May 2, 2023
The Foundation is pleased to welcome two new members to the FreeBSD Foundation team.
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.
Working with industry, Greg will seek to continuously improve and deepen the Foundation’s partnership with innovators like Juniper Networks, NetApp, Deepstack Technologies, Netflix, Verisign, Beckhoff, AMD, and Arm, to name a few. The FreeBSD community is a powerful force and strong partnerships between developers, enterprise users, and software, hardware, and services vendors are essential to scaling the Foundation’s impact. Greg will tend to these partnerships to ensure all parts of the ecosystem thrive.
In his Research capacity, Greg will collaborate with the academic, government, and non-profit organizations for which FreeBSD is central to the research, development, and technology transition process. Long before breakthrough innovations hit VC pitch decks, let alone chip fabs, laptops, microservices, networking and storage appliances, or smartphones, they typically start as a hypothesis in a University lab. For decades, FreeBSD has been instrumental to this research that has produced countless advances in security, performance, and energy efficiency. Greg will work to make FreeBSD the OS artifact of choice for researchers by enabling the Foundation to serve as a clearinghouse of best practices and world-class educational materials.
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.
In this new role, Pierre’s responsibilities will include working on pkgbase, the installer, and maintaining ports, while focusing on improving user experiences on FreeBSD with desktop environments in particular.