FreeBSD Press Release: October 18, 2000

BSD Conference, Monterey, CA, October 18, 2000 The FreeBSD Project announced today the election of a new Core Team, the project’s management board. This marks the first occasion on which the team has been selected by means of an election among the project’s developers. Joining the Core team as new members are Greg Lehey, Warner Losh, Mike Smith, and Robert Watson. Re-elected members are Satoshi Asami, David Greenman, Jordan Hubbard, Doug Rabson, and Peter Wemm.

FreeBSD Project co-founder and continuing Core Team member Jordan Hubbard expressed excitement over the results, "For the first time since the FreeBSD project was formed, open elections have determined the composition of its core team and set an important precedent whereby any developer can now become part of the project’s leadership." The new core team also well-represents FreeBSD’s diverse and highly skilled group of international developers, with expertise ranging from RAID filesystem and device-driver development to extensive security backgrounds.

New Core Team members were elected from and by the FreeBSD committers team, the formal development staff of the FreeBSD project. Committers have direct access to the FreeBSD source repository, and perform the majority of software development associated with the project. Until this point, the Core Team was a self-selected board providing architectural and administrative direction.

This summer, the committers voted to move to a democratic model allowing the project to adapt to the changing development requirements of the open source operating system community. However, with over half of the prior Core Team re-elected from the old team, strong continuity exists.

Departing Core Team member Poul-Henning Kamp said, "I’m very proud of what we have done together in the Core Team over the last 8 years. The new Core, and the fact that they are elected by the committers, means that the project will be much more responsive to change in the future."

The changing of the guard in project leadership comes amid good feelings, Kamp indicated: all past Core members will continue on with the project with increased emphasis on development, "Now I get to spend more time on the FreeBSD source code instead of on project management."

Satoshi Asami is a co-founder and CTO of DecorMagic, Inc., and manages the FreeBSD Ports Collection.

David Greenman is a co-founder of the FreeBSD Project and is currently President of TeraSolutions, Inc., a company that manufactures Internet servers and RAID storage systems.

Jordan Hubbard is a co-founder of the FreeBSD Project as well as its public relations officer and release engineer. He is also Vice President for Open Source Solutions at BSDi.

Greg Lehey is an Open Source Researcher with Linuxcare; he has spent most of his professional career in Germany, where he worked for computer manufacturers such as Univac, Tandem, and Siemens-Nixdorf. He is the author of the Vinum volume management and RAID software for FreeBSD, has been involved in the FreeBSD SMPng project, and is the author of Porting Unix Software and The Complete FreeBSD.

Warner Losh has been porting NetBSD’s pccard code to FreeBSD and has been FreeBSD Security Officer for the past two years.

Doug Rabson is a co-founder of Qube Software Ltd., which specializes in 3D graphics technology. His work on FreeBSD includes the alpha and ia64 ports, and he was the main architect for FreeBSD’s device driver framework.

Mike Smith is Principal Engineer in BSDi’s Open Source Solutions group and has been active in the FreeBSD developer community as a developer resource, OEM liaison, sometime architect and device driver author.

Robert Watson is a research scientist at NAI Labs, working on network and operating system security research. His contributions to the FreeBSD Project include work on trusted operating system extensions (TrustedBSD), security architecture, and work on the security-officer team.

Peter Wemm has been involved with FreeBSD since the early days of the ISP Industry in Australia and has since relocated to the US to work as a Software Engineer for Yahoo!, Inc. His involvement in FreeBSD includes management of the FreeBSD source code repository and kernel development.

FreeBSD is a liberally-licensed open source operating system with its origins in BSD Net/2 and 4.4 Lite, the Berkeley Software Distributions developed at the University of California at Berkeley until 1994. It is developed and maintained by a global organization of paid and volunteer contributors. FreeBSD is distinguished by its high performance networking and filesystem support, and is widely used among Internet service providers, including industry-recognized companies such as Yahoo!, above.net, and Verio. FreeBSD is also frequently used as a platform for embedded networking devices, including products from IBM, Inktomi, Juniper Networks, and Network Alchemy - a Nokia Company.

More information may be found at http://www.FreeBSD.org/.

Jordan Hubbard
The FreeBSD Project
925-682-7859
jkh@FreeBSD.org

BSD is a registered trademark of Berkeley Software Design, Inc. Other trademarks are property of their respective owners. BSD technologies were originally developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors.