A year of funded FreeBSD development

Summary

A year of funded FreeBSD I've been maintaining FreeBSD on the Amazon EC2 platform ever since I first got it booting in 2010, but in November 2023 I added to my responsibilities the role of FreeBSD release engineering lead — just in time to announce the availability of FreeBSD 14.0, although Glen Barber did all the release engineering work for that release. While I receive a small amount of funding from Antithesis and from my FreeBSD/EC2 Patreon, it rapidly became clear that my release engineering duties were competing with — in fact, out-competing — FreeBSD/EC2 for my available FreeBSD volunteer hours: In addition to my long list of "features to implement" stagnating, I had increasingly been saying "huh that's weird... oh well, no time to investigate that now". In short, by early 2024 I was becoming increasingly concerned that I was not in a position to be a good "owner" of the FreeBSD/EC2 platform. For several years leading up to this point I had been talking to Amazonians on and off about the possibility of Amazon sponsoring my FreeBSD/EC2 work; rather predictably, most of those conversation ended up with my contacts at Amazon rhyming with "Amazon should definitely sponsor the work you're doing... but I don't have any money available in my budget for this". Finally in April 2024 I found someone with a budget, and after some discussions around timeline, scope, and process, it was determined that Amazon would support me for a year via GitHub Sponsors. I'm not entirely sure if the year in question was June through May or July through June — money had to move within Amazon, from Amazon to GitHub, from GitHub to Stripe, and finally from Stripe into my bank account, so when I received money doesn't necessarily reflect when Amazon intended to give me money — but either way the sponsorship either has come to an end or is coming to an end soon, so I figured now was a good time to write about what I've done. Amazon was nominally sponsoring me for 40 hours/month of work on F...