I too, would love to see FreeBSD become a first-class citizen on EC2!

As @colechristensen mentioned, you should contact cperciva (Colin Percival) about this -- he's already been doing some work on FreeBSD's Xen support and IIRC he's already talked to some people at AWS about "officially" supporting FreeBSD on EC2. I haven't heard anything for a while though, so perhaps you could use your contacts to get things moving (or moving faster).

EDIT: You might be interested in reading/joining the 'freebsd-xen' and 'freebsd-virtualization' mailing lists:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/

http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-virtualiza...

I've been meaning to reach out to Colin for a while, but now I've actually done it. I'll let you know what he says.

Are you aware that cperciva has been working on exactly this for quite a while? I'm guessing he'd appreciate the help.

I am. I've reached out to him to offer my assistance.

> Ok, I want to fund a project, not propose it. How do I do that?

I'm very interested in this, too. I've just begun using elance to find FreeBSD coders. I have a six-figure budget for various projects in the next three months. I would love to have some great projects coded and returned to the community, but finding vetted, high-quality FreeBSD coders hasn't been easy (on myself as an executive.) It would be most helpful if an organization, like the FreeBSD Foundation , were able to offer me an avenue to fund projects of interest to my organization (and the community.)

What kind of projects do you want coded? Could you be more specific? [Your email is not in your profile so I couldn't email you privately]

Wait what about this announcement? I thought this meant that FreeBSD is now the same status as Linux on EC2. I know originally there was an extra charge for Windows instances, and you had to make your own AMI. But isn't this saying it's official? This is from November 2012, so very recent.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/aws-marketplace-additiona...

"These operating systems come directly from the Open Source community and are available at no charge other than the usual cost for the EC2 instances. You can find them in the Operating Systems section of the Marketplace"

Unfortunately it is HVM only, or you have to run it on Windows instances, which means a portion of that money goes to Microsoft.

What I mean by first class is that it will run on every instance type, including a micro, so I can make a FreeBSD shellhost for $8/mo, for example.

FWIW, in us-east-1, t1.micro is $0.02/hour for both UNIX and Windows. (Yay rounding errors!)

I have a strong feeling that if you simply took the initiative and asked the foundation, you would get what you want. Of course, per-project funding on a wide scale gets into a sticky situation where the foundation no longer can make its own choices and do the right things instead of the popular things.

Agreed. Talking to cpercival would also be a good start. See his page on the subject: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

Also: https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/Xen

I think that funding whatever is required here would be fantastic. The move to VPSs has forced me to also move to Ubuntu for what I host 'in the cloud', and I'd love to move back to FreeBSD.

> Of course, per-project funding on a wide scale gets into a sticky situation where the foundation no longer can make its own choices and do the right things instead of the popular things.

That's why I haven't asked the foundation directly. :) When I made my annual donation to them this year I expressed my desire to see FreeBSD on EC2, but I don't want to start dictating what they should be doing.

There's honestly no harm in discussing it. FreeBSD/Xen is already of interest to base committers, there's existing work done.

If those committers are interested in furthering it via funding -- something you can only establish by talking to the foundation et al -- then everyone wins! :)

Ok, you've convinced me.

How do I "talk to the foundation"? ie. What's the best way to bring this up with them.

I'd start with:

board [at] freebsdfoundation.org

and/or

cperciva [at] FreeBSD.org