Re: The Trolling on the freebsd- lists

[Ben Laurie <ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Dillon wrote:
>     One thing that is occuring in the FreeBSD community is that quite a
>     significant number of developers are doing major pieces of work within
>     the tree under contract.  If I recall correctly, the security work and
>     GEOM are the two biggest contract funded projects (and not foundation
>     funded though perhaps someone closer to these projects can explain 
>     the actual situation on this list).  At least some of these people are
>     core members.

Since I was funded under the same program as at least the security work 
was (perhaps GEOM, too), I can tell you a bit about it - the money came 
from DARPA, under a program called CHATS (Composable High Assurance 
Trusted Systems). The money was made available to improve the security 
of free software, and was obtained through an open bidding process just 
like any other DARPA funding (which means you have to be big and 
American to get it :-).

A similar thing has occurred in Apache and OpenSSL - for example, I am 
working on FIPS certification for OpenSSL, and I am being funded 
directly to do it. In Apache, many of the projects are substantially 
supported by developers working for interested companies. I think this 
works much better than funding through the central body - if your job 
happens to let you work on free software, then you win and you haven't 
hurt anyone else in the project by doing it.

Cheers,

Ben.

--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html       http://www.thebunker.net/

"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff