09-22, 15:00–15:45 (Europe/Dublin), Stage End
In 2023 the FreeBSD Project celebrated its thirtieth year of providing a complete system distribution. This talk tries to understand what it is that has made FreeBSD one of the few long-term viable open source projects. Most of the projects with long-term successes are sponsored by companies that base their products around the open-source software that they actively nurture. While FreeBSD has companies actively using and supporting it, they have come and gone over the years; none has been the primary long-term proponent of it. Thus the FreeBSD community has been the biggest factor in sustaining the project. Often open-source communities depend on long-term leadership of key individuals, for example Linus Torvolds with Linux. FreeBSD has managed to successfully bring in several new leaders over its lifetime which has been key to its ability to continue to adapt to the new challenges that it faces. This talk is based on the article of the same title that I wrote in the May/June FreeBSD Journal that had a 30-year retrospective of FreeBSD.
Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick writes books and articles, teaches classes on UNIX- and BSD-related subjects, and provides expert-witness testimony on software patent, trade secret, and copyright issues particularly those related to operating systems and filesystems. He has been a developer and committer to the FreeBSD Project since shortly after its founding in 1993. While at the University of California at Berkeley, he implemented the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and was the Research Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) overseeing the development and release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. He earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University and did his graduate work at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received master's degrees in computer science and business administration and a doctoral degree in computer science. He has twice been president of the board of the Usenix Association, served nine years as a board member and treasurer of the FreeBSD Foundation, is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member of ACM, and AAAS.
In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, scuba diving, and wine collecting. The wine is stored in a specially constructed wine cellar (accessible from the Web at http://www.mckusick.com/~mckusick/) in the basement of the house that he shares with Eric Allman, his partner of 45-and-some-odd years and husband since 2013.