Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686k in FreeBSD Infrastructure Modernization

https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/sovereign-tech-fund-to-invest-e686400-in-freebsd-infrastructure-modernization/

by nesarkvechnep • 2 years ago

158 94 2 years ago

freebsdfoundation.org

M95D• 2 years ago

This isn't generosity. They probably need it for a bank or something.

dtx1• 2 years ago

Sovereign Transportation Fund to invest €686,400 into Highway Infrastructure

This isn't generosity. They probably need it for a Hospital or something.

boomboomsubban• 2 years ago

It's not generosity, it's investment in infrastructure.

senectus1• 2 years ago

who cares if its generosity or not... it furthers the OS platform. Provided the money has no strings about the license...

roenxi• 2 years ago

Motivation can be important. After Mozilla started taking Google's money they lost a lot of urgency about competing with Chrome to offer a different view of the internet.

In this case there don't seem to be any concerning dynamics and generosity or lack thereof is irrelevant. It'll be good for FreeBSD.

dmurray• 2 years ago

It's better that it's not funded out of generosity.

Now the OS projects can have two revenue streams: one funded by generosity, one by self-interest.

tux3• 2 years ago

Thank god. Generosity really doesn't align with any of my values. Where's the growth in that.

gonzo41• 2 years ago

and your point?

cpach3• 2 years ago

What is generosity? Does the word even apply to organizations?

hnlmorg• 2 years ago

I’m not sure that needs specifically pointing out because nowhere in the title nor article does it call this a donation. It’s clearly described as an investment.

The end result is the same though: everyone who uses FreeBSD benefits from this investment.

darkamaul• 2 years ago

Is anyone aware of similar funds or structures from different countries?

Sovereign Tech Fund is German, but I did not find (albeit not looked too much) any in other European countries.

the-dude• 2 years ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nlnet ?

WhyNotHugo• 2 years ago

NLnet is somewhat similar: https://nlnet.nl/

omnimus• 2 years ago

Nlnet gets funding from NGI https://ngi.eu/ and unfortunately there have been insider reports that EU commission gave top priority to AI and from 2025 cut all funding of NGI to free up money for the AI initiative. Of course this is pretty lame and terrible as lot of good independent projects got funding there.

Vinnl• 2 years ago

For context, NLNet's NGI0 programs are EU-funded (for now [1]).

[1] https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI

razakel3• 2 years ago

Every country has some sort of quango that throws money at "weird" projects.

catanama• 2 years ago

FreeBSD is not weird, it's a good and very reliable OS, I'm very happy this happens.

mtmail• 2 years ago

For Germany that would be https://prototypefund.de/en/

rospaya• 2 years ago

A quango or QUANGO is an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies.

A quasi NGO. First time I heard this term.

rahen• 2 years ago

I am interested in the details, particularly how they plan to reduce the technical debt. Are there any additional resources available?

cyberpunk2• 2 years ago

Presumably it means paying people to work on all the painful crap they’re not getting contributions for.

Most people who want to help out a project like FreeBSD will work on something that interests them; I have an hard time imagining that many people out there want to work on some libtool removal or cleaning up deep in the plumbing of buildworld or such.

Plenty of people are happy to be paid to do such tasks tho, and this pays for that. We all win :)

carstenhag• 2 years ago

Interesting, the first time I've heard of the https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/ .

They have funded a variety of tooling, including curl, ffmpeg, gnome, php, etc: https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech

i80and• 2 years ago

My favorite part is they're funding making home directory encryption a first-tier integrated feature of GNOME[1]

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/STF/homed/-/issues/42

NekkoDroid• 2 years ago

I've been personally most excited for this, simply because I've personally been looking at making my own image based system to daily drive and having an empty (and possibly read-only) /etc/ is kind of a prerequisite, which passwd and shadow kinda make difficult.

For anyone that doesn't know, homed allows using different mechanism as backing storage (e.g. directory, luks loopback, btrfs subvolume, separate drive and more). It stores user information usually store in passwd and shadow in a signed ~/.identity file allowing it to be entirely portable. Changes need to be done via homectl as it needs to be resigned by a system specific key (same for when a new home dir is added) and some changes are limited to admin only, while others can be done by the user themselves.

oytis• 2 years ago

Why FreeBSD? How did they decide that it's worth supporting? What return is expected?

I don't even know a reason to use FreeBSD these days apart of being a FreeBSD enthusiast.

cyberpunk2• 2 years ago

pfsense is fairly widely deployed in a lot of 'secure' infrastructure.

BSDobelix7• 2 years ago

I don't even know a reason to use FreeBSD

That's funny because i don't even know a reason to use Linux these days.

And since there is the Linux-Foundation who invests whopping 5% of their money into the Linux Kernel, an opensource alternative is always good to have.

Edit: Correction it's not 5% but less then 3%

christophilus• 2 years ago

I’m a big fan of the BSDs, but if you’re talking about the desktop, Proton and Steam, WiFi support, and (for me) Niri. You can get Niri working, probably, with some effort, but it comes out of the box on Fedora and Arch. The case of Niri is representative, in my limited experience, of the general case. The dev tooling I use always supports Linux as a 1st class citizen, but rarely supports the BSDs.

kombine2• 2 years ago

That's funny because i don't even know a reason to use Linux these days.

Can I run apps like Slack or Spotify on BSD? Will it have WiFi and Bluetooth drivers for my laptop? Not even talking about games.

skirge• 2 years ago

it boost rate of R&D and innovation in EU so statistics look better. It reminds me a story told by my professor - years ago (70s) he implemented accounting system for some company and later noticed a serious bug which made it unusable. It wasn't a problem because system was never deployed - it was needed so the (state owned, because it was Poland) company could report deployment of innovation.

socksy• 2 years ago

Very cynical, but wrong in this case. The point of the sovereign tech fund[0] is to throw some (relatively small in the scheme of things) money at open source infrastructure that everyone relies on, no matter if that infrastructure itself is German, or even European. Basically, as their graphics on their homepage allude to, aiming to improve https://xkcd.com/2347/

IMO this is exactly the common-sense investments that every country should be making in their own self interest, and is one of the things that Germany is actually doing right.

[0] https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/mission

talideon• 2 years ago

Obviously the likes of Juniper, NetApp, Sony, Netflix, &c., know something you don't.

Also, FreeBSD is fairly heavily used in Germany.

ruthmarx13• 2 years ago

Obviously the likes of Juniper, NetApp, Sony, Netflix, &c., know something you don't.

Or there was no advantage and it was just the preference of the person designing the architecture.

mardifoufs• 2 years ago

Aren't NetApp and Juniper slowly switching to Linux too?

lnxg33k1• 2 years ago

The license could be one

stragies• 2 years ago

Some (former) apple users in my small sphere that now also run FreeBSD mentioned feeling happy about helping to ensure there will always be well-tested BSD/MIT licensed code Apple then can incorporate/use.

kombine2• 2 years ago

Wait, they do it for Apple Corp??

seszett• 2 years ago

I don't even know a reason to use FreeBSD these days apart of being a FreeBSD enthusiast.

In addition to the technical reasons other people have given, just running on a slightly "exotic" platform is often sufficient to avoid most of the common exploits. Not because there are inherently less vulnerabilities on your platform, but because it's less likely to be an explicit target.

IWeldMelons2• 2 years ago

FreeBSD has good ZFS support, and nice package update cycle (quarterly + ongoing security updates), halfway between rolling release and point release, coppled with the stable "core" part of the system.

Hardware support is shitty, even worse than OpenBSD, and it tells a lot. 12th-gen Intel integrated video driver is scheduled to appear only in September 2024.

1oooqooq• 2 years ago

hardware support being bad is a feature.

remember BSDs are chosen by companies to whom linux is license-toxic. if they distribute hardware, like apple, gpl is poison.

this is a way to use your taxes to get free (as in beer, primarily) software they can ship on their products. less other companies can easily use that code the better.

ruthmarx13• 2 years ago

This seems like a strange use of money, surely? Nothing against FreeBSD, but Linux is where most of the focus already is. People using FreeBSD are doing so due to preference or legitimate need due to their software somehow specifically being BSD dependents.

Not that this isn't 'nice', but is that the goal here? I would have thought it would make more sense to put this money toward something underfunded but still useful for the government.

strken• 2 years ago

How do we know it's not useful to the German government? Without context, I would have assumed that "infrastructure, security, regulatory compliance, and developer experience" meant they were trying to secure FreeBSD's builds because they were using them and identified them as a weak point.

ruthmarx13• 2 years ago

Then they are wasting taxpayer dollars and should switch to Linux.

cpach3• 2 years ago

You have a point, and I agree that these days, for most people, Linux is where the action is. But it might not be desirable to end up in a future where Linux is the only game in town. Therefore it could be wise to support other FOSS operating systems, to keep some kind of competition.

ruthmarx13• 2 years ago

Is this not an argument against vendor lock in? I'd argue that doesn't really apply to a FOSS project like Linux, and that BSD isn't sufficiently different to help diversity. If that was the goal, there are a ton of smaller OS projects that I think would make sense to fund. Like ReactOS.

heraldgeezer2• 2 years ago

huh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_Free...

https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/

ex Junipers junOS, Sonys OS for PS3,4,5 is based on FreeBSD. Netflix and Netapp use it for their main stuff.

Lots of "under the hood" stuff is FreeBSD. Even I know this, and I'm a filthy Windows user.

ornornor2• 2 years ago

I’d wager BSDs move more packets every day than any other major OS. Network infrastructure is often running BSD, so does Netflix on its cache servers, network appliances…

ruthmarx13• 2 years ago

You're 'huh' is misplaced.

Some stuff having some BSD code in it is entirely beside the point.

bluGill• 2 years ago

You should be running a mix of FreeBSD anyway. Do not get yourself locked into one vendor solutions even if the vendor is open source.

binkHN• 2 years ago

The BSD license is more permissive than the GPL/Linux license, so one could argue source code investments made here can more readily be integrated into all systems, even closed source.

packetlost• 2 years ago

I don't see how diversity of platforms/OS could be anything but a good thing. FreeBSD has been making a lot of QoL changes over the last several years and is laid out much more like a cohesive system than any Linux distribution I've used. Not to mention it is still used elsewhere.

Putting all your eggs in one basket is usually a good way to end up hungry.

ruthmarx13• 2 years ago

I don't see how diversity of platforms/OS could be anything but a good thing.

I didn't say it wasn't a good thing, I said I don't think it giving €686k to FreeBSD is the best use of that money, even if diversity of systems is a goal. In that case, give it to ReactOS or something.

jmclnx2• 2 years ago

This seems like a strange use of money

I do not :)

Linux and even more so, us, needs FreeBSD and the other BSDs. IMHO Linux, at the moment, seems to be heading to Corporate Domination and is slowly becoming a Windows type Clone. Plus with Wayland being Linux only and its largest funder is Red Hat, it seems to be trying to eliminate BSD.

The *BSDs right now is a option for people who want an OS to work the way they would like it to, not a way a Company like Red Hat/IBM wants it to be.

So great for FreeBSD, and the way the BSDs operate, developments will cross-pollinate the other BSDs.

tomxor• 2 years ago

Wayland being Linux only and its largest funder is Red Hat, it seems to be trying to eliminate BSD.

https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/wayland/

ruthmarx13• 2 years ago

The *BSDs right now is a option for people who want an OS to work the way they would like it to, not a way a Company like Red Hat/IBM wants it to be.

I mean, Linux is just the kernel. Any number of distros are further than the BSD's for how Red Hat and IBM would want it to be.

assimpleaspossi• 2 years ago

Of note: Hacker News, this very web site, runs FreeBSD as their server.

tristor• 2 years ago

I am really surprised by all the negative comments in this thread about FreeBSD by people who seemingly use Linux and think this is an appropriate way to behave.

There are many reasons why someone might use BSD, and it has several specific advantages over Linux for some use cases. That aside, even in cases where Linux is "better", FreeBSD is more than sufficient. There is no downside and many upsides to having multiple free operating systems that are aligned around the same core standard (POSIX) with tooling for software portability.

Thank you Germany for helping fund open source.

spiderfarmer• 2 years ago

You're surprised by negative comments on HN?

jmclnx2• 2 years ago

I am not. When I used Coherent OS, Linux was starting out and Linux people were spamming comp.os.coherent on USENET incessantly. The very few BSD people who posted were respectful of people on that group.

Seems over the years, times have not changed :(

And yes, a big thank you to Germany.

elric• 2 years ago

I'm not surprised, but I am a little disappointed. Some random tech fund gives a small amount of money to a project that can put it to good use, and even plans specific useful things with said money, and then some ninnies come along to complain about it? Why? Is it their money? Do they dislike FreeBSD benefiting from things? Are they jealous because their pet project didn't get any money in this particular instance?

I'm sure some money goes towards silly things and could be spent on more worthwhile things, but this doesn't strike me as a waste of money...

vegadw2• 2 years ago

On the one hand, this sounds like a lot of money, on the other, it's ~765k USD. If you just go off the rough assumption that 1 engineer/100k USD/yr then it's either a team of 7 for a bit over a year or a single engineer for a decade or so. I don't know if that's enough to make a significant impact? I'd like to think so, but a project that big, once it gets funding, is sure to have some tech debt that needs paid before anything new, so, will new things come of this?

_mlbt3• 2 years ago

There are a few exceptions, but overall the BSDs have very well engineered and maintainable code. They don’t move as fast as Linux distros do partly due to less manpower and partly due to taking the time to do it the right way. There is much less churn and they don’t have the cruft of supporting obscure UNIX flavors that have faded into distant memory like GNU utilities do. Take a look at some FreeBSD code and their GNU and Linux equivalents and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

vegadw2• 2 years ago

Interesting! Does that make it perform worse on some modern hardware due to having, say, worse scheduling for CPUs with multiple CCXs or worse graphics drivers? I'm obviously wandering a bit outside my knowledge here.

Sovereign Tech Fund to Invest €686k in FreeBSD Infrastructure Modernization

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