Serious Business

A brief story about OSS foundations, money, and why I hope FreeBSD dies a quick death.

Let me start by saying: every day I have to deal with FreeBSD. Through an unfortunate combination of circumstances, a co-worker has been blinded by the lies of FreeBSD and now swears by its superiority over other operating systems. Thus most of our servers that have been installed by him in recent years run the shit. Since I started this has been the subject of many day-to-day jokes/jabs in our small part of the floor.

Don’t get me wrong here; I know FreeBSD works on servers. I know it works well. However, I think FreeBSD is about as useful on the desktop as any Linux distro is (‘what a POS’). To this end, Gordon (a coworker) decided to surprise me with the following (which I only received after the fact):

Gordon wrote:

Hello FreeBSD Foundation,

I would like to make two donations. One from myself and one from a
co-worker. My donation isn’t a problem. However, the one for my
co-worker might be a problem. The donation from the co-worker has
to appear from him — but I would be paying for it.

(It’s a bit of a practical joke on my part. The coworker doesn’t
much care for FreeBSD. He’s one of those filthy Debian users. Seeing
his name appear as a donor for FreeBSD would result in much comedy at work)

Can this be arranged?

Regards,

-Gordon

Son of a bitch.

This f’n guy. Do you see what this  guy is doing to me? KILLING ME SLOWLY.

_Well_Fucking_Played_Gordon_

So this letter gets sent to deb@freebsdfoundation and board@freebsdfoundation. One would think that Gordon’s going to slay with this one, right? WRONG.

Instead of taking the free money, although slightly underhanded, in pretty good faith / kind gesture, the FreeBSD foundation replies to him with this:

Dear Gordon,

Thank for your interest in making a donation to the foundation. I
understand your intent on playing a practical joke on your co-worker.
We all try to have a good sense of humor here. But, our donors list is
extremely important to us. This is where we have a chance to acknowledge
and show our appreciation to our donors. The names listed there are
FreeBSD’s biggest advocates. And, BTW, we do have a policy that we only
list the name as documented on the check or donation service.

I hope you understand why we can’t support you with your request.
Thank you for your support of FreeBSD.

Sincerely,

Deb Goodkin
Director of Operations
The FreeBSD Foundation

Wut?

Really?

_Really?_

Listen guys. FreeBSD isn’t so hot nowadays. When someone offers you money for your shitty work, take it. Take it and fucking run. Use it to get that stick shoved up your ass surgically removed. What if he was going to donate hundreds of dollars? You wont add 12 letters to a web page because someone might be butthurt if they found out the true story behind it? This is whats wrong with these shitty fucking OSS projects.

For future reference FreeBSD foundation: NO ONE GIVES A FUCK.

Idiots.

Anyway, I will be making a donation to some shitty OSS project other than the FreeBSD project and forwarding the receipt on to Deb in reply to her message in the near future. Thanks for the laughs.