Keith Bostic (software engineer)

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Keith Bostic
Keith Bostic.jpg
Born (1959-07-26) July 26, 1959 (age 64)
Employers
Known for nvi and Berkeley DB
Website bostic.com OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

Keith Bostic (born July 26, 1959) is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix and open-source software.

Contents

Biography

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, honoring 180 individuals, including Bostic, who contributed to the group's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

Bostic and his 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 employed 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 an embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open source software. Berkeley DB is written in C with API bindings for 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 database features including database transactions, multiversion concurrency control and write-ahead logging. BDB runs on a wide variety of operating systems including most Unix-like and Windows systems, and real-time operating systems.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sleepycat Software</span> American technology company

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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).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">BSD Daemon</span> Fictional character

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nvi Re-implementation of ex/vi

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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.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marshall Kirk McKusick</span> American computer scientist (born 1954)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">NextBSD</span> Operating system

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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 Dougherty, Dale (2000-03-24). "Bostic on the BSD Tradition: An interview with BSD veteran Keith Bostic". ONLamp.com: BSD DevCenter. O'Reilly Media, Inc. Archived from the original on 2013-05-28. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
  3. "Oracle Buys Sleepycat, Is JBoss Next?". InformationWeek. 13 February 2006. 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.