Contributors to FreeBSD

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Table of Contents

Abstract

This article lists individuals and organizations who have made a contribution to FreeBSD. To see the current list of FreeBSD Committers you can take a look at the following list.

1. The FreeBSD Developers

This list, which includes all members of the Core Team, names everyone who has commit privileges for one or more of the three source trees (doc, ports and src). To see the current Core Team members you can take a look at the administration page.

(in alphabetical order by last name):

2. Core Team Alumni

The following people were members of the FreeBSD core team during the periods indicated. We thank them for their past efforts in the service of the FreeBSD project.

In rough reverse chronological order:

3. Development Team Alumni

The following people were members of the FreeBSD development team during the periods indicated. We thank them for their past efforts in the service of the FreeBSD project.

In rough reverse chronological order:

4. Ports Management Team Alumni

The following people were members of the FreeBSD portmgr team during the periods indicated. We thank them for their past efforts in the service of the FreeBSD project.

In rough reverse chronological order:

5. Development Team: In Memoriam

During the many years that the FreeBSD Project has been in existence, sadly, some of our developers have passed away. Here are some remembrances.

In rough reverse chronological order of their passing:

  • Mike Karels (2016 - 2024; RIP 2024)

    Mike Karels, originally a microbiology Ph.D. degree candidate at University of California Berkeley (UCB), expressed interest in computers in a nearby lab which led him to change his entire career path. He eventually became involved in the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UCB in the early 1980’s. Once there, his contributions were instrumental in the development and improvement of the BSD Unix TCP/UDP/IP implementation, including the socket interface API, one of the most widely used application programming interfaces in the history of the Internet.

    Over the next several years, he continued to help prepare the Berkeley Software Distribution releases for 4.3BSD, 4.3BSD-Tahoe, 4.3BSD-Reno, Networking Release 1, and Networking Release 2. During this time, he was one of the authors of "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix Operating System", an important book in the field of computers and operating systems, published in 1989.

    After leaving the CSRG, he was a founding member of BSD Incorporated (BSDi), one of the earliest purveyors of BSD Unix software in source and binary forms. Mike held steady through multiple organizational changes across Walnut Creek CDROM, Wind River Systems, Secure Computing, McAfee, Intel Security, and Forcepoint.

    In 1994, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Unix, the USENIX Association honored Mike with inclusion in the Unix Deck of Cards, a set of playing cards with the faces of pioneers in the early Unix community. He is the Seven of Spades.

    He also became involved with the FreeBSD Project and contributed greatly to it over the years including additions to the sysctl subsystem, and the Mandatory Access Control (MAC) framework, eventually earning a src commit bit. After his retirement, he stepped up to help with the release engineering of FreeBSD and was elected to serve on the core team shortly before his unexpected passing on his way home from the BSDCan 2024 Conference. Just the previous year, he gave a delightful retrospective talk on his work with BSD at BSDCan 2023 that can be viewed on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSziyKlG1ws.

    Mike is remembered as a brilliant software engineer, patient, humble and approachable to those needing help. He enjoyed music, photography, and nature as well as spending time with his family. A remembrance page for Mike can be found at https://www.gearty-delmore.com/obituaries/michael-mike-karels.

  • Hans Petter Selasky (2010 - 2023; RIP 2023)

    The FreeBSD community remembers Hans Petter Selasky who passed away in Lillesand, Norway on June 23, 2023 at the age of 41. Hans was an incredibly brilliant and kind person, and made many valuable contributions to FreeBSD. He was best known for re-writing and maintaining the USB stack and the webcamd package which enables modern teleconferencing on FreeBSD. Most recently, he worked for Mellanox (now Nvidia) to support their ConnectX series of high speed NICs on FreeBSD. Hans’s work included major contributions to the kernel TLS framework, as well as support for NIC kTLS send and receive offload in the mce(4) driver.

    One example improvement was his idea to sort incoming TCP packets using the NIC provided RSS flow identifiers in order to present LRO with all packets from the same TCP connection back to back. This idea was crucial to Netflix’s ability to serve 100Gb/s of video traffic from a single machine.

    Outside of FreeBSD, Hans’s hobbies included music and mathematics. He was active in his church, and contributed to its sound team. He was a loving and dedicated uncle to his nieces and nephews. He loved animals, especially his cat Pumba.

    A longer edition of this remembrance can be found on this FreeBSD Forum page.

  • Bruce D. Evans (1991 - 2019; RIP 2019)

    Bruce was a programming giant who made FreeBSD his home.

    Back before FreeBSD and Linux there was Minix, a toy "unix" written by Andy Tannenbaum, released in 1987, sold with complete sources on three floppy disks, for $99.

    Bruce ported Minix to the i386 around 1989.

    Linus Torvalds used Minix/386 to develop his own kernel, and Bruce was the first person he thanked in the release-announcement.

    When Bill Jolitz released 386BSD 0.1 in 1992, Bruce was listed as a contributor.

    Bruce co-founded the FreeBSD project, and served on core.0, but he was never partisan, and over the years many other projects have benefitted from his patches, advice and wisdom.

    Code reviews from Bruce came in three flavours, "mild", "brucified" and "brucifiction", but they were never personal: It was always only about the code, the mistakes, the sloppy thinking, the missing historical context, the ambiguous standards - and the style(9) transgressions.

    As Bruce gave more code reviews than anybody else in the history of the FreeBSD project, the commit logs hide the true scale of his impact until you pay attention to "Submitted by", "Reviewed by" and "Pointed out by".

    Being hard of hearing, Bruce did not attend conferences.

    The notable exception was the 1999 BSDcon in California, where his core team colleagues greeted him with "We’re not worthy!" in Wayne’s World fashion.

    Twenty years later we’re still not.

  • Kurt Lidl (2015 - 2019; RIP 2019)

    Kurt first got involved with BSD while it was still a project at the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly after personalized license plates became available in Maryland, he got "BSDWZRD".

    He began contributing to FreeBSD shortly after the conception of the project. He became a FreeBSD source committer in October 2015.

    Kurt’s most well known FreeBSD project was blacklistd(8) which blocks and releases ports on demand to avoid DoS abuse. He has also made many other bug fixes and enhancements to DTrace, boot loaders, and other bits and pieces of the FreeBSD infrastructure.

    Earlier work included the game XTank, an author on RFC 2516 "A Method for Transmitting PPP Over Ethernet (PPPoE)", and the USENIX paper "Drinking from the Firehose: Multicast USENET News".

  • Frank Durda IV (1995 - 2003; RIP 2018)

    Frank had been around the project since the very early days, contributing code to the 1.x line before becoming a committer.

  • Andrey A. Chernov (1993 - 2017; RIP 2017)

    Andrey contributions to FreeBSD can not be overstated. Having been involved for a long there is hardly an area which he did not touch.

  • Jürgen Lock (2006 - 2015; RIP 2015)

    Jürgen made a number of contributions to FreeBSD, including work on libvirt, the graphics stack, and QEMU. Jürgen’s contributions and helpfulness were appreciated by people around the world. That work continues to improve the lives of thousands every day.

  • Alexander Botero-Lowry <alexbl@FreeBSD.org> (2006 - 2011; RIP 2012)

    Alexander was best known as a major contributor to FreeBSD’s Python ports and a founding member of {python} as well as his work on XMMS2.

  • John Birrell <jb@FreeBSD.org> (1997 - 2009; RIP 2009)

    John made major contributions to FreeBSD, the best known of which is the import of the dtrace(1) code. John’s unique sense of humor and plain-spokenness either ruffled feathers or made him quick friends. At the end of his life, he had moved to a rural area and was attempting to live with as minimal impact to the planet as possible, while at the same time still working in the high-tech area.

  • Jean-Marc Zucconi <jmz@FreeBSD.org> (1994 - 2009; RIP 2009)

    Jean-Marc was an astrophysicist who made important contributions to the modeling of the atmospheres of both planets and comets at l’Observatoire de Besançon in Besançon, France. While there, he participated in the conception and construction of the Vega tricanal spectrometer that studied Halley’s Comet. He had also been a long-time contributor to FreeBSD.

  • Jun-ichiro Itoh <itojun@FreeBSD.org> (1997 - 2001; RIP 2008)

    Known to everyone as itojun, Jun-ichiro Hagino was a core researcher at the KAME Project, which aimed to provide IPv6 and IPsec technology in freely redistributable form. Much of this code was incorporated into FreeBSD. Without his efforts, the state of IPv6 on the Internet would be much different.

  • Cameron Grant <cg@FreeBSD.org> (1999 - 2005; RIP 2005)

    Cameron was a unique individual who contributed to the project despite serious physical disabilities. He was responsible for a complete rewrite of our sound system during the late 1990s. Many of those who corresponded with him had no idea of his limited mobility, due to his cheerful spirit and willingness to help others.

  • Alan Eldridge <alane@FreeBSD.org> (2002 - 2003; RIP 2003)

    Alan was a major contributor to the KDE on FreeBSD group. In addition, he maintained many other difficult and time-consuming ports such as autoconf, CUPS, and python. Alan’s path was not an easy one but his passion for FreeBSD, and dedication to programming excellence, won him many friends.

6. Derived Software Contributors

This software was originally derived from William F. Jolitz’s 386BSD release 0.1, though almost none of the original 386BSD specific code remains. This software has been essentially re-implemented from the 4.4BSD-Lite release provided by the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley and associated academic contributors.

There are also portions of NetBSD and OpenBSD that have been integrated into FreeBSD as well, and we would therefore like to thank all the contributors to NetBSD and OpenBSD for their work.

7. Additional FreeBSD Contributors

(in alphabetical order by first name):

8. 386BSD Patch Kit Patch Contributors

(in alphabetical order by first name):

9. Donors Gallery

The FreeBSD Foundation thanks financial and in-kind donors.

The FreeBSD Donations Liaison area includes a list of donated hardware.

The FreeBSD Project thanks all donors!

As of 2010, the section below was several years out-of-date.

9.1. Contributors to the central server project

The following individuals and businesses made it possible for the FreeBSD Project to build a new central server machine, which has replaced freefall.FreeBSD.org at one point, by donating the following items:

9.2. Direct funding

The following individuals and businesses have generously contributed direct funding to the project:

9.3. Hardware contributors

The following individuals and businesses have generously contributed hardware for testing and device driver development/support:

  • BSDi for providing the Pentium P5-90 and 486/DX2-66 EISA/VL systems that are being used for our development work, to say nothing of the network access and other donations of hardware resources.

  • Compaq has donated a variety of Alpha systems to the FreeBSD Project. Among the many generous donations are 4 AlphaStation DS10s, an AlphaServer DS20, AlphaServer 2100s, an AlphaServer 4100, 8 500Mhz Personal Workstations, 4 433Mhz Personal Workstations, and more! These machines are used for release engineering, package building, SMP development, and general development on the Alpha architecture.

  • TRW Financial Systems, Inc. provided 130 PCs, three 68 GB file servers, twelve Ethernets, two routers and an ATM switch for debugging the diskless code

  • Dermot McDonnell donated the Toshiba XM3401B CDROM drive currently used in freefall.

  • Chuck Robey <chuckr@glue.umd.edu> contributed his floppy tape streamer for experimental work.

  • Larry Altneu <larry@alr.com,> and Wilko Bulte <wilko@FreeBSD.org>, provided Wangtek and Archive QIC-02 tape drives to improve the wt driver.

  • Ernst Winter (Deceased) contributed a 2.88 MB floppy drive to the project. This will hopefully increase the pressure for rewriting the floppy disk driver.

  • Tekram Technologies sent one each of their DC-390, DC-390U and DC-390F FAST and ULTRA SCSI host adapter cards for regression testing of the NCR and AMD drivers with their cards. They are also to be applauded for making driver sources for free operating systems available from their FTP server ftp://ftp.tekram.com/scsi/FreeBSD/.

  • Larry M. Augustin contributed not only a Symbios Sym8751S SCSI card, but also a set of data books, including one about the forthcoming Sym53c895 chip with Ultra-2 and LVD support, and the latest programming manual with information on how to safely use the advanced features of the latest Symbios SCSI chips. Thanks a lot!

  • Christoph P. Kukulies <kuku@FreeBSD.org> donated an FX120 12 speed Mitsumi CDROM drive for IDE CDROM driver development.

  • Mike Tancsa <mike@sentex.ca> donated four various ATM PCI cards to help increase support of these cards as well as help support the development effort of the netatm ATM stack.

9.4. Special contributors

  • BSDi (formerly Walnut Creek CDROM) has donated almost more than we can say (see the 'About the FreeBSD Project' section of the FreeBSD Handbook for more details). In particular, we would like to thank them for the original hardware used for freefall.FreeBSD.org, our primary development machine, and for thud.FreeBSD.org, a testing and build box. We are also indebted to them for funding various contributors over the years and providing us with unrestricted use of their T1 connection to the Internet.

  • The interface business GmbH, Dresden has been patiently supporting Jörg Wunsch <joerg@FreeBSD.org> who has often preferred FreeBSD work over paid work, and used to fall back to their (quite expensive) EUnet Internet connection whenever his private connection became too slow or flaky to work with it.

  • Berkeley Software Design, Inc. has contributed their DOS emulator code to the remaining BSD world, which is used in the doscmd command.

Last modified on: August 11, 2024 by Fernando Apesteguía