Fundraising 2020

Is it really more than 10 years since we last had an official fundraising drive?

Looking at old TNF financial reports I noticed that we have been doing quite well financially over the last years, with a steady stream of small and medium donations, and most of the time only moderate expenditures. The last fundraising drive back in 2009 was a giant success, and we have lived off it until now.

In the last two or three years the core team was able to find developers doing various tasks of funded development. Not all of them ended in a full success and were integrated into the main source tree — like the WiFi IEEE 802.11 rework, which still needs to be finished — but others pushed the project forward in big steps (like Support for "Arm ServerReady" compliant machines (SBBR+SBSA) debuting with the new aarch64 architecture in NetBSD 9.0).

There is more room for improvements, and not always volunteer time available, so funding some critical parts of development makes NetBSD better faster.

Besides the big development contracts we often buy hardware for developers working on special machines, and we also invest in our server infrastructure.

But now it is time: we would like to officially ask for donations this year. We are trying to raise $50,000 in 2020, to support ongoing development and new upcoming contracts - helping to make NetBSD 10 happen this year and be the best NetBSD ever!

The NetBSD Foundation is a non-profit organization as per section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. If you are a US company or citizen, your donations may be tax deductible. Your donations may also be eligible for matching offers from your employer.