There's something very interesting going on here: A week ago the total jumped by $100k from an anonymous donation. Now the total just jumped by another $150k, and the donors list is showing "Anonymous Donor" in a new $250k+ category. Did Mr. Anonymous send in a $100k check and then change his mind and add another $150k a week later?
US public charities (which means donations from the public are tax-deductable) are limited in the percentage of their income they can receive from private foundations and families. The amount of the large donation may have been contingent upon receiving enough funds from a broader base of sources. Too large of a donation could have caused the FreeBSD Foundation to fail their public support test for the year and be reclassified as a private foundation.
I don't think that's a problem here. I've been looking at the donors list and the sizes of donations for the past few months with an eye to where the public support test ends up, and by my arithmetic they could have given the $250k earlier in the year without ever putting the Foundation at risk of failing the public support test.
For what it's worth: Over the 2008-2012 window, the 2%-of-total-support cap on the amount of each donor's contribution which counts as "public" is currently at almost $40k; and there are five donors (Anonymous, NetApp, Hudson River Trading, iXsystems, and Google) which are currently above that limit. As a result, each new dollar donated by someone not on that list else counts as $1.10 towards the "public support" amount, since it increases by 5 x $0.02 the amount of "public support" from those five largest donors, in addition to the $1 itself counting as public support.
The whole point of an anonymous donation is that is anonymous. I agree that it is a corporate user, and it's possible that using FreeBSD is a strategic advantage they don't want to disclose. Or is just that they don't want the PR part of it.
Right I'm saying it could be a large enough company that they have multiple streams of donations going at once and it was consolidated after the fact. Like international divisions or similar.
I'm aware of large FreeBSD-using companies which are not listed. Some of them go to varying lengths to avoid publicizing their use of FreeBSD, so if it's one of them I could certainly understand why they'd want to avoid having their name appear at the top of the FreeBSD Foundation donors list.
Usually it's a matter of keeping secrets from their competitors. If you know that a device due to be released next year will be running FreeBSD, it could help you figure out what components are going to be in it, for example (probably parts which FreeBSD can already run on), which might tell you something about its performance.
FreeBSD seems to emphasise doing things right over doing them in a hurry and therefore may at times be a bit behind the curve in terms of support for the latest hardware and features. But when those features do come, they tend to be of superior quality (GEOM, Netgraph & bhyve for example) and rock solid.
For serious server and and networking use (often in the guise of pfSense), that makes it my OS of choice. Glad to see some hardware vendors think the same way.
Why does anybody care what some forum troll on Phoronix says? I was replying to a statement that made it sound like Linux users had declared jihad on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD isn't just targeting servers. There's also a lot of work happening on embedded systems, and one of the larger projects the FreeBSD Foundation funded recently was strictly desktop-oriented -- providing support for Intel graphics chipsets.
