Hello everybody,

I am currently considering to work on the FreeBSD bluetooth stack. I am
hacking around on the very experimental BLE tools by Takanori Watanabe
[1]. At the very least, we could unify the existing frameworks - bthidd,
blued by Andreas Kempe [2] and FreeBSD-BLE - into a single daemon with CLI
and tray app or something. The entire architecture however should be put
into question and perhaps we should consider supporting Linux drivers and
porting bluez.

Anyway, that would be a major undertaking and since I am looking for
(additional) income, I was also considering to get this financed by the
FreeBSD foundation. People are often complaining about FreeBSD's BT
support on the desktop, so this might indeed be attractive to the
foundation. Which takes me to my question: Does anybody have any
experience in working for them and which rates would be appropriate? I am
totally new to freelancing - actually I am still trying to answer all
bureaucratic questions associated with it. Actually, I would need to
involve a FreeBSD committer anyway if we want to get stuff reviewed [3]
and eventually committed into src or ports. That would be a compensated
collaboration. So if you are a committer and interested, at least in
discussing the matter, please get in touch with me! Or forward this post
to somebody, who could be interested.

Best regards,
Robin

PS: There have been several attempts to improve FreeBSD bluetooth support.
Andreas Kempe's patches are still not committed and he's given up on it.
But if we involved a committer from the very beginning, I think we might
get something done this time.

PPS: I do see a problem with the financing, though. The foundation states
in its Proposal Submission Guidelines [4] that they won't pay industry
standard rates (see 1.6) and in their example submission, the contributor
proposes $1000 for every milestone, roughly every month, which does not
sound reasonable at all.

[1]: https://github.com/rhaberkorn/FreeBSD-BLE
[2]: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2022-04-2022-06/blued/
[3]: https://freebsdfoundation.org/get-involved/project-proposal-overview/
[4]: https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/FreeBSDProposalSubmission.pdf

I wrote some preliminary instructions for the Bluetooth Low Energy tools.
If you got a mouse lying around, that doesn't yet work with FreeBSD, give
it a shot:

https://github.com/rhaberkorn/FreeBSD-BLE

On Fri, 10 Jan 2025, Robin Haberkorn wrote:

> Hello everybody,
>
> I am currently considering to work on the FreeBSD bluetooth stack. I am
> hacking around on the very experimental BLE tools by Takanori Watanabe [1].
> At the very least, we could unify the existing frameworks - bthidd, blued by
> Andreas Kempe [2] and FreeBSD-BLE - into a single daemon with CLI and tray
> app or something. The entire architecture however should be put into question
> and perhaps we should consider supporting Linux drivers and porting bluez.
>
> Anyway, that would be a major undertaking and since I am looking for
> (additional) income, I was also considering to get this financed by the
> FreeBSD foundation. People are often complaining about FreeBSD's BT support
> on the desktop, so this might indeed be attractive to the foundation. Which
> takes me to my question: Does anybody have any experience in working for them
> and which rates would be appropriate? I am totally new to freelancing -
> actually I am still trying to answer all bureaucratic questions associated
> with it. Actually, I would need to involve a FreeBSD committer anyway if we
> want to get stuff reviewed [3] and eventually committed into src or ports.
> That would be a compensated collaboration. So if you are a committer and
> interested, at least in discussing the matter, please get in touch with me!
> Or forward this post to somebody, who could be interested.
>
> Best regards,
> Robin
>
> PS: There have been several attempts to improve FreeBSD bluetooth support.
> Andreas Kempe's patches are still not committed and he's given up on it. But
> if we involved a committer from the very beginning, I think we might get
> something done this time.
>
> PPS: I do see a problem with the financing, though. The foundation states in
> its Proposal Submission Guidelines [4] that they won't pay industry standard
> rates (see 1.6) and in their example submission, the contributor proposes
> $1000 for every milestone, roughly every month, which does not sound
> reasonable at all.
>
> [1]: https://github.com/rhaberkorn/FreeBSD-BLE
> [2]: https://www.freebsd.org/status/report-2022-04-2022-06/blued/
> [3]: https://freebsdfoundation.org/get-involved/project-proposal-overview/
> [4]:
> https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/FreeBSDProposalSubmission.pdf
>