Thank you to everyone who made a financial contribution in 2022! We’re still tallying up the totals and will have final numbers soon. Unfortunately, we did not meet our fundraising goal, which reinforced our need of having someone who can focus on encouraging organizations to invest in FreeBSD. We will bring someone on board soon to help with that effort.

In this Quarterly Status report you’ll read about many of the areas we funded in Q4 to improve FreeBSD and advocate for the Project (the two main areas we spend money on). Check out reports on the internally and externally funded projects like Openstack on FreeBSD, Enabling Snapshots on Filesystems Using Journaled Soft Updates, FreeBSD as a Tier 1 cloud-init Platform, and FreeBSD/riscv64 Improvements. In addition, we provided tons of community engagement and education opportunities virtually and in-person!

If you want to help us continue our efforts, please consider making a donation towards our 2023 fundraising campaign! https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/

We also have a Partnership Program for larger commercial donors. You can read about it at https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/.

During the last quarter of 2022, 218 src, 45 ports, and 12 doc tree commits identified the Foundation as a sponsor. Work was committed under Foundation sponsorship to repositories outside of FreeBSD as well, e.g., to the cloud-init project. Some of this sponsored work is described in separate report entries:

Other Foundation work in the src tree included:

The Foundation provides a full-time staff member and funds projects to improve continuous integration, automated testing, and overall quality assurance efforts for the FreeBSD project. You can read about the latest activity for that work in a separate report entry.

Much of our effort is dedicated to Project advocacy. This may involve highlighting interesting FreeBSD work, producing literature and video tutorials, attending events, or giving presentations. The goal of the literature we produce is to teach people FreeBSD basics and help make their path to adoption or contribution easier. Other than attending and presenting at events, we encourage and help community members run their own FreeBSD events, give presentations, or staff FreeBSD tables.

The FreeBSD Foundation sponsors many conferences, events, and summits around the globe. These events can be BSD-related, open source, or technology events geared towards underrepresented groups. We support the FreeBSD-focused events to help provide a venue for sharing knowledge, working together on projects, and facilitating collaboration between developers and commercial users. This all helps provide a healthy ecosystem. We support the non-FreeBSD events to promote and raise awareness of FreeBSD, to increase the use of FreeBSD in different applications, and to recruit more contributors to the Project. We are continuing to attend events both in person and virtual as well as planning the November Vendor Summit. In addition to attending and planning virtual events, we are continually working on new training initiatives and updating our selection of how-to guides to facilitate getting more folks to try out FreeBSD.

Check out some of the advocacy and education work we did last quarter:

We help educate the world about FreeBSD by publishing the professionally produced FreeBSD Journal. As we mentioned previously, the FreeBSD Journal is now a free publication. Find out more and access the latest issues at https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/journal/.

You can find out more about events we attended and upcoming events at https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/news-and-events/.

The Foundation owns the FreeBSD trademarks, and it is our responsibility to protect them. We also provide legal support for the core team to investigate questions that arise.

Go to https://www.freebsdfoundation.org to find more about how we support FreeBSD and how we can help you!