In this post, we give an update on the work that has gone on over the past few months towards meeting the objectives set out in the FreeBSD Foundation Technology Roadmap.

While FreeBSD developers have accomplished a lot in the past few years to improve the desktop experience, much work remains. A significant development for this focus area is a new Userland Software development position with the Foundation. We began our search in late January for a developer who could “develop, fix, and enhance any part of the operating system outside of the kernel”. Since then, we received over 40 applications and to give an indication of the strength of those applicants, we spent about a month conducting multiple interviews per week. With such a fantastic field, it was very challenging to select just one person to fill the role, but we are excited to introduce Pierre Pronchery as the newest member of the FreeBSD Foundation team. If you attend conferences such as BSDCan, EuroBSDCon, or Fosdem you may have met Pierre or you may recognize his name from his work with our BSD sibling, the NetBSD project where Pierre is both a developer and a board director. Look out for new FreeBSD contributions from Pierre. 
As you may know from past newsletters, Bjoern Zeeb has been contracted by the Foundation to improve wireless networking on FreeBSD. After a pause in work, Bjoern has been ramping back up on this contract. In his latest update, he reports that work continues on the linuxkpi, net80211, and wpa_supplicant.

         

A month ago, I had the opportunity to head down to Pasadena, California to join members of the open source community at SCaLE20X. This was my second SCaLE, and the first time I had been to one held in the original Pasadena location.

On the first day of the conference, I assisted Roller Angel with running a full-day FreeBSD workshop. The goal of the day was to help people install FreeSBD on either a virtual machine or cloud device, install and run a desktop environment, set up a basic jail, create a local ports repository, and more. While it mostly went off without a hitch, we did run into a small issue when Vultr (the cloud provider we were using) was unable to process card payments, sending us scrambling to find a different provider for those attendees. The turnout was great and we got a wide range of participants in the workshop, from FreeBSD newbies, to experienced users wanting to put FreeBSd on their new machine. If you are interested in going through the workshop in your own time, Roller Angel has posted it online as a text file which can be found here.

Senior Director of Technology Ed Maste talks about Security Beyond Software: The open source hardware security evolution in Helpnet Security.

Greg Wallace joins the Foundation as the new Director of Partnerships and Research. He brings 20+ years experience in the technology industry to the FreeBSD Foundation. His career includes roles as a technology policy analyst, open source start-up founder and start-up marketer many times over, freelance researcher and writer, and Director of Marketing for several open source Foundations such as jQuery, Node.js, Open Mainframe, and Hyperledger.   

He will focus on developing mutually beneficial relationships with companies and organizations building with FreeBSD and representing this work in today’s major technology conversations on topics like security and green(er) computing. 

Pierre Pronchery joins the FreeBSD Foundation as a Userland Software Developer. Pierre is no stranger to the BSD community. After a brief stint on FreeBSD 4.1, he settled on NetBSD in 2006, where he was invited as a developer and currently serving on the Board of Directors. But his passion and focus really is for a better user experience on BSD systems overall! 

Joining the FreeBSD Foundation is a unique opportunity to contribute to the BSD ecosystem, build bridges between communities, and bring his experience to FreeBSD as well.

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Just like the development work discussed in this newsletter, all of the Foundation’s work is funded by your generous donations. Thank you!

If you haven’t supported us yet this year, make a donation here (US-based donors, your gift is tax-deductible). Technology companies whose products and services rely on FreeBSD can join our Partnership Program – reach out to our new Director of Partnerships, Greg Wallace, with any questions.

While your financial contributions are essential, there are so many additional ways to get involved with FreeBSD, such as contributing code, docs, and bug reports. Be sure to share these great resources with your colleagues who are new to FreeBSD: resources & project tech docs, FreeBSD handbook, community links, upcoming events.