Intel to more actively engage with FreeBSD Foundation and make $250K donation

https://twitter.com/michaeldexter/status/840423816249589760

by sydney6 • 9 years ago

185 37 9 years ago

inopinatus• 9 years ago

"Feedback from our customers that they want broader and timelier support".

Absent volume, you and I don't get to be direct customers of Intel. I wonder who they meant. My first guess was Sony or Nintendo, since both have recent consoles with FreeBSD-derived OS, but fact checking indicated that neither have an Intel CPU.

Maybe at the behest of Apple, or the router/NAS/appliance manufacturers, many of whom run a FreeBSD-derived OS. Or perhaps it was simply effective lobbying by the FreeBSD project / foundation.

This is all speculation so if anyone knows who really prompted this I'd be interested to hear it.

(edit: grammar & fact check)

GalacticDomin8r• 9 years ago

you and I don't to be direct customers of Intel.

Speak for yourself, thank you very much.

X86BSD2• 9 years ago

My guess was Netflix, and then someone reminded me of Nintendo now that the switch is out. So those would be my two guesses as to who is leaning on them. Perhaps iXsystems as well.

gonzo• 9 years ago

Netflix, Netgate and Yahoo had an extended meeting with Intel and several members of the Foundation board during MeetBSD last year.

wyldfire• 9 years ago

My first guess was Sony or Nintendo, since both have recent consoles with FreeBSD-derived OS, but I don't think either have an Intel CPU.

It's a fair bet they were considered as design candidates. Perhaps their community engagement was a factor in them losing the designs. (Though IMO that seems like it would be weighted much lower than other factors).

ksec5• 9 years ago

I have the exact question in mind. Who, Why, and Now?

Sony - If Intel wants the next PS5 CPU to be from Intel. But Intel lacking any decent GPU, and their reluctance to low margin business may suggest otherwise.

Yahoo - some have suggested, but as much as I want to believe it is true, last time I heard they have been switching to Linux since Marissa arrival. Most of their BSD people has since left.

Netflix - FreeBSD usage is limited to their own CDN Appliance, which as the name implies, working like a appliance and needs not much tweaking. Their main, encoding and core Network is on AWS with Linux. And if Netflix is that much a big customer for Intel?

Router / NAS / Appliance? Gosh they have been here for more then a decade and only now Intel decide to listen to them? One reason could be they are switching to ARM + Linux. For them to stay on x86 they will have to better support for FreeBSD, but I still think this is a weak argument.

Apple - Despite OSX's close relationship with the BSD community. Apple doesn't use any FreeBSD on their Cloud Servers. And Airport uses NetBSD which is something different enough.

May be it is Whatsapp?

kev0094• 9 years ago

WhatsApp is completely absent from FreeBSD development. The donations from Jan Koum have been from his personal finances. In kind, it's a shame FB/WhatsApp don't do development.

And while the FreeBSD Foundation provides governance and services around the periphery including a couple full timer contributors, almost all significant code contributions are coming from a small quorum of commercial users. If Intel follows through on higher quality and more timely HW enablement, that is going to be a lot more worthwhile than this donation.

NF was able to leverage some connections built over several people's careers to wake Intel up to the extant market share of FreeBSD users. By my naive estimation this is approaching $1B/yr.

The other conjecture I will offer is that Intel may see any of AMD Naples, ARM64, OpenPOWER as a realistic threats now and dots were connected between Intel's marketing driven culture and Intel's software services group which has a mission to make sure software runs best on Intel.

floatboth• 9 years ago

working like a appliance and needs not much tweaking

Uh, excuse me? They literally rewrote the whole sendfile system call to make it faster (and to make it possible to add in-kernel TLS for, well, sending files over TLS). I'm sure they would welcome, say, driver improvements for the Intel 10/40Gb Ethernet cards.

mintplant• 9 years ago

My first guess was Sony or Nintendo, since both have recent consoles with FreeBSD-derived OS

Switch OS isn't FreeBSD-based.

https://twitter.com/qlutoo/status/838702899014217729

https://twitter.com/qlutoo/status/838666432774692864

https://twitter.com/ylws8/status/838777665498853376

Though the network stack may be partly taken from FreeBSD.

https://twitter.com/qlutoo/status/838786008380420096

snnn• 9 years ago

BTW, Microsoft is also a major supportor of Freebsd foundation.

seibelj• 9 years ago

Idea for anyone who wants to make it:

Make a website where any person or company can donate a fixed amount (one-time, periodically) that gets donated to open source. The website integrates with or links to as many open source projects as possible. Perhaps the website donates to each project once a month, pooling all the money together, to keep from having lots of transaction fees.

To be more advanced, write a tool that scans all code bases and automatically tells you what open source products you use. So if I work for a company, I run the tool against all of our repositories, it determines which products we use, and it syncs with the website. Then, say we donate $100 a month, it gets split between all of them automatically in some sort of proportion.

Then github open source projects can sign up with the website and become automatically tracked with the tool, so if someone or a company uses them they can get paid.

I simply do not have the time to pursue this, but if I had the time I would. I believe it will vastly improve the open source community and help finance it.

llukas• 9 years ago

flattr.com

SomeStupidPoint• 9 years ago

Do you have any reason to believe companies would donate?

My experience is we know what code we use, management just doesn't care to pay.

(Not to knock the idea, I like it, just curious.)

PascLeRasc• 9 years ago

There were a bunch of sites like this discussed in the big Octave funding thread a few weeks/month back

cperciva• 9 years ago

Deciding how to split the money is the hard part here. How do you decide what each product is "worth"? Is left-pad worth as much as Apache? Probably not -- so do you say that money gets divided in proportion to lines of code? But then you reward people for writing crappy code; why write a 1000-line program if you can write a 10,000-line program and get more money? And how do you account for different levels of usage? If I have a three-line Ruby script in my repository because I didn't want to spend five minutes to rewrite it as a shell script, and I run it once a month, do you count me as "using" Ruby?

Now, a tool which enumerates all the open source code you're using could be useful. And maybe you could encourage users to make donations, and to tell you the relative value they get out of each tool. And maybe you could then suggest values based on how much other users say a particular tool is worth to them. But you're not going to get any sensible values from an automatic process; you'll need human valuation at some point in the process.

DanBC• 9 years ago

People sometimes say that it's impossible for their company to make open source donations, but that it is possible for a product to be bought. It doesn't really matter what that product is - a printed manual, or a bit of support, but it's the order placement and invoice cycle that's most important for the people writing the cheques. Without those bits of paperwork the company cannot pay.

daurnimator• 9 years ago

I sort of thought this was what gittip (now gratipay) was. But they ran into regulatory issues?

keeler• 9 years ago

This comes at an interesting time when Microsoft has recently announced server designs on ARM architecture.

kev0094• 9 years ago

MS is a big supporter of FreeBSD and has done some high quality work in supporting HyperV/Azure. ARM and users like Cavium are also supporters and have done a lot of enablement work.

kev0094• 9 years ago

Netflix has done phenomenal vendor management here. Intel is a big ship with slow feeeback loops but they were able to connect the dots and hopefully we will see Intel working in earnest to support the long standing and rapidly growing segment of FreeBSD revenue.

julian_1• 9 years ago

Please use the funds to implement support for the last two generations of Intel integrated graphics chipsets.

Currently, FreeBSD supports neither Broadwell or Skylake and they're probably the most common chipsets used in laptops. source https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics

I would be running FreeBSD on my Dells right now if I could.

loeg2• 9 years ago

Matt Macy and company have basically added enough Linux API support to FreeBSD to run minimally ported Linux i915 drivers on FreeBSD. That work is here: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/comm... It more or less works on new Intel hardware today (same hardware as Linux 4.7, but more bugs).

What's left for out of the box support, you ask?

* Committing the needed "linuxkpi" additions. This is complicated by the fact that some of Macy's work just imported GPL2 code rather than recreating it BSD-licensed. Hans Petter Selasky has been doing a lot of work lately to fix this gap.

* Fixing remaining bugs/incompatibilities in the linuxkpi that result in artifacts and crashes.

And the further concern is, how do we keep from falling so far behind again? Matt's vision has two pieces:

* We bring down our driver diff to almost nothing and expand the linuxkpi as needed by newer versions of the graphics drivers. This would make bringing in newer versions of the i915/radeon/amdgpu drivers less painful.

* We move the graphics drivers and linuxkpi (or portions of it) to the ports tree. FreeBSD's release cycle is far too slow to wait for a release to support new graphics hardware. On the other hand, stable branches get new ports on a regular basis.

yjftsjthsd-h• 9 years ago

Does putting graphics drivers in the ports tree also help the licensing situation, by keeping GPL out of the core system?

dwringer• 9 years ago

I know it's not an Intel problem but CUDA support from nvidia would also be nice :P

agapon• 9 years ago

I wish AMD payed any attention to FreeBSD at all.

microcolonel• 9 years ago

Given the broad use of OpenSSH in business, it is shocking how little money OpenBSD gets.

ComputerGuru• 9 years ago

They're basically completely separate projects at this point.

X86BSD2• 9 years ago

I have complained on bsd related threads before how the industry as a whole should be appalled and embarrassed to their core for using core tools, utils like OpenSSH and not giving a damn penny in return to fund its development. Everyone uses OpenSSH. Everyone. It's a core part of almost the entire internet now. The openbsd foundation should be awash in so much cash as to be embarrassed because of it but they are not and I find it absolutely unacceptable, corporate America should be ashamed.

faragon• 9 years ago

Well, one-time 250.000 USD donation for a company like Intel, is quite small, in my opinion, considering most FreeBSD servers are running Intel CPUs.

Intel to more actively engage with FreeBSD Foundation and make $250K donation

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