Poul-Henning Kamp, a FreeBSD developer, writes about operating systems, virtualization, security, time keeping, and software engineering culture.
Commenters note his influence, including md5crypt, FreeBSD timecounters, and Ntimed, and recommend his bikeshed email and NSA ORCHESTRA talk.
I would first check with my manager or my accountant, that I am not doing something that would violating my employment contract.
I.e. my manager is quite open about 20% of time arrangements, and we are working on several open-source projects at work, but I am not sure if taking money for working on something extra wouldn't violate something. It might be worth it to have it clearly spelled out in the contract.
On the other hand, a.f.a.i.k. in what do you do in your free time on your own hardware should be no concern to your employer, so accepting patreon donors should fall into that category as well?
Alongside patreon, I would attempt to introduce something like Varnish Moral Licence [1] as well. It looks like Mr. Kamp figured a nice way how to get a open-source sponsorship from big corporations (because from the procurement's perspective it still looks like a licence you get an invoice for even you don't promise them anything in return :-)
[1] http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/vmlfaq.html#isn-t-this-more-a-sort-of-sponsorship-than-a-license
I did watch, thanks, but anyone in a hurry can get just the slides here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/_downloads/FOSDEM_2014.pdf
I particularly appreciated the "QUEEN success example: SSC" (self-signed certificates, starts at slide 23), which also got a good laugh from the audience ...
(if you're just watching the video, this is the text of the second slide in the PDF, not shown at FOSDEM:
"""
What is this ?
This is a ficticious NSA briefing I gave as the closing keynote at FOSDEM 2014
The intent was to make people laugh and think,
but I challenge anybody to prove it untrue.
Playlist spoiler:
Electric Light ORCHESTRA: Confusion
ABBA: Money, Money, Money
Backman Turner OVERDRIVE: Taking Care Of Business
QUEEN: Bicycle Race
Beastie BOYS: Sabotage
PASADENA Roof Orchestra: Pennies From Heaven
"""
)
The most straightforward thing is to just run the CPU with an accurate clock frequency. You'll have to replace the Quartz next to the clock-generation chip next to your CPU/Chipset by something which is very accurate.
http://phk.freebsd.dk/soekris/pps/
https://deltafabri.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/under-60-ns-an-atomic-stratum-1-ntp-server-hardware/
For the cost, it's about $150 or so for a used GPS with precise 10 MHz reference frequency output, there's a different PLL IC (different from the ClockBlock module) from Silabs which is available from Adafruit for <$10, but I don't know if the xtal there can be exchanged for a 10 MHz frequency. The C-revision of the used IC can be, though... https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-si5351-clock-generator-breakout/overview
The author stops at an intuitive leap before developing the idea into something easily put into practice.
Actually doing what the author describes is often impossible except in an intuitive way. How could you know a priori which decisions might have big impacts? On a project of any complexity you need either deep specific experience or a very accurate working model of the entire project. You aren’t likely to have either.
This has been previously covered in depth, even in software, although of course it could possibly be improved.
Painting the bikeshed is one example: http://phk.freebsd.dk/sagas/bikeshed/
He influenced my career as much as Dennis and Ken did.
Our "nanokernel" paper brought NTP into the nanosecond domain and gave FreeBSD "timecounters".
But our true shared passion was Loran-C
Dave even invented the 16-pulse "tactical Loran-C" during the Vietnam War.
I borrowed his ISA card Loran-C receiver (serial #1 & only) and later I built two generations of SDR receivers, and he was so proud when I showed him this dancing pulse received with a cheap ARM chip:
https://phk.freebsd.dk/AducLoran/animation2.gif
And boy was he pissed when USA shut down Loran-C, he really loved his "loudenboomers"
RIP
His post announcing his "from the scratch" effort:
http://phk.freebsd.dk/time/20140926.html
The problem with all such initiatives ("we start clean") is that they typically never even reach the feature set of the previous software (implementing features takes orders of magnitude more time than some simple "proof of concept") and that they often make the same errors the older software already solved. JWZ wrote nicely somewhere about that effect (something like "it's not 'hard to read code,' those are the actual features implemented") but I can't find the link.