Expanding infrastructure donations for NTP Pool, CPAN, and FreeBSD

We believe that supporting the internet’s critical open source infrastructure shouldn’t rely exclusively on large corporate foundations, nor solely on the passion and goodwill of a few individuals. While many high-profile open-source projects enjoy significant corporate backing and marketing budgets, there is a class of internet-critical projects—the digital plumbing we all rely on—that remains proudly independent and community-driven. Ensuring their sustainability amid increasing requirements like the CRA without compromising their independence is an urgent matter of digital choice, and NetActuate is proud to help make this happen.

After consulting with community leaders in each project, we are happy to expand our infrastructure support for three such pillars of internet openness: NTP Pool, CPAN, and FreeBSD (the latter announced in Q4).

The Roots of Open Source

Many modern open-source initiatives are governed by large, well-funded organizations, or by single corporations. While these projects provide great value, they shift the landscape toward corporate interests. And with the ever growing concentration of power in the tech industry, this creates risk both for community members and users. We believe projects that represent the original spirit of open source and the open internet—grassroots, community-governed, and focused on solving technical challenges for the common good–are vital to the vibrancy and security of the internet.

But being independent often means operating with limited resources. Many of these projects rely on a single primary maintainer and volunteers, a model that can become unsustainable as the project grows in popularity, as original maintainers move on, or the project’s infrastructure needs refreshing to keep up with the accelerating pace of change (as described by Ulises Gascón, Maintainer of Node.js, Express, Lodash, and TC39 delegate).

Ensuring the World’s Time: The NTP Pool

The NTP Pool is a massive, community-driven project providing time synchronization services to hundreds of millions or billions of devices worldwide. There are other options for time services, but NTP Pool stands as the leader among free, open source, and entirely community-driven services. This independence matters.

"We’ve been keeping time on the internet synchronized since 2003, with thousands of volunteers running time servers worldwide. Planning for another 20+ years requires infrastructure partners who understand global-scale DNS and anycast—not just servers, but expertise. NetActuate brings both." — Ask Bjørn Hansen, NTP Pool Project

To support the NTP Pool’s long-term sustainability, NetActuate is:

• Donating Infrastructure: Providing bare metal servers, power, networking, and storage as part of a resilient, globally distributed upgrade to the project’s Core Infrastructure
• Global Resilience: Providing global VMs for authoritative DNS and monitoring, as well as BGP Anycast to improve consistency across their global endpoints
• Long-term Sustainability: Beyond infrastructure, NetActuate is working with project leadership to support resilience and long-term sustainability goals

Strengthening the Perl Ecosystem: CPAN Testers

The CPAN Testers project is a unique and vital part of the Perl community, providing automated testing across countless environments to ensure module reliability and detect regressions in the Perl interpreter itself. As one of the most mature development language package system, CPAN is unique in providing built-in testing for all modules. Before a CPAN module is installed, the module’s tests are run to verify its operability. CPAN Testers collects these test reports for use by the Perl community.

To help consolidate their services and increase their storage capacity, NetActuate is providing:

• High-Performance Storage: A multi-TB object storage donation in our Raleigh, NC location to handle their growing dataset of test reports
• Dedicated Computing: Bare metal servers and virtual machines to support their Kubernetes-based architecture
• Community Sponsorship: We are working with the Perl Foundation to ensure this infrastructure remains a permanent resource for the community

“CPAN Testers has a long history, starting from reports sent via e-mail being collected and distributed via newsgroups to a website storing 150 million records. We’re excited to use NetActuate’s platform to evolve into a cloud-native data warehouse supporting the Perl language and the CPAN community." — Doug Bell, project lead, CPAN Testers

Accelerating FreeBSD Development

NetActuate’s commitment to independent open source also includes our ongoing support for the FreeBSD Project. As long-time users of FreeBSD, we recognize it as a foundational operating system for high-performance networking and demanding workloads. FreeBSD also serves as a beacon of independence, as one of the first open source communities to embrace open governance and with a Foundation committed to the public interest.

To strengthen FreeBSD’s development pipeline, NetActuate sponsored dedicated bare-metal compute infrastructure for the project’s Cirrus CI runner.

This donation expands FreeBSD’s continuous integration capacity, allowing for faster build times and quicker feedback for contributors working on GitHub workflows and pull requests.

“NetActuate’s support will make a real difference for our CI efforts. The new Cirrus runner will speed up builds and testing for GitHub contributions, helping us keep FreeBSD development moving smoothly.” — Ed Maste, Senior Director of Technology at the FreeBSD Foundation.

Sustaining the Foundation: Why Independent Open Source is Vital for Global Choice

By providing global, high-availability infrastructure to the independent projects that power our world, NetActuate is helping to ensure that the internet remains a reliable, community-governed, independent resource for everyone. We see this support as a shared responsibility across the industry and we encourage others to make similar donations where needed.

"Open source is an essential way that NetActuate ensures maximum choice and flexibility for our customers," says Mark Mahle, CEO of NetActuate. "Therefore, it is part of our mission to provide infrastructure support so independent OSS projects remain strong and sustainable for all community members and users."