Java 1.5 donations

[Michael Vince]

Hi All,

I been seeing a lot of VM crash reports posted to this mailing list and 
I was thinking how it would be great if this project got funding, 
everyone knows doing work for reward is better then doing it for free.
I just wanted to state my personal opinion and thoughts about this topic.
I was thinking that methods like Andre Oppermann seem to give a good 
example of how a (arguably) small amount of money $18k US can go to 
greatly help the FreeBSD project.
http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/tcpoptimization.html

I was wondering if anyone knew if there was any details such as a time 
frame and a rough figure of how much it would cost to get some good 
results (or even full Sun Java certification) happening 1.5 Java on 
i386/amd64 as I was hoping maybe I could persuade the company I work at 
to donate. I also did notice that there was recently a funding 
announcement for Java 1.5 on FreeBSD on the FreeBSD foundation web site 
which is good news.

I have been looking at the FreeBSD web page to judge how good it is in 
enticing donations and I think its a bit ordinary, If you go to the 
entry page of the main FreeBSD web site http://www.freebsd.org  its hard 
to see any sign of a donations page,  The donations page is hidden away 
under the 'about' area. http://www.freebsd.org/about.html which 
ultimately has a link going to the FreeBSD foundation page 
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/ if you want to donate money, 
personally I don't think thats very good way to entice people to give 
money to the FreeBSD foundation.
If you look at the OpenBSD web site http://www.openbsd.org/ you can see 
that all they really have on their entry web page is right in the middle 
front page is the encouragement of buying either CDs/Tshirts or straight 
donations which is a effective method of encouragement of donations.
Some people could be mistaken (or just prefer) to think that FreeBSD 
foundation don't really care about donations which is not ideal.

I think in the main entry FreeBSD web site page there should be an extra 
tab for "Donations" or even in place of either the "About" or "Support" 
links. It could be worded in a similar way OpenBSD have it, where it 
could have more of a guilt factor in there such as 'if your company uses 
FreeBSD then you are encouraged to give back and donate to the FreeBSD 
foundation'.
I think this is especially true for big companies, I mean I don't know 
how much Apple or Yahoo give back for using FreeBSD but I think if it 
isn't large then having a web page that puts a bit of pressure on all of 
us including big companies to drive a guilt factor could go a long way.
I did touch on this topic a little while ago and some one flamed me 
saying  Apple gave a lot back by giving back some source patches to the 
GCC project, I don't see any argument other then that is more giving 
back GNU then to directly FreeBSD.

Mike