Building and Running an Open-Source Community: The FreeBSD Project

by Marshall Kirk McKusick

Abstract

The BSD community started at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1970's. Through the 1980's the BSD software was developed and released from Berkeley. In 1992, Berkeley made its final release, 4.4BSD-Lite, an open-source version of BSD. Since that time, independent development has continued by the FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, and Dragonfly projects. This talk will trace the history and structure of the BSD community from its start as a small group of paid staff at Berkeley up through the thousands of volunteer developers that make up the FreeBSD Project of today. It will describe how the development structure set up at Berkeley was expanded to create a self-organizing project that supports an ever growing and changing group of developers around the world.

Author bio

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. 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. His particular areas of interest are the virtual-memory system and the filesystem. 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, is currently a member of the editorial board of ACM's Queue magazine, and is a member of the Usenix Association, ACM, and IEEE.

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 domestic partner of 27-and-some-odd years.

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