July 31, 2020

Non-profit Organization Dedicated to Supporting and Promoting the FreeBSD Project and Community Worldwide Hits Major Milestone

Boulder, CO – July 28, 2020 – The FreeBSD Foundation, supporters of FreeBSD, one of the oldest and largest open source computer operating systems in the world that is used by many top corporations, has announced its twentieth anniversary. Founded as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization by early FreeBSD developer Justin Gibbs in March 2000, the FreeBSD Foundation has helped FreeBSD to become one of the most widely distributed open source operating systems, and is used by Netflix, Apple, Sony, Intel, Microsoft, and tens of millions of deployed systems.

“We’re thrilled that the FreeBSD Foundation has entered its third decade of supporting FreeBSD and its community of developers,” said FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Deb Goodkin. “As more companies and individuals discover the benefits of FreeBSD, its permissive business-friendly licensing and its democratic development philosophy, we anticipate its reach to expand to more industries and countries,” she added.

From 2000 to 2005, FreeBSD Foundation activities were managed by its board of directors comprised of volunteers, including Gibbs. During this time, FreeBSD partnered with Sun Microsystems to license FreeBSD Java binaries, funded early work on network scalability for SMP systems, and fostered BSD conferences. In 2004, the FreeBSD Foundation acquired the FreeBSD trademark from Wind River.

In 2005, the FreeBSD Foundation hired its first employee, Deb Goodkin, who came to the Foundation with a strong technical background of 20 years in storage development as firmware engineer, logic designer, applications engineer, technical marketing and technical sales. Now the Executive Director, Goodkin has been instrumental in creating policies and a corporate structure to ensure that as volunteers, board members and staff change, the FreeBSD Foundation continues to thrive and support the FreeBSD Project.

Since 2005, the FreeBSD Foundation has seen the open source OS being implemented around the globe by top corporations. That year, FreeBSD Foundation participated in the first Google Summer of Code, and in 2006 participated in its first collaborative development project, the Network Stack Virtualization Project, allowing for complete networking independence between jails on a system, including giving each jail its own firewall, virtual network interfaces, rate limiting, routing tables, and IPSEC configuration.

The FreeBSD Foundation has added Senior Software Developer Konstantin Belousov, Director of Project Development Ed Maste,, Software Engineer Li-Wen Hsu, Marketing Director Anne Dickison, and Administrator Manager Loren Gurkowski to the full-time team. In 2014, the Foundation launched the FreeBSD Journal, and began working with ARM and Cavium to enable a FreeBSD OS port to ARMv8, specifically AArch64, to help bootstrap this effort.

The Foundation began funding travel grants in 2004 for developers to attend BSD-related events. In addition to sponsoring AsiaBSDcon, BSD Sig at USENIX Annual Technical Conference and EuroBSDcon, the FreeBSD Foundation also held its first workshops in Tonga in 2018 and Australia in 2020.

 

About FreeBSD Foundation

The FreeBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3), US-based, non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations and is used to fund development projects; support infrastructure; improve test coverage, continuous integration and automation; sponsor community engagement; and advocate for the Project. The Foundation also represents the FreeBSD Project in executing contracts, license agreements, and other legal arrangements that require a recognized legal entity. For more information or to find out how you can get involved, please call (720) 207-5142 or visit our website at https://www.freebsdFoundation.org/. Follow us on Facebook at @FreeBSDFoundation and on Twitter at @freebsdfndation.

 

Media Contact:

Ali Randall
Daisy Public Relations
Phone: (303) 718-3373
Email: alidaisypr@gmail.com

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