EuroBSDCon Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), which is backed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, is funding open source work again. This time, the recipients are the FreeBSD Foundation and SerNet, which is one of the backers of the Samba Project.
The STF gave the GNOME ecosystem €1 million in 2023, as we mentioned in July, but clearly the fund has broader aspirations. The Register has previously mentioned that FreeBSD also received funding. Now it looks like the foundation will spend its €686,400 ($767,200, or £573,000) by investing it in its infrastructure.
These efforts are alongside an effort to improve laptop support in the OS, which has been funded by a separate investment from Quantum Leap Research (QLR). QLR's website is less than forthcoming about what it does, but the FreeBSD folks mention that it "is focused on tackling some of the most complex problems faced by the Department of Defense and the US Intelligence Community." It seems multiple governments are bunging cash at FreeBSD.
This is on top of recent FreeBSD audio stack work. Some of this new effort, the team told us at this year's EuroBSDCon in Dublin, is going toward improving power management, especially suspend/resume support, audio support including better microphone handling and utilizing media-playback keys, and, perhaps most of all, improving its Wi-Fi support.