Date: Tue, 1 Jan 2008 02:30:40 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org> To: Pollywog <lists-fbsd@shadypond.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: corporate backers of freebsd Message-ID: <20080101003040.GB2507@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <200712312314.42749.lists-fbsd@shadypond.com> References: <10f7864f0712311010x2497409ava350991ccebf3ae2@mail.gmail.com> <200712312314.42749.lists-fbsd@shadypond.com>
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On 2007-12-31 23:14, Pollywog <lists-fbsd@shadypond.com> wrote:
>On Monday 31 December 2007 18:10:55 Gary Smithe wrote:
>> In short, here's my question:
>> Canonical, RedHat, IBM, Novell, and a slew of others are funding /
>> supporting Linux development and pushing some of that development
>> into the free community, so that all can benefit from full-time
>> developers and the money that supports them.
>
> This is true but on the flip side, Linux has become a target of the
> patent trolls (Microsoft and SCO to name two) and thus far they have
> left FreeBSD alone. This was one thing that prompted me to try
> FreeBSD and to not depend exclusively on one OS solution. I am just
> an individual user but this was still important to me.
>
> BTW you may have read that SCO has been delisted by NASDAQ :)
This is probably a bit off-topic for the original thread, but SCO has
filed for bankruptcy. This is probably related to being delisted by
NASDAQ.
To help a bit with the original question too:
Yes, Gary, there are companies who also fund FreeBSD work in several
ways, i.e.:
* Paying developers on a per-project basis, to implement features
which they need.
* Employing developers, and then contributing code back to the FreeBSD
Project.
* Supporting FreeBSD drivers and subsystems, and working with the
Project to keep their hardware support up to date, to implement new
features, fix bugs, and so on.
Some examples which I recall off the top of my head are:
The support of Isilon Systems for VFS locking, which was then 'ported'
back to FreeBSD. Jeff Roberson worked with Isilon Systems to bring
VFS locking to FreeBSD, and it is not part of the official kernel
source tree.
NetApp and Isilon systems have made public statements, through the
FreeBSD Foundation, about the reasons they like FreeBSD. Advocacy of
this sort, from successful companies is also a good contribution to
the Project. It may convince other companies to look at FreeBSD too.
The hwpmc(4) performance counter work was started by Joseph Koshy, and
then sponsored by Google and the FreeBSD foundation.
NLNet supports the work of Marko Zec for the Network Stack
Virtualization project.
Cisco, iXsystems, Chelsio, Intel, Myricom, Neterion and others are
actively contributing hardware to our "netperf" cluster. Sentex is
hosting the netperf cluster, and has been providing ongoing support to
the FreeBSD Project for a very long time now.
ISC is hosting FreeBSD Project machines too.
Yahoo!, Apple, Juniper, Philips and Cisco are employers of some of the
most active FreeBSD developers, and they have contributed in many many
ways to the well-being and ongoing development of FreeBSD as we know
it today.
Cisco has provided, through Randall R. Stewart, a fully functional
version of the SCTP protocol, and Randall has done an excellent job
both of integrating SCTP into the tree, and supporting / maintaining
it later on.
Last, but definitely not least, Google, through its wonderful `Summer
of Code' projects, has funded the development of a huge number of
features which are either already part of the main FreeBSD source
tree, or are in the process of being refined, debugged, tested and
integrated to the main FreeBSD system. The list of all the Google SoC
projects is available through out web site, but here are some of the
projects which I remember as I'm typing this:
* BSD bintools project (some of the tools which are part of the GNU
binutils have been cleanly implemented using only BSD-licensed
code).
* Improvements to the Ports infrastructure. This was completed and
committed to CVS by Gabor Kovesdan, who was fudned by Google for
_two_ years in a row. Kudos to both Gabor and Google for all the
Ports work they have done :)
* SNMP monitoring and a BSD-licensed snmpd daemon has been
implemented by Shteryana Shopova and committed to the tree.
This is, by far, not an exchaustive list, but just a *few* of the
companies which have supported the FreeBSD Project so far. I have
undoubtedly forgot many more, since I am both a relatively "new" FreeBSD
team member, and I am not involved in *all* the sub-projects which are
part of the greater FreeBSD Project "umbrella".
There is a lot more information on our web site about companies who
contribute to the development of FreeBSD. The quarterly status reports
at <http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/>; and the `Newsflash' at
<http://www.freebsd.org/news/newsflash.html>; are good places to "hunt"
for this sort of information.
HTH,
Giorgos
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