The FreeBSD Project is run by FreeBSD committers, or developers who have direct commit access to the master Git repository. [1] The FreeBSD Core Team exists to provide direction and is responsible for setting goals for the FreeBSD Project and to provide mediation in the event of disputes, and also takes the final decision in case of disagreement between individuals and teams involved in the project. [2] The Core Team is also responsible for selecting individuals for other teams related to the development and ongoing maintenance of FreeBSD, such as the Security Officer, the Release Engineering team, and the Port Manager team. [1] Finally, the Core Team also vote on nominations for new committers. In the event of a breach of internal rules of conduct, it falls to the core team to decide on sanctions. [2] The FreeBSD Core Team would be the equivalent of a board of directors, if the FreeBSD Project were a company.
The FreeBSD Core Team is the equivalent of a similar body in the NetBSD Project called the Core Group. [3]
Mike Karels was elected but died before he could take office, yielding a core team of 8 instead of 9. [4]
The FreeBSD Core Team began as an unofficial group of programmers, mainly consisting of those that initiated the FreeBSD Project itself. [2] There were eleven members, and new members could only join through invitation.
As the FreeBSD project grew, so did the Core Team. By the year 2000, there were over 200 active committers, and the Core Team had expanded to 18 people. Some Core members were completely inactive, others far less active than many non-members, and there were even accusations of cronyism. The old, informal structure was no longer considered viable, and in early 2000 discussions were had regarding the future of the organisation. [2] A set of bylaws were formulated by Jonathan Lemon, Warner Losh and Wes Peters. [2] In a general vote by active committers on August 28, 2000, these bylaws passed by 117 votes to 5 against.
The FreeBSD Core Team is now an elected body comprising nine members from the pool of project developers with rights to directly change the Project repositories (committers). Committers are entitled to vote in Core elections if they have made at least one change to one of the Project's repositories in the past 12 months.
The first election took place in September 2000. [5] Seventeen candidates stood for election, including eight of the existing Core Team. Five were re-elected, alongside four new members. [5] Elections have taken place every two years since, the most recent election results being announced in May 2022. Elections shall be held two years after the last vote, even if the previous election was early. [6] Elections may be held early if the membership of the Core Team fall below seven, [6] or if petitioned for by 1/3 of active developers. [6] The bylaws may be changed by a 2/3 majority of committers if at least 50% of active committers participate in the vote. [6]
The Core Team appoints a secretary at its own discretion. This non-voting position exists to provide a central point of contact between external parties and the group, for keeping track of the agenda, and for acting as the interface between Core and other internal groups such as the Account Creation team. The Core Team Secretary is also responsible for writing and distributing monthly status reports to the FreeBSD developer community. The current Core Team Secretary is Sergio Carlavilla Delgado. [7]
The election lasts for five weeks. During the first week, committers who wish to run for election announce their intention to do so. In the four weeks that follow the application period, active committers vote for up to nine candidates. [1]
After the voting period closes, votes are counted. Ties are resolved by unambiguously elected candidates; for instance, if there is a tie for ninth place, the first eight decide which of the tied candidates will join the team. [1] The results are announced within one week of the end of the voting period, and the newly elected team enters office one week after the announcement. [1]
Debian, also known as Debian GNU/Linux, is a Linux distribution composed of free and open-source software and optionally non-free firmware or software developed by the community-supported Debian Project, which was established by Ian Murdock on August 16, 1993. The first version of Debian (0.01) was released on September 15, 1993, and its first stable version (1.1) was released on June 17, 1996. The Debian Stable branch is the most popular edition for personal computers and servers. Debian is also the basis for many other distributions that have different purposes, like Proxmox for servers, Ubuntu or Linux Mint for desktops, Kali for penetration testing, and Pardus and Astra for government use.
XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and was available for many other operating systems and platforms. It is free and open source software under the XFree86 License version 1.1. It was developed by the XFree86 Project, Inc. The lead developer was David Dawes. The last released version was 4.8.0, released December 2008. The last XFree86 CVS commit was made on May 18, 2009; the project was confirmed dormant in December 2011.
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Theo de Raadt is a South African-born software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects and was also a founding member of NetBSD. In 2004, De Raadt won the Free Software Award for his work on OpenBSD and OpenSSH.
Matthew Dillon is an American software engineer known for Amiga software, contributions to FreeBSD and for starting and leading the DragonFly BSD project since 2003.
SquirrelMail is a project that aims to provide both a web-based email client and a proxy server for the IMAP protocol.
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers collaboratively developing software.
Poul-Henning Kamp is a Danish computer software developer known for work on various projects including FreeBSD and Varnish. He currently resides in Slagelse, Denmark.
Robert Nicholas Maxwell Watson is a FreeBSD developer, and founder of the TrustedBSD Project. He is currently employed as a Professor of Systems, Security, and Architecture in the Security Research Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.
TrueOS is a discontinued Unix-like, server-oriented operating system built upon the most recent releases of FreeBSD-CURRENT.
The FreeBSD Ports collection is a package management system for the FreeBSD operating system. As of February 2020, there are over 38,487 ports available in the collection. It has also been adopted by NetBSD as the basis of its pkgsrc system.
Wireless network cards for computers require control software to make them function. This is a list of the status of some open-source drivers for 802.11 wireless network cards.
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD and the current version runs on x86, ARM, PowerPC and RISC-V processors. The project is supported and promoted by the FreeBSD Foundation.
A committer is an individual who is permitted to modify the source code of a software project, that will be used in the project's official releases. To contribute source code to most large software projects, one must make modifications and then "commit" those changes to a central version control system, such as Git.
OpenBSD is a security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. The OpenBSD project emphasizes portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography.
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is available for many platforms, including servers, desktops, handheld devices, and embedded systems.
LibreSSL is an open-source implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. The implementation is named after Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), the deprecated predecessor of TLS, for which support was removed in release 2.3.0. The OpenBSD project forked LibreSSL from OpenSSL 1.0.1g in April 2014 as a response to the Heartbleed security vulnerability, with the goals of modernizing the codebase, improving security, and applying development best practices.
Colin A. Percival is a Canadian computer scientist and computer security researcher. He completed his undergraduate education at Simon Fraser University and a doctorate at the University of Oxford. While at university he joined the FreeBSD project, and achieved some notoriety for discovering a security weakness in Intel's hyper-threading technology. Besides his work in delta compression and the introduction of memory-hard functions, he is also known for developing the Tarsnap online backup service, which became his full-time job.
