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[20061202]
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What to do with your extra money at the end of the year, and beyond
The end of the year's approaching rapidly, and if you have an urge
of doing something good with your leftover money, here are some
ideas how to make this planet a better place:
- I've had a look at the
the BSD Certification Group's donation meter page
tonight, and saw it's at 11% ($4.139US out of $35kUS)
of what's needed right now. Looking at the list of
who has contributed so far,
I thought I'd mention this here:
While you may think NetBSD does not need certification, think
again how this may improve NetBSD's overall recognition in the industry.
And in the end it's a *BSD* certification, and not FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD
only - so I think NetBSD and its users should actively participate in
the process to drive this.
Go for it!
- Of course your favourite Open Source project may always need money,
too, so think about it - a few bucks can make a difference. As for
NetBSD, money's needed to buy new and replace old hardware, support
public relations and handle legal fees.
Personally, I'd like to
see this expanded for having more people do work on public relations,
setting up booths at roadshows and going to conferences, but that's
not a cheap goal: Having materials like flyers, CDs, flags, posters
etc. available is one thing, and paying for travel, accommodation
and possibly conference and booth fees easily sum up to several
hundred $/EUR per conference, and there's quite a number of them,
all over the year and all over the planet.
Another goal that I think would be nice to achieve is being able
to reward people for contributing to the NetBSD project's code
base, e.g. by implementing specific subsystems, various projects
(think "Google Summer of Code") or fix critical bugs.
For all this, money is needed. As a non-profit organization,
the NetBSD Project does not sell its goods and instead gives
it away for freely for the benefit of everyone. As a return,
we're glad for every user -- private and commercial -- as well
as companies to think about what they get, and
give something back.
- Personally I'm still looking for someone to pay me
for working part-time on NetBSD documentation and public relations.
Current state of things as far as I'm concerned is
that I'm devoting a lot of my personal time to NetBSD right now
for free, while working on my PhD thesis; Once this is done, I'll have to
find a job that's paying my bills, and I'd very much appreciate
to continue working on NetBSD, but this won't be for free then any
more. Timeframe for this is Q3/2007, so if you think things should
continue as far as I'm concerned,
contact me!
[Tags: certification, donations, hubertf]
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