Staff

Leadership

Executive Director

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.

Senior Director of Technology

Ed Maste

Ed first became involved with FreeBSD while working on the operating system team at Sandvine, Inc. in 2003. In 2005 he started working with Robert Watson to solve issues in the FreeBSD network stack and received a commit bit later that year.

Since then, he moved on to lead the operating system team and led a number of developers working to bring enhancements from FreeBSD into Sandvine’s operating system by contributing back changes that they have made and supporting work that they find valuable by contracting FreeBSD committers. Ed started working as a kernel consultant in 2012 after leaving Sandvine.

In 2013, Ed took on the role of Director of Project Development for the FreeBSD Foundation, managing the project grant process and full-time FreeBSD Foundation Development staff.

Senior Director Advocacy and Community

Kim McMahon

Kim McMahon is well-known in the open source and cloud native ecosystem as a marketer of open source and growing healthy and productive communities. She led the marketing and community activities at several Linux Foundation projects including CNCF and RISC-V, building member participation and end-user ecosystems. She has also worked at organizations large and small such as Cisco and Nirmata, leading marketing for open source projects, developer journeys, and community. Community building, breaking down barriers, and uniting are Kim’s drivers.

Senior Director of Partnerships and Research

Greg Wallace

Greg is an enterprise open source leader with over 20 years of experience with leading-edge technical solutions. He has significant experience with enterprise and full stack open source software, information security, cloud, and networking. Greg has previously worked at numerous start-ups, large technology companies, and open source organizations. As Senior Director of Project Marketing at the Linux Foundation, he developed content with and helped promote the Node.js, OpenJS, Hyperledger, and Open Mainframe communities. More recently, Greg worked part time with the FreeBSD Foundation researching and writing about Foundation Grant Projects, Core Team 10, and the Netflix case study. He was a Rotary Scholar at the University of Barcelona and later earned joint MBA and International Affairs degrees from Columbia.

Team

Senior Software Engineer

Konstantin Belousov

Konstantin started using FreeBSD in 1998 and began working on fixing bugs in 2005. He received his commit bit in 2006.

Konstantin’s main objective is to keep FreeBSD stable and usable. He joined the Foundation in 2011, and currently works on new features, bug fixes, security, and code reviews. He specifically likes to understand the details of the x86 hardware operations.

Director Communications, Events, and Operations

Anne Dickison

Anne joined the Foundation in 2015 and brings 20 years experience in technology-focused marketing and communications. Specifically, her work as the Marketing Director and then Co-Executive Director of the USENIX Association helped instill her commitment to spreading the word about the importance of free and open source technologies.

Digital and Community Manager

Drew Gurkowski

Drew started working for the foundation as an intern in 2015 and continued as a consultant starting in 2018. He graduated from the Boston Conservatory with a degree in musical theatre and continues to perform and direct in New York City.

Administration Manager

Loren Gurkowski

Loren joined the Foundation in May of 2018. She graduated from Colorado State University with a degree in History and Human Development and Family Studies. Loren is currently working on her Masters at Simmons College. She has worked in the non-profit sector since 2014.
Marketing Manager and Writer

Jason Perlow

Jason Perlow is a prominent technology and food blogger, known for his expertise in Linux, open-source technologies, enterprise technology, cloud computing, mobile technology, and embedded systems. As ZDNet’s Senior Contributing Writer since 2008, he leads the “Tech Broiler” blog, covering a wide range of tech topics. With a background in consultancy for major corporations, Perlow brings a deep understanding of the tech landscape. He served as Editorial Director at the Linux Foundation from January 2020 to December 2023, contributing significantly to Linux and open-source initiatives. Perlow also held positions at Microsoft and IBM Global Technology Services.

Software Engineer

Li-Wen Hsu

Li-Wen has been involved with FreeBSD since 1999 and received his FreeBSD commit bit in 2007. He regularly organizes FreeBSD related community resources and events in Taiwan, and also helps with the BSD events in other parts of Asia. He joined the FreeBSD continuous integration team in 2013.

Li-Wen joined the FreeBSD Foundation in May 2018 as a Software Engineer responsible for the software quality improvement projects. In his spare time for fun, he is a scuba diver, biker, and snowboarder.

Technical Product Marketing Manager

Chris Lentricchia

Chris Lentricchia is a self-described open source guy who got his start in tech at Red Hat and later at SUSE. Since then, Chris has worked at Instana, LogDNA, Isovalent, and started his own 501c3 nonprofit. He is passionate about mental and physical health along with the process of continual improvement and personal growth. He believes that with a little bit of discipline and elbow-grease, there is nothing in the world that can not be accomplished. Outside of work, Chris is an avid outdoorsman with a four-legged best friend, who splits his time between a Laconia, New Hampshire, and an off-grid cabin on top of a mountain in northwestern Maine, where his hobbies include hunting, fishing, camping, CrossFit, and survival. Chris is a massive philosophy and history nerd; his favorite philosophers include Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. He also consumes way more coffee than he should – seriously, it’s not healthy.

Project Manager

Joseph Mingrone

Joseph has been a FreeBSD user since the late 1990s and became a ports committer in 2016. He became increasingly interested in FreeBSD when he began administering a FreeBSD-based cluster for an academic group at Dalhousie University. He served as the secretary for the tenth Core team from 2018 until 2020.

Userland Software developer

Pierre Pronchery

Pierre installed his first FreeBSD system back in 2001, while studying the possibilities of different open source Operating Systems available. Passionate about their design & implementation, he gradually focused on NetBSD since 2005, eventually becoming a NetBSD developer in 2012 and serving on the Board of Directors for the NetBSD Foundation since 2017.

By joining the FreeBSD Foundation, he brings his experience from another major BSD derivative to FreeBSD, while contributing to pkgbase, the installer, maintaining ports, and focusing on improving user experience with the desktop environments in particular.

Board of Directors

The Foundation Board is a governing board composed of volunteers who champion FreeBSD and bring a wealth of knowledge in their respective areas of open source, research, academia, industry, and community building. While they are not involved in the day-to-day operations of the Foundation, their duties include helping to set the strategic direction for the Foundation, overseeing the budget, and shining a light on the FreeBSD Project and Foundation whenever possible.

Justin Gibbs
President, Treasurer, and Founder

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.

Vice President

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.

Robert Watson
Director

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.

Hiroki Sato
Director

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.

Director

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/lab/about, and an Advisory Board member for the Portland State University Digital Cities Testbed Center.

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. 

Assistant Secretary

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.