Building And Running An Open-Source Community: The Freebsd Project

Marshall Kirk McKusick - Unix & BSD Guru

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

This talk will tell the story of the FreeBSD project, which started 20 years ago from the open-source release of 4.4BSD-Lite from the University of California at Berkeley. The FreeBSD project patterned its initial community structure on the development structure built up at Berkeley. It evolved and expanded that structure to create a self-organizing project that supports an ever growing and changing group of developers around the world. This lecture concludes with a description of the roles played by the thousands of volunteer developers that make up the FreeBSD Project of today. Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick's work with Unix and BSD development spans over thirty years. It begins with his first paper on the implementation of Berkeley Pascal in 1979, goes on to his pioneering work in the eighties on the BSD Fast File System, the BSD virtual memory system, the final release of 4.4BSD-Lite from the UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group, and carries on with his work on FreeBSD. A key figure in Unix and BSD development, his experiences chronicle not only the innovative technical achievements but also the interesting personalities and philosophical debates in Unix over the past thirty years.