FreeBSD Foundation's Year-End Fundraising Campaign!

Dear FreeBSD Community,

Your donations have helped make FreeBSD the best open source operating system available! By investing in The FreeBSD Foundation you have helped us keep FreeBSD a high-performance, secure, and stable operating system.

Thanks to people like you, the FreeBSD Foundation has been proudly supporting the FreeBSD Project and community for over 13 years now. We are incredibly grateful for all the support we receive from you and so many individuals and organizations that value FreeBSD. As of this writing we have raised $427,000 towards our goal of raising $1,000,000. Would you consider making a gift to support our work in 2014?

Donations can easily be made here: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.

This year your donations helped FreeBSD by:

• Funding development projects to improve FreeBSD, including: Native iSCSI kernel stack, Updated Intel graphics chipset support, Integration of Newcons, UTF-8 console support, Superpages for ARM architecture, and Layer 2 networking modernization and performance improvements.
• Hiring two more staff members to help with FreeBSD development projects, security, and release engineering.
• Educating the public and promoting FreeBSD. We are preparing the debut our new online magazine, the FreeBSD Journal. We created high-quality brochures to teach people about FreeBSD. We also visited companies to help facilitate collaboration efforts with the Project.
• Sponsoring BSD conferences and summits in Europe, Japan, Canada, and the US.
• Protecting FreeBSD IP and providing legal support to the Project.
• Purchasing hardware to build and improve FreeBSD project infrastructure.

But are you aware of the tangible benefits derived from our support of the FreeBSD community? Providing travel grants to FreeBSD volunteers is a great way to invest in the future of FreeBSD. One person we sponsored was Google Summer of Code student Mike Ma, who had the chance to present his work at EuroBSDCon. During his presentation he received valuable input that will help improve and verify his GSoC work. By attending the conference, he had the opportunity to meet passionate FreeBSD developers who inspired him to learn as much as he could about their different projects. This encouraged him to continue working with his mentor and get involved in his mentor’s work as well as some lldb work.

Now that Mike’s back at his university, he's been busy promoting and advocating for FreeBSD. In fact he's so passionate about the Project now that he convinced a friend who is working on programming languages to work on the clang project, because it's relevant to his own work.

This one investment helped FreeBSD by providing an environment for a student to get more involved in the Project, and bring that enthusiasm back to his university to promote FreeBSD and encourage more students to get involved. This is an investment in the next generation of FreeBSD developers.

Donate today to help us continue and increase our support of the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide! Making a donation is quick and easy. Click here to make a donation.

Thank you for your support!

Sincerely,

Deb Goodkin
Secretary/Treasurer
The FreeBSD Foundation