Wow! Many congratulations to the folks at the FreeBSD Foundation for receiving a generous $1 million donation from Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp.
And of course many, MANY thanks to Jan Koum for giving back in this way! As he states in his Facebook post (reprinted in that link above), the FreeBSD operating system helped him get started in his career and got him to where he is today. This is a wonderful recognition of the power of open source operating systems – and it is wonderful that Jan Koum made this donation.
While most of the UNIX-related work in my life has been focused around Linux versus FreeBSD, I’ve used FreeBSD on a number of projects and found it quite good. From a strategic point of view, I’m glad to see this donation to the FreeBSD Foundation to help advance its own plans. Much of the world’s attention to “open source” matters focuses around Linux – and Linux receives the majority of corporate support and donations. But the Internet thrives on diversity and it is great to have a strong set of operating systems out there. This donation is good for the health of the overall Internet and the open source ecosystem.
Kudos to Jan Koum for making this donation now that he has risen to such a successful point in his life where he can make a donation like this. I hope he will inspire others who are in such situations to do so as well!
