The FreeBSD Foundation

Last week I was writing "About the GNOME Foundation". This time I visited the FreeBSD Foundation trying to understand how that organization is structured, how do they finance themselves and what do they do?

Membership

This Foundation does not have members.

Management

Based on the Profit and Loss report it seems there is one person who gets salary or several people who get partial salary but I could not find out the details. (In 2009 they had 55,000 USD payroll expenses. For 2010 they budgeted 62,000 USD)

Update: After I sent a message to the board I got a reply from Deb Goodkin the Secretary and Treasurer of the FreeBSD Foundation telling me that she is the one who receives a salary.

Control

The board is self electing. Each board member is elected for a period of a year. They normally don't get a salary but they can receive one if the board decides so. They can get compensation for their expenses.

Reporting

There are quarterly, publicly available financial reports and quarterly reports about the activities of the foundation. There is also a FreeBSD Foundation blog for better communication.

Funding

They are funded by donations of almost 1,000 different donors. In 2009 the total donations were 270.000 USD and they spent 162,000 USD. In 2010 they budgeted for 347,000 USD expenses while their goal is to raise 350,000 USD. There is a nice image on the front page of the FreeBSD Foundation showing the current status of the fund-raising.

Actions

In the quarterly description of activities one can see the types of activities the Foundation does:

• Financing various FreeBSD conferences.
• Travel cost of some of the FreeBSD developers.
• They are running the fund-raising itself.
• Evaluate and support various development projects.