I hate commenting when I have nothing of real value to add, but I just wanted to say this is wonderful and I hope you get some new customers out of it.
Well, you know, I've decided that I don't particularly like ramen, so I figured that I'd go without this month. :-)
In all seriousness, I was planning on making a donation anyway, but I figured that I could afford to make a bigger donation this way. If I'm lucky, this will bring in new users, and the lack of profits this month will be balanced out by increased profits in the following months... but even if nobody new uses Tarsnap because of this, I'll be glad that I've supported the FreeBSD Foundation.
I'm a dedicated FreeBSD user and never see press like this; FreeBSD f'ing rocks and I think your idea is great. It's an excellent way to get some press and help the project financially.
This may be a bit off topic from the actual post, but, I just looked at Tarsnap and think it is awesome (you got a customer out of this).
Have you done any/many blog posts on the technology behind your service? It is put together very well and the copy on your website is professional, clear, and abundant. Great job.
Have you done any/many blog posts on the technology behind your service?
I've written lots of blog posts which touch on various aspects of Tarsnap, but the two which fall most closely into the category "technology behind Tarsnap" are
No -- but for tax purposes I need to round numbers to an integer number of cents anyway. For some reason the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency only allows space for two digits after the decimal place on all of their tax forms...
That's between me and the FreeBSD Foundation. I don't feel that me making a charitable donation should require me to divulge what I consider to be private personal information.
Well, you certainly don't have to divulge anything, but it's not the charity that makes that so.
Also, it occurs to me that if this were a truly charitable act (instead of a partially charitable act along with a plug for your business), then you would have done it and not told anyone, or at least you wouldn't have asked people to buy TarSnap at the end of your article.
So, as long as you are marketing me your product, please do tell me how much money you think this donation amounts to so I can judge your corporate giving appropriately.
I'm honestly taken aback by the poor taste of this comment.
There's no such thing as a "partially charitable act", FreeBSD can use the help - Colin shouldn't feel compelled to disclose his company's financials because someone on the internet feels that he somehow deserves that information.
I guess if you needed some sort of baseline by which to base your donation (assuming you actually intend to make one instead of just being snarky on the internet), I'd suggest starting with donating significant portions of your time to the FreeBSD project as Colin has done.
There's a certain worldview that assumes personal profit is the ultimate evil and self-sacrifice is the ultimate good. Thus, Colin's good act is canceled out by the fact that he could benefit from it.
Frankly, this seems dumb to me. Self-sacrifice is not good if others are also made to suffer, profit is not evil if others also benefit.
I just think it's reasonable to ask how much he plans to have his business donate.
And the fact that it is a business making the donation means that it isn't personal information, it's information about the business, so I didn't think his response was a reasonable answer.
The reasonable answer is "I'm not telling," not "I'm not telling and it's none of your business because this is a personal charitable contribution," which it isn't.
I don't think it's a bad thing he's trying to help FreeBSD, or make a profit. I just don't feel the same reverence for the act that the other people in this thread seem to, particularly since I have no way to judge how much FreeBSD will make, or how much he will profit on the increased sales.
All in all a good PR stunt... whether it's all that charitable of an act, we'll never know.
the fact that it is a business making the donation means that it isn't personal information, it's information about the business
I didn't notice this bit when I replied earlier. If Tarsnap were a traditional startup company and there were cofounders and investors, I'd agree with you; but Tarsnap isn't that. Rather, Tarsnap is 100% owned by me, and the profits Tarsnap makes -- when I'm not donating them to the FreeBSD Foundation -- are my income.
To me this moves it from "business information" to "personal information": You're basically asking how much money I earn -- and while I know many people are happy to discuss that, the way I was raised makes me treat discussions of someone's income as only slightly less taboo than discussions of their sex life.
I have no way to judge how much FreeBSD will make, or how much he will profit on the increased sales.
Well, that makes two of us!
When I contacted the FreeBSD Foundation to check that they had no objection to me announcing a donation this way, I gave them an estimate of how much they would receive if this didn't lead to more users signing up; but I'm certainly hoping that they'll get more than that.
>"All in all a good PR stunt... whether it's all that charitable of an act, we'll never know."
So the "charitableness" of each good act is now to be quantified, measured, and judged? This heralds the end of small kindnesses, heretofore reckoned one of life's great pleasures.
Sorry, my original verbiage wasn't quite right - I was looking to see what year you started contributing to FreeBSD and came across some fundraising information but it doesn't look like it's really pertinent to the point - I've removed the sentence.
Thank you for making the donation though; it really is a great gesture.
As much as I like FreeBSD, and as much as I prefer the BSD license to the GPL, everytime I think about it, I reach the same conclusion: the BSD License is flawed.
Because of the GPL, Linux has companies like Red Hat committing 25% of the new code base. Companies have to improve the product, and Linux can evolve without direct funding.
The BSD license allows Apple and others to shamelessly rip code out of the product and put very little in, thus relying on a small community of developers and donations to keep running. It's a shame really, since FreeBSD is such a better product with so much potential. And all we can really do is support it through programs like this.
Nearly all the code to the base system is available under the non-BSD APSL, but the fact is that most of it just isn't useful to the BSDs, and if it were, Apple would likely be open to contributing the code under an alternative license (eg, they re-licensed launchd under the Apache license):
Because of the GPL, Linux has companies like Red Hat committing 25% of the new code base. Companies have to improve the product, and Linux can evolve without direct funding.
There's two routes for money to take:
1. People donate money to the FreeBSD Foundation, which then funds FreeBSD development.
2. People pay for RHEL, and then RedHat uses that money to fund Linux development.
Is there really any significant difference between these?
Colin's statement was in the context of the question of BSD vs. GPL licensing.
RedHat's model it's clearly more effective than simple charity, but I don't see a difference between RedHat and any other OSS-reliant contributing vendor. As an example, Juniper funds FreeBSD development based on sales/support of their high-end networking products, and contributed the MIPS port included in FreeBSD 8:
The main difference is that these companies make their money by incorporating FreeBSD into their products, are not required to provide all the source to their products, and thus can contribute back improvements as they see fit.
