We kicked off the new year with ambitious goals to help move the FreeBSD Project forward by identifying features and functionality to support in the operating system and increasing our advocacy efforts to increase and expand the visibility of FreeBSD. Stay tuned for a blog post that will provide more information on our 2024 goals and plans.

We also published the 2024 Budget. In order to provide greater transparency about the budgeting process, we wrote a blog post that provides more details on how funding is allocated, new breakouts of some of the project expense categories, and more details on where the funding is going.

During the first quarter of 2024, 180 src, 65 ports, and 18 doc tree commits identified The FreeBSD Foundation as a sponsor.

Three new projects began this quarter.

Six projects continued this quarter.

Here is a sampling of other Foundation-sponsored development completed over the first quarter of 2024:

A contract was completed to set up a new cluster site at NYI Chicago. You can read about the details of that project on the Foundation’s blog.

As part of our continued support of the FreeBSD Project, the Foundation supports a full-time staff member dedicated to improving the Project’s continuous integration system and the test infrastructure. The full update can be found within the quarterly status report.

A focus of Partnerships this Quarter has been to educate the industry about the innovations in the FreeBSD community and the impact that FreeBSD continues to have as a cornerstone to our digital society. This is an ongoing priority, and one we invite (encourage) everyone using and working on FreeBSD to join us in. Greg Wallace, the Foundation Partnerships lead, is grateful for the opportunities he has had to meet with open source and industry leaders at Microsoft, Google, AWS, OpenSSF, Alpha-Omega, CISA, Eclipse Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Apache Software Foundation, Rust Foundation, Red Hat, Linux Foundation and many others to ensure they have visibility into the key role FreeBSD plays in the global digital infrastructure. This is a role FreeBSD has earned through its technical excellence, security by design, high availability, simplicity of operations, commitment to open source collaboration, and cohesiveness.

One sees these characteristics of FreeBSD in the important ongoing funded development work such as porting VPP to FreeBSD, sponsored by RG Nets.

Ensuring industry visibility to the excellence and impact of FreeBSD is vital to ensuring tier one support for FreeBSD across all key hardware and software platforms. As a community, every conversation we have with people outside the BSD communities, and every piece of content we publish, that attest to how FreeBSD powers our individual and corporate success, brings us one step closer.

To this end, the Foundation is working on a FreeBSD Impact Report that will aggregate the core and often mission critical role FreeBSD plays in society, from embedded systems powered by QNX, to payments and check processing, to digital entertainment, internet and cybersecurity infrastructure.

Our community is stepping up in innumerable ways, including to make sure FreeBSD supports industry-standard containerized workloads — check out the Open Container Initiative FreeBSD runtime extension working group.

The recently opened hardware vendor support survey will feed into a hardware support guide that reflects the collective experience of all respondents that is intended to help everyone identify hardware vendors that prioritize FreeBSD; it will also help focus Partnerships' outreach on the priority vendors.

To close, please TELL THE WORLD YOU USE FREEBSD AND WHY. There is no wrong way to do this — put it on your blog, on your favorite social media channel, list FreeBSD on your company’s Open Source page, contact the Foundation about a Case Study, etc.

Stormshield, a leading cybersecurity company based in Europe, provides a great example of how vendors that use FreeBSD can do this. The footer of their blogs says: "A strong supporter of Open Source, Stormshield is an active member (and sponsor) of the FreeBSD community…​Whenever we modify Open Source software, make patches or add features, we offer them to the community for inclusion."

The first quarter of 2024 marked the beginning of a new era for the Foundation Advocacy team. We welcomed Kim McMahon in the role of Senior Director of Advocacy and Community and also brought on two new technical writers to help increase the frequency and depth of the FreeBSD-related content we produce. Just some of our expanded Q1 efforts to support FreeBSD are below.

Thank you to everyone who gave us a financial contribution last quarter to help fund our work to support the Project. 2024 started strong with a total of $250,855 raised this quarter. We are grateful for your investment in FreeBSD!

Please consider supporting our efforts in 2024 by making a donation here: https://freebsdfoundation.org/donate/.

Or, check out our Partnership opportunities here: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/freebsd-foundation-partnership-program/.

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