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A year of funded FreeBSD development

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...

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". This port provides a command-line interface to the EC2 Instance MetaData Service, and is necessary because when Amazon launched "IMDSv2" to paper over (but not properly fix) the security problem inherent in exposing IAM credentials over HTTP, they made it impossible to use FreeBSD fetch(1) to access the IMDS. While I don't pay for these images — the FreeBSD release engineering AWS account is sponsored by Amazon — it was still costing someone money; so when I realized I could get rid of 336 TB of EBS snapshots, I figured it was worth spending a few hours writing shell scripts.

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