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Jan Koum, Founder of WhatsApp, donates to FreeBSD Foundation again

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Last year, Jan Koum donated $1 million to the FreeBSD Foundation, allowing the organization to surpass their fundraising goal for 2015. This year in 2016, Koum donated a large amount once again, helping the organization continue their efforts in funding FreeBSD projects, travel grants, and overall promoting the use of FreeBSD around the world. Koum’s story started with a humble beginning, being raised in an immigrant family, and finding passion as a FreeBSD developer at Yahoo!. He then went on and found WhatsApp, a widely used mobile messenger app, where he deploys FreeBSD to serve nearly a billion users.

freebsd_foundationThe FreeBSD Foundation is thrilled to share the news that thanks to the generosity of Jan Koum, CEO and Co-Founder of WhatsApp, the Foundation is $500,000 closer to reaching our goal for 2016. Jan says, “While WhatsApp today is used by over a billion people, it is FreeBSD that provides the reliability and performance and helps our engineers keep WhatsApp service running efficiently and trouble-free.” The Foundation would like to take this opportunity to thank Jan for his continued support of the FreeBSD Project and the work we are doing.

Original announcement: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/foundation-announces-new-uranium-donor/

FreeBSD mentioned along with WhatsApp

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Jan Koum, founder of WhatsApp — the popular mobile messaging and voice calling application, has once again given tribute to FreeBSD and spoke of his beginnings at Yahoo. You can read the full article at Wired. WhatsApp is used by 900,000,000 users around the world.

FILE -- WhatsApp founders Brian Acton, left, and Jan Koum at company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., May 23, 2013. The frenzy to acquire fast-growing technology startups reached new heights on Feb. 19, 2014 as Facebook announced its largest ever acquisition, saying it would pay at least $16 billion for WhatsApp, a text messaging application with 450 million users around the world. (Peter DaSilva/The New York Times)

FILE — WhatsApp founders Brian Acton, left, and Jan Koum at company headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., May 23, 2013. The frenzy to acquire fast-growing technology startups reached new heights on Feb. 19, 2014 as Facebook announced its largest ever acquisition, saying it would pay at least $16 billion for WhatsApp, a text messaging application with 450 million users around the world. (Peter DaSilva/The New York Times)

http://www.wired.com/2015/10/whatsapps-co-founder-on-how-the-iconoclastic-app-got-huge/

WhatsApp donates 1 Million Dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation

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logo_freebsdfoundationJam Koum, CEO and co-founder of WhatsApp–a company well known to deploy FreeBSD on their servers, has recently made a very generous donation of $1,000,000 to the FreeBSD Foundation. This means that their 2014 fundraising goal of $1,000,000 has been surpassed. Congratulations!

whatsapp

A Message from Jan Koum:

Last week, I donated one million dollars to the FreeBSD Foundation, which supports the open source operating system that has helped millions of programmers pursue their passions and bring their ideas to life.
I’m actually one of those people. I started using FreeBSD in the late 90s, when I didn’t have much money and was living in government housing. In a way, FreeBSD helped lift me out of poverty – one of the main reasons I got a job at Yahoo! is because they were using FreeBSD, and it was my operating system of choice. Years later, when Brian and I set out to build WhatsApp, we used FreeBSD to keep our servers running. We still do.
I’m announcing this donation to shine a light on the good work being done by the FreeBSD Foundation, with the hope that others will also help move this project forward. We’ll all benefit if FreeBSD can continue to give people the same opportunity it gave me – if it can lift more immigrant kids out of poverty, and help more startups build something successful, and even transformative.
 –Jan Koum

Official blog post: http://freebsdfoundation.blogspot.com/2014/11/freebsd-foundation-announces-generous.html