Related link: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-advocacy/2005-August/002488.html

You may or may not be aware that Pair Networks is a big supporter of FreeBSD. Take their Datacenter Tour and you’ll see their network contains over a 1000 hardened and fully patched FreeBSD servers.

Not only that, they put their money where there mouth is. Remember last year when Poul-Henning Kamp asked for donations to fund his work on the FreeBSD filesystem and disk-I/O subsystems? In a gutsy yet successful move, a new funding strategy was born which many insiders now refer to as “pulling a PHK”. Well, Poul’s biggest donation came from, you guessed it, Pair Networks at just over 25,000 USD.

It turns out that another FreeBSD developer has pulled his own PHK in order to fund the optimization and cleanup of the current FreeBSD TCP/IP code. In under two weeks he made his target financial goal with a huge boost from Pair Networks who donated 14,000 USD.

A big thankyou to Pair Networks for providing such donations. An equally big thankyou to all of the other people who donate–your contributions provide visibility to a userbase who cares about FreeBSD and the developers who contribute to the FreeBSD project.