossible to enter a password, as there is a solution
    (Unlocking encrypted root partition remotely via SSH)
    - http://blog.neutrino.es/2011/unlocking-a-luks-encrypted-root-partition-remotely-via-ssh/
    - http://dev.kakaopor.hu/early-ssh/ + busybox
    - http://matt.ucc.asn.au/dropbear/dropbear.html + busybox

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  13. Use the money to pay someone at Adobe to write a native flash driver :-)

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. I am sure that flash from adobe has hundreds of vulnerabilities that developers don't want to fix it for thank you and even search for... So Flash should open and show that there are no backdoors...

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  14. The sociology of Marcel Mauss put into practice.
    Give, must receive and reciprocate.

    greetings to all.

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  15. Cool. Will FreeBSD unbuntufy now? (Not in terms of code, in terms of ease of use.)

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  16. Maybe it's time to migrate from "mailman" to "mlmmj" it is more convenient...

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  17. i think gpgpu support i s important

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    1. Not enough still NUMA and many other things, for use in heavily loaded systems computing
      https://wiki.freebsd.org/NUMA

      So there is a lack of similar launchd and uselessd (clean minimalist alternative to systemd), FreeBSD-10.1 is still a very long time to boot, the implementation of the decryption of encrypted-geli disks is not yet implemented via bootloader+busybox. At Ubuntu-Enterprise cloud, disk-drive decryption possible remotely via SSH or serial port.

      You can decrypt the volume using grub but there is a lot of magic, it doesn't pull to deploy hundreds of servers in a minute, Ubuntu MAAS-Juju when it wins on speed deployments https://juju.ubuntu.com/
      https://maas.ubuntu.com/

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  18. Use the money to pay Luigi Rizzo, to write stable and production ipfw-netmap, dummynet-netmap.

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  19. Long Live Jan. you just gave feathers to a great OS

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  21. Please spend this money on operation for miwi cloning

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  22. Hi.. Great news

    To the freebsd foundation: Spanish is the second most spoken language, do you have plans to make courses in this language ?

    To Dru Lavigne: What do you think to make certifications in spanish ?

    Thank you

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