Surely there are better reasons to donate to these projects other than funding development for massive corporations like Netflix, Sony, and Facebook. The idea that my donation money will be primarily used to cut costs for these corporations isn't exactly appealing to me.
You might one day want to run a startup or a project and then you could just do it on FreeBSD in any way you like, given the permissive license and this is exactly the reason why you need BSD, not only because Netflix, Sony or WhatsApp uses them to serve you their service.
Does it really bother you that much if your $10 of donation will benefit yourself, myself, other ordinary people and some companies at the same time, enough to stop you from donating?
I personally can't understand that, because when I donate my money or my code, it's yours then and you're free to do with it as you please, and wether you make $1000000 off it or not, it's not my concern anymore.
No it doesn't bother me if others (including big corporations) benefit as well, if I'm doing the donation anyway. I'll probably view it as a bonus! It's just that the benefit to big corporations alone isn't a motivator for me to donate in the first place.
The idea that at some point in the future I might want to use FreeBSD is definitely a better motivator. However this same argument applies to a million other projects that are in need of donations. My donation fund is limited, and so arguments that apply to pretty much every project don't make these BSD projects stand out.
In practice there are projects which I'm already actively using, and they get the majority of my donations. However I do occasionally donate to projects with future potential that I haven't benefited from yet.
I'm not against donating, even to projects which I don't directly use. I'm just saying that the fund raising pitch here is very weak. Not to belittle the BSD projects, but to point out that the situation can be greatly improved. Although yes I also understand that most open source project people want to work on their personal pet features and not deal with things like marketing, sales, image building.
The reason why Netflix/Sony/WhatsApp are mentioned is not because they're best reasons to donate to FreeBSD but instead because there's much higher chance for the reader to know them rather than DTrace, ZFS, Jails, performant TCP/IP stack and many other things where FreeBSD benefits the users.
It's much simpler to get a connection this way and some interest from the end user, who otherwise wouldn't have heard about FreeBSD and wouldn't ever thought on donating the money to a project that he wouldn't have know is running so many things he enjoys and or relies on.
We're aware everyone has limited funds and lots of people have better use for their resources than to donate, but this is exactly why we are asking kindly, we are not demanding nor trying to impose our point of view in such donation request and most importantly, we're not judging regardless of the donation decision :)
We are grateful even for discussion such as this one, that may spread out the knowledge and familiarity of the FreeBSD project and in result perhaps drive even more donations or - better yet - new project members!
>DTrace, ZFS, Jails, performant TCP/IP stack and many other things where FreeBSD benefits the users.
Just to point out, that DTrace and ZFS are (were) not BSD features, and were not invented by a Open Source BSD.
It just happened that they were open sourced by a GPL incompatible license (CDDL) which makes it impossible to directly merge it into the mainline Linux kernel.
EDIT
Just also to point out that had ZFS been a BSD licensed tech, it's very likely that ZoL would have been just as good an option as ZFS on FreeBSD.
