George Neville-Neil has written the lead article for the January issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) and the FreeBSD Foundation is the sponsor for this month's issue. The entire issue is available as a PDF and George's article is also available in HTML. You are welcome to host/translate a copy of the PDF or article elsewhere as

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From the December Foundation Newsletter:

In 2009, the FreeBSD project had the misfortune of losing two long time contributors: John Birrell and Jean-Marc Zucconi. I chatted with John recently, during this year's BSDCAN, so his death was all the more shocking. It forced me to recognize my own mortality and to consider what contributions from our lives remain after

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The Bad Code Offsets project of The Alliance for Code Excellence is "a way to undo the bad code other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software".

The

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Brooks Davis recently reported on his trip to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009. The Foundation assisted in some of his travel costs to this event. Brook writes:

The Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit was held at the Google campus in Mountain View October 24th and 25th. I represented the FreeBSD project at the event along with

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We would like to thank everyone who has donated to the FreeBSD Foundation this year. We have raised $182,778 towards our 2009 goal of $300,000! We are almost 2/3 of the way to reaching our goal! Oh, and BTW, we have had 663 donors this year. This is compared to just over 300 this time last year. This is important

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Pawel Jakub Dawidek has completed the first milestone for the High Available Storage Project. He writes:

I want to report that first milestone of the HAST project is complete.

Summary of the work that have been done:

• Implementation of hastd daemon.
• Implementation of hastctl utility to manage hastd daemons.
• GEOM_GATE class was extended so that the caller can specify

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Developers not only benefit from the work done by the Foundation, they also help to financially support it. Colin Percival writes about donating to the Foundation on his blog. His blog post begins:

As a FreeBSD user and developer, I obviously care about the success of FreeBSD. I make a small contribution towards this success via my role as Security

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It is with sadness that we note the passing of long time FreeBSD committer, John Birrell. Many in the FreeBSD community had the opportunity to interact with John online and perhaps meet him in person at a BSDCan. He will be missed.

It is now possible to make a donation to the FreeBSD Foundation in memory of someone. Select the

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The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to once again be a sponsor of AsiaBSDCon 2010. This conference will be held in Tokyo, March 11-14, 2010.

If you are considering speaking at this conference, the call for papers ends on December 20.

We're kicking off our End-of-Year Fund Raising Drive! Our goal this year is to raise $300,000. So far, we have raised just over $159,000 so we are little more than half way towards our goal. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive.

Click here to find out how

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Rafal Jaworowski and Semihalf have been awarded a grant to provide FreeBSD with support for the flattened device tree (FDT) technology. This project allows for describing hardware resources of a computer system and their dependencies in a platform-neutral and portable way.

The main consumers of this functionality are embedded systems whose hardware resources assignment cannot be probed or self-discovered.

The

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The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce a new funded project!

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement storage replication software that will enable users to use the FreeBSD operating system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared across the cluster nodes. The project is partly being funded by OMCnet Internet Service GmbH and

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Reports are starting to trickle in from those who attended last week's EuroBSDCon. Robert Watson notes that the FreeBSD Developer's Summit was the largest yet in the EU with around 70 attendees. And, despite the poor economy, attendance for the conference was up at about 180 attendees, and the dinner sponsored by iXsystems sold out at 150 with a waiting

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The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to once again be a sponsor of EuroBSDCon. This year, Robert Watson of the Foundation is a co-organizer of the conference with UKUUG. The Foundation is hosting a FreeBSD Developer Summit which will bring together 50-60 developers for an intense two-day workshop to discuss all aspects of FreeBSD development, including features for the now-in-the-works FreeBSD

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In Why We Send Developers to Conferences, Thomas Abthorpe discussed the value in face-to-face networking with both committers and BSD users.

In this post, Ion-Mihai Tetcu discusses the importance of BSD developers speaking at non-BSD specific and international conferences. His report also shows some of the lessons that can be learned from meeting with users and learning first-hand how

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Earlier this year, the Foundation sponsored Edward Tomasz Napierala to fix FreeBSD's #1 reported bug: a USB disk causing a panic when detached before unmounting. Edward describes the project as follows:

One of the long-standing problems encountered by FreeBSD users was the fact that the system could often crash after a mounted disk device - for example, a USB flash

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We are pleased to announce the addition of Dru Lavigne to our Board of Directors. Dru brings with her years of experience as a writer, FreeBSD advocate, and FreeBSD administrator/teacher.

Millions of systems run FreeBSD. Hundreds of volunteers contribute to FreeBSD's success. But what is the size of FreeBSD's user base? This simple question is very hard to answer, but its answer is vital to the cause of promoting FreeBSD. It is extremely difficult to convince businesses to invest time and money to add FreeBSD support to their products based

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In this Edition:

* Letter From the President
* 2009 Fundraising Drive
* Dru Lavigne Helping Foundation
* Safe Removal of Active Disk Devices
* Wireless Mesh Support
* Improvements to the FreeBSD TCP Stack
* AVR32 Support
* Problem Reporting Prototype
* FreeBSD Powers Long Distance Wireless Link
* DCBSDCon 2009
* AsiaBSDCon 2009
* Foundation at BSDCan

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