Thanksgiving - no donation this year

dgoodkin said:
What questions do you think I should ask?
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dgoodkin, if I were you, I would use the FreeBSD forums to push projects forward, especially those that need prioritization or those that are struggling to make progress but are important. There are quite a few of those.

The FreeBSD forums aren't just for newbies who want to install RELEASE-15 on some poorly supported laptop for the first time. There are quite a few people here who have many years of experience with FreeBSD. Don't let some complaining here irritate you, because there are people who would be willing to do something if you asked them for some kind of cooperation. That could be at least as valuable as asking for donations.

If I were you, I would ask the forum administrators to set up a separate “Foundation” sub forum where Foundation-related matters can be discussed, Foundation staff can be found, and relevant issues can be discussed. I would suggest, for example, a sub-forum in the top section “The FreeBSD Forums” with relevant subcategories such as “Foundation News,” “Projects,” “We need your help,” etc. Think about it a little and come up with some more good ideas.

I think this is far more effective than hoping for emails to info@foundation and only engaging in dialogue with a few individuals without a broader feedback. I mean, nothing is more suitable and efficient than using the official FreeBSD forums with the domain FreeBSD.org directly.

You could specifically ask for funding, collaboration, or feedback for individual projects here in the FreeBSD forums. These would be relevant questions you could ask here. And I think you'll make faster and more efficient progress with urgent projects here.

I would very much welcome a constructive dialogue that would help us all move forward.
 
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dgoodkin one week later

When a dialog stalls I like to mention that every behavior is a form of communication.
It is impossible not to communicate because you cannot not-behave.
Even if communication is being avoided, that is a form of communication.
 
POSIX.1 said:
dgoodkin one week later

When a dialog stalls I like to mention that every behavior is a form of communication.
It is impossible not to communicate because you cannot not-behave.
Even if communication is being avoided, that is a form of communication.
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My apologies. It might help if I set up email notifications so I know when someone tags me. I appreciate your suggestions, especially some of the sub-forum ideas, and will explore how the Foundation can become more engaged in the forums in the new year. Please note that the annual community survey, which the Core Team and Foundation send out in the spring, is an excellent place for the community to provide its feedback. We use that information to understand which projects we should support, where we can provide assistance, and hear concerns and challenges. Even though we do this once / year, we can compare the responses to previous years to understand if things have improved. Now off to setting up my email notifications!
 
dgoodkin said:
Please note that the annual community survey, which the Core Team and Foundation send out in the spring, is an excellent place for the community to provide its feedback.
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dgoodkin I noted the surveys since they started.

Why is the Detailed Report of Findings of the 2025 Community Survey not so promoted to read here like the call to take part?

This year's results are particularly interesting. Did you forget to give us a link here on the FreeBSD forums when the results were published?
Here it is:
 
POSIX.1 said:
Why is the Detailed Report of Findings of the 2025 Community Survey not so promoted to read here like the call to take part?
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The survey and its results were discussed here. I don't remember whether "the foundation" (meaning staff) ever posted it directly, but I remember starting a thread to talk about it. Most of the discussion in that context was between the "Make FreeBSD another desktop OS that is easy to install and use, and optimized for sitting in a coffee shop with a laptop" and "give it the power to serve". I think people know what side I come down on.

POSIX.1 said:
This year's results are particularly interesting.
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They absolutely are. As is the direction the funding of new development by the foundation is taking. Note that mentioning those two things next to each other doesn't imply that they are connected.
 
ralphbsz said:
The survey and its results were discussed here. I don't remember whether "the foundation" (meaning staff) ever posted it directly, but I remember starting a thread to talk about it. Most of the discussion in that context was between the "Make FreeBSD another desktop OS that is easy to install and use, and optimized for sitting in a coffee shop with a laptop" and "give it the power to serve". I think people know what side I come down on.


They absolutely are. As is the direction the funding of new development by the foundation is taking. Note that mentioning those two things next to each other doesn't imply that they are connected.
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Thanks for sharing it back in September. I just learned that our blogs and reports are directly posted here: https://forums.freebsd.org/forums/blogs-and-newsfeeds.50/. Since the survey results were posted on a webpage rather than a blog post, they were not uploaded to the forum.
 
ralphbsz said:
The survey and its results were discussed here.
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They definitely were because I remember being angry about slides 45 and 46, where the bullet points at the top of the slide absolutely contradict the actual data presented in the slide
There are differences in other sources though – especially newer users who more likely to turn to IM, AI or Reddit
and less likely to use mailing list posts or source code.
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And
As with getting help, newer users seem less inclined to use traditional sources like mailing lists, newsletters, or the
FBSD Journal -- preferring Reddit, social media, and YouTube to stay up to date.
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Look at the data, and you'll see the Forum way outperforms all those alternative means of communications for all users, regardless of how long they've been using Freebsd.

It does make me wonder why the Foundation considers us a red-headed stepchild.
 
ralphbsz said:
No, it's a user discussion forum that's hosted by FreeBSD community (I think the hosting costs are paid by the foundation, not 100% sure). I don't think the forum is thought of as the official channel where the foundation speaks ex cathedra. Nor is it the way to reach either foundation decision makers, nor core developers. It's for users to help each other.

I don't think the foundation can have a single "home", other than their web site.
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As explained here: https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-freebsd-forums-official-or-not.99667/page-2#post-723931
 
Maturin said:
..., but it summerizes the issue, and shows there are people concerned about it, and solutions are available.
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Some partial solutions are available. Yes, it is possible to run a commercial (cloud- or computer-type-) service where you can pretend to not know the identity of your customers, because you have not asked them explicitly, and you don't store it explicitly. But the reality is that this anonymity can be easily pierced. For example, even that Servury blog post says explicitly that they outsource payments to a payment processor, who by design and by law needs to know who is paying the bill (the money has to come from a certain bank account or credit card number). And accepting payment by crypto coin only moves the problem to the fact that blockchain only pretends to be anonymous; once you actually begin transacting with coins, you can be triangulated. And even an anonymity-friendly company like Servury has to keep debugging logs, which will contain lots of IP addresses and ports from their users, and there goes anonymity. I think their anonymity is virtue signaling, not reality. It helps them attract gullible customers who think they are privacy focused, when in reality pretty much anything you do in public (including in the public part of the internet) is and has to be trackable.

The reality is that we are not Robinson living on an island. In a society we interact with others humans, and those humans have memories (without memory most of society breaks), and most of our legal system relies on these memories and formalizes them. My favorite example comes, once again, from US election law. I was running the campaign in an election, and one of our adversaries (let's call them Alice, Bob and Christine) wrote a letter to the state election law agency (using their real name and address), asking the following question: can we anonymously campaign in this election by putting signs in our front yards and along public roads? And they got a very official answer from the state agency, in the form of a letter: yes, but you can only place signs on private property, not on public roadways, and if you spend more than $200 doing this, you have to register with the state and identify who you are on the signs. And since the state campaign finance agency (called FPPC here in California) is very public and open, it published both their letter and the agency's response on their web site. The irony is thick here.
 
POSIX.1 said:
dgoodkin, did you make any progress on that? Got some ideas to share here? Do you need some input?
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No. We were busy with end-of-year projects and fundraising, and many people took time off to enjoy the holidays with their families. We've been back for three days, busy catching up on projects and finalizing 2025 projects and financials. I found out that all posts made on our website and social media are also posted in the forums, specifically in the blogs & newsfeed channel. So, any asks we have for help or funding are posted there. But, for the long term, we need to assess how we would manage a Foundation channel and if it would be beneficial to the Project. I would prefer one place where people can communicate with us instead of all the places right now, like irc, mailing lists, working groups,... I understand you want the communication with the FF to be in the forums, but there are many FreeBSD communication platforms, and it's difficult to monitor all of them. We're a small team supporting the project, mostly working on software development projects, security work, and advocacy. I'll discuss with the core team when we meet this month to get their input too.
 
dgoodkin said:
I understand you want the communication with the FF to be in the forums, but there are many FreeBSD communication platforms, and it's difficult to monitor all of them.
Click to expand...
This is not the fault of this forums if FreeBSD maintains official forums, and then loses overview of having to deal with more additional communication channels than they can handle, instead of saying:"Please focus on our official channel."
Or to put it from the user's - my - point of view: When I came to FreeBSD I found this forums as the official forums: A central contact point about FreeBSD. That's a big plus. Not every system provides such. You can see its value proven everytime some desperate user asks here a question about an issue on another OS, just because she/he found nothing comparable like this forums. The community here is friendly, open, helpful, qualified above way more than FreeBSD, and exemplary supportive - I dare say 99% of all FreeBSD support is done here. For free. Voluntarily by convinced volunteers using FreeBSD. It (shall) represents the (core) community of FreeBSD.
If the foundation dances at too many weddings at the same time (german saying), neglecting this - their own - forums, pays too few attention here, instead is overchallenged dealing with too many external channels, then that's not the community's fault.

After a while I found out: There is also Discord, FaceBook, and, and, and, and,...
To neither of them I'm a registered user, nor I'm willing to get a login. To me this is all more kind of a fashion, what's currently cool. Yesterday everybody was on Discord, today it's Reddit, tomorrow it will be something else - I don't know, I don't care.
I need one channel to communicate with people. Well, okay, maybe three, or four, because I cannot communicate with everybody about everything in personal contact, only, nor is phone, nor classic ("snail") mail suitable for everything. But for sure I don't need not a dozen of different FaceBook clones. All those "new" communication channels, call them social media, are not because people need them, but because there is money to make with it, and every company wants to draw the crowd on their platform.
Having the same communcation with the same people sprawled over more channels does not improve communication. It worsen it. But that's another discussion.

And I guess it also cannot be in the foundation's interest if I register to FaceBook, Discord, and whatelse, and start spreading my FreeBSD according communication over those, several other channels, instead of having it concentrated in one central location.

Then I get those yearly survey polls, the foundation asking users to find out about their needs, and what they think, while almost all of it already can be taken out from here. Almost everything is already here in this forums. Even elaborated, and explained - no need to count checkmarks, then interpret what they mean, and maybe get to wrong conclusions.
And I read "there are too many communication channels as we few people can handle" ... 🧐?

But, okay, you already figured out, that's not perfect, and something needs to be done.
I just hope, with whatever you decide to do, you don't miss the community - your community.
And there is no need to tell extra: Losing the community could be fatal for the whole project FreeBSD.

dgoodkin said:
and fundraising
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The original point of this thread was exactly about this topic.

I don't know, how many 50...200$ donations the foundation received per year, and how many of those you don't get because it's mandatory for every donator to give all personal data. Can't be much. So, it's okay for you
as I said in my OP, none by me anymore as long as it's this way - the foundation can dispense this.(?)
If not, you may reconsider, if there will be anonymous donations (until a certain amount [we already have this USA IRS issue discussed in large in this thread]), or at least the informations to be given are not mandatory but voluntarily.

Apart from such questions like if I am employed or not.
I am a self-employed one-man show (freelancer/entrepreneur/... call it what you like.)
Also like pensionaries I don't have an employer. So, now I'm what? Unemployed. What you make of this? That I am a lazy, indolent, workshy bum, impose himself to welfare?
Geez, I wonder why such things need to be extra flagged up.
 
Maturin said:
This is not the fault of this forums if FreeBSD maintains official forums, and then loses overview of having to deal with more additional communication channels than they can handle, instead of saying:"Please focus on our official channel."
Or to put it from the user's - my - point of view: When I came to FreeBSD I found this forums as the official forums: A central contact point about FreeBSD. That's a big plus. Not every system provides such. You can see its value proven everytime some desperate user asks here a question about an issue on another OS, just because she/he found nothing comparable like this forums. The community here is friendly, open, helpful, qualified above way more than FreeBSD, and exemplary supportive - I dare say 99% of all FreeBSD support is done here. For free. Voluntarily by convinced volunteers using FreeBSD. It (shall) represents the (core) community of FreeBSD.
If the foundation dances at too many weddings at the same time (german saying), neglecting this - their own - forums, pays too few attention here, instead is overchallenged dealing with too many external channels, then that's not the community's fault.

After a while I found out: There is also Discord, FaceBook, and, and, and, and,...
To neither of them I'm a registered user, nor I'm willing to get a login. To me this is all more kind of a fashion, what's currently cool. Yesterday everybody was on Discord, today it's Reddit, tomorrow it will be something else - I don't know, I don't care.
I need one channel to communicate with people. Well, okay, maybe three, or four, because I cannot communicate with everybody about everything in personal contact, only, nor is phone, nor classic ("snail") mail suitable for everything. But for sure I don't need not a dozen of different FaceBook clones. All those "new" communication channels, call them social media, are not because people need them, but because there is money to make with it, and every company wants to draw the crowd on their platform.
Having the same communcation with the same people sprawled over more channels does not improve communication. It worsen it. But that's another discussion.

And I guess it also cannot be in the foundation's interest if I register to FaceBook, Discord, and whatelse, and start spreading my FreeBSD according communication over those, several other channels, instead of having it concentrated in one central location.

Then I get those yearly survey polls, the foundation asking users to find out about their needs, and what they think, while almost all of it already can be taken out from here. Almost everything is already here in this forums. Even elaborated, and explained - no need to count checkmarks, then interpret what they mean, and maybe get to wrong conclusions.
And I read "there are too many communication channels as we few people can handle" ... 🧐?

But, okay, you already figured out, that's not perfect, and something needs to be done.
I just hope, with whatever you decide to do, you don't miss the community - your community.
And there is no need to tell extra: Losing the community could be fatal for the whole project FreeBSD.


The original point of this thread was exactly about this topic.

I don't know, how many 50...200$ donations the foundation received per year, and how many of those you don't get because it's mandatory for every donator to give all personal data. Can't be much. So, it's okay for you
as I said in my OP, none by me anymore as long as it's this way - the foundation can dispense this.(?)
If not, you may reconsider, if there will be anonymous donations (until a certain amount [we already have this USA IRS issue discussed in large in this thread]), or at least the informations to be given are not mandatory but voluntarily.

Apart from such questions like if I am employed or not.
I am a self-employed one-man show (freelancer/entrepreneur/... call it what you like.)
Also like pensionaries I don't have an employer. So, now I'm what? Unemployed. What you make of this? That I am a lazy, indolent, workshy bum, impose himself to welfare?
Geez, I wonder why such things need to be extra flagged up.
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I'll respond to the donation part first. Thanks to your post, we have addressed a few of those issues. When we tested the new 3rd party app, it did not do the "upselling" or ask the employment question. After reviewing it following your post, we identified the issues and addressed them. The only thing we still need to look into is the ability to donate less than $250 without providing your personal information.

Regarding the communication channels. I totally get where you are coming from. I would love to see the statistics on where the official FreeBSD communication is taking place. Right now, I see lots of discussions on irc, mailing lists, and the forums. I'm not trying to minimize the use here. It's important. So are the 6666 members on discord. Yes, that's not an official channel, but those folks are doing an amazing job attracting newer people to the project. The FF is working on how and where we provide information about the work we are doing. We provide this information in so many places, including in the forums, but we still hear comments that people don't know what we are doing.

We added projects to our github account with links to reports so people can easily find out more about the projects we are funding and managing.

I want to continue, but I have a meeting now. I just want you to know, that I understand what you and posix are trying to do to have more active engagement with the Foundation on the forums. We will discuss internally, but it will take a little bit of time. I don't want to create the channel without having a plan in place for how we will engage with it.

Thank you for your input!
 
dgoodkin said:
Regarding the communication channels. I totally get where you are coming from. I would love to see the statistics on where the official FreeBSD communication is taking place.
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You have the data. Look at slide 46 here:

The Forum is third most used.

dgoodkin said:
It's important. So are the 6666 members on discord. Yes, that's not an official channel, but those folks are doing an amazing job attracting newer people to the project.
Click to expand...
Discord, lumped together with other "Instant Msg" platforms is a distant 9th. Even if you only look at people who have been using Freebsd for 5 years or less, the Forum is second, and Discord et all are tied for third with Youtube.
 
I'm not used to Discord. I never use it. Three years ago I signed in to see what it was like and felt like I was dropped into the middle of someone else's conversations and I didn't want to interrupt. Which made me felt left out and didn't know how to break in.

I went there late last night and felt the same way. I couldn't find any documentation of how to use Discord but I didn't try very hard. At first it looked like "everybody" was there but then I looked at the date/time of the posts and realized a lot of the posts were from three years ago. I wanted to clear them all out by marking them as "read" but that just drew a red line at that date/time.

I only spent maybe ten minutes there and left feeling uncomfortable but I'll try again when I have time I guess.
 
I use it to talk to my kids, but refuse to give it out as a contact point for me. The fact is, it's a for-profit unicorn that's going to be bought by someone sooner or later. Your access to the platform, data, contact lists, etc. then becomes the property of someone else to do with what they will. There's no way this sort of thing can go wrong.
 
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