Board of Directors
The Foundation board is comprised of volunteers that are actively involved in FreeBSD and are respected researchers in their areas of professional expertise.
Justin T. Gibbs
Justin is a Software Engineer at Facebook. His past experience has ranged from office application development at Microsoft to embedded systems for general aviation aircraft at Avidyne. A member of the FreeBSD Development Team since 1993, Justin has contributed to many areas of the FreeBSD operating system, and is best known for his work on the SCSI subsystem. After serving on the FreeBSD Core Team from 1995-2000 he created the FreeBSD Foundation to provide a non-profit framework for funding FreeBSD development and community support.
Andrew Wafaa
Andrew leads Arm’s Open Source Office, encompassing internal and external open source engagements and has been working with both the FreeBSD Foundation and the community for over 8 years, pushing for Arm adoption externally and FreeBSD adoption internally. As a member of Arm’s Open Source Software leadership team, he is responsible for building the relationships between Arm engineering and key open source projects of which FreeBSD is one such project.
With nearly 20 years of experience in the Open Source space working for the likes of Fujitsu, EMC, Sun Microsystems as well as local government IT teams. He has held and continues to hold numerous Board positions in various Open Source projects, including openSUSE, Xen and the Yocto Project. Prior to the technology world, Andrew spent over a decade in the aviation space and is slowly returning to it as a
private pilot.
Dr. Robert N. M. Watson
Dr. Watson is a University Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Systems, Security, and Architecture at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, where he leads a research team exploring intersections between operating systems, networking, security, program analysis/transformation, and computer architecture. He has worked extensively with industrial consumers of FreeBSD to support their interaction with the open-source community, and developed the MAC Framework that supports product-specific security models, such as the sandboxing features in iOS, Mac OS X, and Junos. Previously, Dr. Watson was a Senior Research Scientist at McAfee Research. He co-authored “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System.” He has served on the FreeBSD Core Team and Foundation Board for over ten years and has been an active contributor to the open-source FreeBSD operating system in the areas of security, networking, and release engineering since the late 1990s.
Dr. Hiroki Sato
Hiroki Sato, Ph.D. joined the FreeBSD Development Team in 2000. He has been working as a member of the Core Team since 2006 and the Release Engineering and Documentation Engineering Teams since 2004. His focus is maintaining the project’s documentation, text processing software, and IPv6 network functionality, while actively promoting FreeBSD in Asian countries by hosting AsiaBSDCon. In 2014 he founded BSD Research, a Japan-based non-profit to support development and communities of FreeBSD in Japan in collaboration with FreeBSD Foundation. He is currently an assistant professor of Communications and Computer Engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Cat Allman
Cat is a Program Manager, Google, Developer Ecosystem Team, San Francisco
She has worked on open source, interdisciplinary innovation, and “maker” community development during her 14+ years with Google. Her work with free and open source software communities and startups since the 1980’s includes Mt Xinu, Pilot Network Services and Sendmail Inc. A frequent speaker on open source, not for profit fundraising and the “maker movement” at events and institutions including http://makerstown.eu/, LinuxConfAU, FOSS Oman, GoOpen Arctic Forum, Carnegie Mellon University, OSCON, ACM-SIGCSE, National University of Singapore, USENIX Women in Advanced Computing Summit, BINUS University Jakarta, CROSS at University of California Santa Cruz, and FOSSASIA, she has used her expertise regarding communities, fundraising and unconference/event creation to co-organize conferences including Science Foo Camp, produced with Nature, O’Reilly Media, and Digital Science 2007-2021, Education & Lifelong Learning Foo Camp with O’Reilly, Sesame Workshop & Macmillan Learning, the 1st Open Source Track at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and the 2018 and 2020 Sustain! Conferences. She is currently a 4th term USENIX.org Board member, a 3x Jury member for http://www.falling-walls.com/
In addition, she has advised CZI Essential Open Source for Science, Sloan Foundation, Johns Hopkins University, Python Foundation, Harvard Business School Alumni Office, Blue Origins and others on community building, fundraising and other topics.
Deb Goodkin
Deb has been with the Foundation since August, 2005. She has spent 20+ years working in marketing, sales, and development of data storage devices. She earned an MSEE from the University of Santa Clara, and a BSCE from the University of California, San Diego.
