Keith Bostic

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Keith Bostic
Keith Bostic.jpg
Born (1959-07-26) July 26, 1959 (age 61)
Employer
Known for nvi and Berkeley DB
Website bostic.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Keith Bostic is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution UNIX and open-source software.

Contents

In 1986, Bostic joined the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. [1] He was one of the principal architects of the Berkeley 2BSD, 4.4BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite releases. [2] Among many other tasks, he led the effort at CSRG to create a free software version of BSD UNIX, which helped allow the creation of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

Bostic was a founder of Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi), [2] which produced BSD/OS, a proprietary version of BSD.

In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Bostic, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

Bostic and wife Margo Seltzer founded Sleepycat Software in 1996 to develop and commercialize Berkeley DB, an open-source, key-value database. Sleepycat Software was the first company to develop dual-licensed open-source software. In February 2006, the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation, [3] where Bostic worked until 2008.

Bostic and Michael Cahill founded WiredTiger in 2010 to create a NoSQL database management system. In November 2014, the company was acquired by MongoDB, which employs Bostic. [4]

Bostic is the author of nvi , a re-implementation of the classic text editor vi and many other standard BSD and Linux utilities. He is a past member of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and several POSIX working groups, and a contributor to POSIX standards. [5]

Publications

Related Research Articles

Berkeley DB (BDB) is a software library intended to provide a high-performance embedded database for key/value data. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for C++, C#, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, Tcl, and many other programming languages. BDB stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, and supports multiple data items for a single key. Berkeley DB is not a relational database, although it has advanced database features including database transactions, multiversion concurrency control and write-ahead logging.

vi Keyboard-oriented text editor

vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.

The Unix file system (UFS) is a file system supported by many Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is a distant descendant of the original filesystem used by Version 7 Unix.

Sleepycat Software American technology company

Sleepycat Software, Inc. was the software company primarily responsible for maintaining the Berkeley DB packages from 1996 to 2006.

USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 by Unix System Laboratories against Berkeley Software Design, Inc and the Regents of the University of California over intellectual property related to the Unix operating system; a culmination of the Unix wars. The case was settled out of court in 1994 after the judge expressed doubt in the validity of USL's intellectual property, with Novell and the University agreeing not to litigate further over the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).

BSD Daemon

The BSD Daemon, nicknamed Beastie, is the generic mascot of BSD operating systems.

nvi Re-implementation of ex/vi

nvi is a re-implementation of the classic Berkeley text editor, ex/vi, traditionally distributed with BSD and, later, Unix systems. It was originally distributed as part of the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution (4BSD).

Computer Systems Research Group

The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

BSD/OS is a discontinued proprietary version of the BSD operating system developed by Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi).

Berkeley Software Design Inc. was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS, a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PC compatible computer systems. The name was chosen for its similarity to "Berkeley Software Distribution" the source of its primary product.

UNIX/32V was an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released in June 1979. 32V was a direct port of the Seventh Edition Unix to the DEC VAX architecture.

History of Unix

The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems.

Margo Seltzer American computer scientist

Margo Ilene Seltzer is a professor and researcher in computer systems. She is currently the Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family Chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Previously, Seltzer was the Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and director at the Center for Research on Computation and Society.

FreeBSD Free Unix-like operating system

FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed simply, permissively licensed BSD systems.

Marshall Kirk McKusick American computer scientist

Marshall Kirk McKusick is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine. He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".

The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. The term "BSD" commonly refers to its descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.

Unix Family of computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix

Unix is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in the 1970s at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others.

Michael J. (Mike) Karels is an American Software Engineer and one of the key people in history of BSD UNIX.

NextBSD

NextBSD was an operating system initially based on the trunk version of FreeBSD as of August 2015. It is a fork of FreeBSD which implements new features developed on branches but not yet implemented in FreeBSD. As of 2019 the website seems defunct, and the later commits on GitHub date from July, 2016.

The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s.

References

  1. McKusick, Marshall Kirk (1999-01-01). "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix - From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable". In DiBona, Chris; Ockman, Sam; Stone, Mark (eds.). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution . O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN   978-1-56592-582-3.
  2. 1 2 Dale Dougherty (2000-03-24). "Bostic on the BSD Tradition: An interview with BSD veteran Keith Bostic". ONLamp.com: BSD DevCenter. O'Reilly Media, Inc. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
  3. "Oracle Buys Sleepycat, Is JBoss Next?". InformationWeek. Retrieved 2021-03-05.
  4. Wolpe, Toby (December 16, 2014). "MongoDB snaps up WiredTiger and its storage expert team". ZDNet . Archived from the original on March 12, 2017. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
  5. "Keith Bostic". informit. Retrieved 19 November 2013.