Top all-time · #328
FreeBSD Foundation
Company blog · freebsdfoundation.org/blog · on HN as emastesystems
FreeBSD Foundation is the company blog at freebsdfoundation.org, writing about systems. Since 2008, 159 different Hacker News readers have linked it 333 times, most often “Help FreeBSD reach it's donation goal for 2017”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-13, and you can follow it by feed.
November 2026 FreeBSD Vendor SummitJoin us November 5–6 for the 2026 FreeBSD Vendor Summit! Connect with FreeBSD developers and contributors to discuss features, solve challenges, and address your organization's needs.Register NowThe Q3 2026 issue of the FreeBSD Journal is now available.This edition
Most-linked posts?
- Help FreeBSD reach it's donation goal for 20177 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2013-12-11
- Maintaining the Fastest CDN at Netflix on FreeBSD7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2024-04-25
- /donate/sponsors6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-12-22
- /donors/6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-03-28
- FreeBSD Foundation is still $55k short of their fundraising target for 20215 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-05-06
- FreeBSD Foundation exceeds target for 20125 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-12-09
- An Introduction to OCI Containers on FreeBSD5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-11-01
- Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-28
- The FreeBSD Foundation falls short of its 2012 fundraising goal by 50%4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-12-29
- Donors to the FreeBSD Foundation4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-12-31
What Hacker News says?
Netapp, Google, Juniper, Netflix, VMware, EMC, Tarsnap, and many others are listed (usually ever year) on the Foundation's donors list [0]. Others (e.g. HP) choose to donate hardware to the Project and most of its infrastructure is hosted (gratis, IIRC) by Yahoo!, ISC, NYI, and Sentex. Side note: Tarsnap is listed at the same level as Juniper (2013) and VMware (2014); I have mixed feelings about that. [0]: https://w…
Comment linking /donate/sponsors
on “WhatsApp Co-Founder Donates $1M to FreeBSD Foundation”Submitted Raid-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS Goes Live as a story · 228 points
HN discussionI don't know, NetApp has been a sponsor for as long as I can remember. If I were running the foundation, I'd probably be happy knowing every year I was getting over $100k from NetApp instead of a one-time thing. It's tough to budget off of one-off donations. Not that they'd complain, but you make it sound like none of those companies help at all. for reference: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors
Comment linking /donate/sponsors
on “WhatsApp Co-Founder Donates $1M to FreeBSD Foundation”Submitted FreeBSD Celebrates 25th Anniversary as a story · 191 points
HN discussionYes, here's a quote from the FreeBSD Foundation's July 2013 newsletter: At WhatsApp we leverage FreeBSD and Erlang to provide industry record uptime. The ability to scale linearly on commodity hardware has allowed WhatsApp to keep our serving costs low. These days we run anywhere between 2 million and 3 million concurrent TCP connections on a single FreeBSD server... https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/press/2013Jul-n…
Comment linking /press/2013Jul-newsletter
on “Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $16B in Cash and Stock Plus $3B in RSUs”Submitted The FreeBSD Foundation falls short of its 2012 fundraising goal by 50% as a story · 186 points
HN discussionHappy New Year! If you're in the United States, don't forget that today is the last day to make your tax deductible donations to charity for 2020! Here are some of my favorite tech related charities that I donate to: https://supporters.eff.org/donate/year-end-challenge--LDEF https://www.python.org/psf/donations/ https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
Comment linking /donate/
on “Happy New Year HN”Submitted Apple Donated $100-$249 to FreeBSD in 2021 as a story · 169 points
HN discussionJails were explicitly designed for security, cgroups were more generalized as more about resource control, and leverages namespaces, capabilities, apparmor/SELinux to accomplish what they do. > Jails create a safe environment independent from the rest of the system. Processes created in this environment cannot access files or resources outside of it.[1] While you can accomplish similar tasks, they are not equivalent…
Comment linking /freebsd-project/resources/introduction-to-freebsd-jails/
on “Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks, etc”Submitted Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686k in FreeBSD Infrastructure Modernization as a story · 158 points
HN discussionThere seems to be a trend that most *BSDs are having donation problems and missed 2013 budgets. For example [1], [2] I encourage all to donate to our BSD friends. We all benefit from their work. [1] https://www.freebsdfoundation.org [2] http://www.netbsd.org/donations/
Comment linking /
on “OpenBSD will shut down if we do not have the funding to keep the lights on”Submitted Anonymous donor donates $500k to FreeBSD Foundation as a story · 95 points
HN discussionPostgreSQL is just a community of volunteers as far as I'm aware, not full-time developers employed by the project. FreeBSD seems to have three paid directors: https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/our-team/ Debian has a leader and also seems to be more a volunteer organisation than a full company: https://www.debian.org/intro/organization
Comment linking /about-us/our-team/
on “Let me pay for Firefox”Submitted A Journey from Linux to FreeBSD as a story · 87 points
HN discussion> And why should they? Because that's a sensible thing to do when someone's open source project is at the very core of your commercial product? > When was the last time someone you know paid Redhat for CentOS or Canonical for Ubuntu on principal? Netflix and Tarsnap have donated to FreeBSD Foundation multiple times[1], and Jan Koum has donated over $1 million after selling WhatsApp[2]. Also, look at how many compani…
Comment linking /donors/
on “WARP is here”Submitted FreeBSD project turns 26 years old as a story · 83 points
HN discussionWhy is it that the Mozilla Foundation was set up in such a way that it cannot fund the core browser development activity? Other foundations do fund software development for their respective projects, e.g. the FreeBSD Foundation [1] and the Python Software Foundation [2]. [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/about-us/about-the-foundation/ [2] https://www.python.org/psf/developersinresidence/
Comment linking /about-us/about-the-foundation/
on “Servo v0.0.1”Submitted FreeBSD OCI Container on Jails/Bhyve with Support for Podman as a story · 72 points
HN discussionDoesn't FreeBSD run the very site you're on? Distrowatch recently switched to it (which IMO is a bit ironic, although they list BSDs as distros too). There's bunch of companies that use and regularly contribute to the code: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/n... Also: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donors/ (I would imagine that company that donate have interest too keep it alive because t…
Comment linking /donors/
on “Bocker – Docker implemented in around 100 lines of Bash (2015)”Submitted Why laptop support, why now: FreeBSD's strategic move toward broader adoption as a story · 71 points
HN discussion> .. wifi as well. OpenBSD has supported 11ac for several years, and has the iwx(4) driver for modern Intel WiFi cards. There's also support for Broadcom FullMAC, bwfm(4), which is on e.g: Apple Silicon machines. HaikuOS also has a port of OpenBSD's iwm/iwx drivers. FreeBSD just recently announced they've started porting the OpenBSD iwx driver.. from Haiku. https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/laptop-support-and-usabi…
Comment linking /blog/laptop-support-and-usability-project-update-first-monthly-report-community-initiatives/
on “OpenBSD Innovations”Submitted FreeBSD Foundation exceeds target for 2012 as a story · 71 points
HN discussionThere are some organisations/groups which seem to be effective in actually paying people. There is a group of Debian developers that collect funding and pay Debian developers/maintainers to maintain LTS for Debian releases: https://www.freexian.com/en/services/debian-lts.html https://raphaelhertzog.com/tag/Freexian+LTS/ The FreeBSD Foundation also hires developers to do actual work: https://www.freebsd.org/news/stat…
Comment linking /what-we-do/projects/
on “Germany offers up to €30k for 6 months of working on OSS”Submitted FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege as a story · 58 points
HN discussionI don't think so. Here's a report from this month: https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/february-2025-laptop-supp... Looks like (some) laptops might sleep and wifi is on the way! (with help from Linux drivers)
Comment linking /blog/february-2025-laptop-support-and-usability-project-update/
on “Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive”Submitted FreeBSD Foundation is still $55k short of their fundraising target for 2021 as a story · 46 points
HN discussion> In 2014 I joined the Netflix cloud performance team. Having spent years as a DTrace expert, it might have seemed crazy for me to move to Linux I thought Netflix was mostly running FreeBSD [1]. Is it only the Open Connect Appliance? [1]: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/testimonial/netflix/
Comment linking /testimonial/netflix/
on “DTrace for Linux 2016”Submitted Why Dell's ThinOS Runs on FreeBSD as a story · 44 points
HN discussionDismissing the FreeBSD community as contrarians feels uncharitable. I can think of at least a few other contributing factors for the increase in popularity of late: 1) Linux's popularity has enlarged the pool of users interested in Unix-like operating systems. Some proportion of users familiar with Unix genuinely like FreeBSD and the unique features it offers. 2) The rise of docker and the implosion of VMWare has dr…
Comment linking /blog/why-laptop-support-why-now-freebsds-strategic-move-toward-broader-adoption/
on “A Love Letter to FreeBSD”Submitted Your Impact on FreeBSD: 2024 Milestones and What’s Next | FreeBSD Foundation as a story · 21 points
HN discussion
