In 2023 the FreeBSD Project celebrated its thirtieth year of providing a complete system distribution. This talk tries to understand what it is that has made FreeBSD one of the few long-term viable open source projects. Most of the projects with long-term successes are sponsored by companies that base their products around the open-source software that they actively nurture. While FreeBSD...
The HardenedBSD Project is a "spork" of FreeBSD that aims to provide the wider BSD community with a clean-room reimplementation of the publicly-documented bits of the grsecurity patchset for Linux. The cofounders of the project started collaborating in 2013, and the project become official in 2014.
HardenedBSD goes above and beyond its original goal by providing extra security enhancements,...
In December 2022, Colin Percival assumed the role of Acting Release Engineering Lead for the FreeBSD Project. He managed FreeBSD release engineering for four months, until Glen Barber returned to the role after FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE.
This is the story of four months of release engineering and a FreeBSD release managed by someone who neither wanted nor expected the job.
OpenBSD provides the utility fw_update(8) to handle firmware loading for hardware from manufacturers whose licensing isn't compatible with our base system. We will take a trip into the history of fw_update(8), its structure and why it exists. A recent rewrite provides an illustration of the value OpenBSD places on simplicity and user experience.
The RISC-V port in NetBSD has been years in the making with the most recent efforts bringing success to the project. To enable the successful port, NetBSD needed to gain some supported technologies and undergo some structural changes to facilitate the requirements and recommendations accompanying the RISC-V platform. As the majority porting efforts targeted a virtual platform, physical...
Standards development and application at the Operating System (OS) level are in a complex and evolving state. This talk will not only explore what it means to be POSIX compliant, but will focus on the question: What is the status of POSIX compliance within the BSD sphere in 2024? What are the drivers for POSIX compliance today?
This talk will explore what POSIX compliance means and whether...
A comprehensive look at contributing to FreeBSD via Github. In addition to the basics of how to create a pull requests, we'll explore how to structure your submissions to spped their acceptance. You'll learn the criteria used to evaluate the submission, what is and isn't acceptable. You'll learn about tools to use to test your submission for compliance with style, proper man page...
- Making use of the force multiplier of many hands make light work.
- Tom Smyth talks about his experience using BSD as a small business owner.
- Tom further explores the positive experience of supporting developers to achieve discrete real improvements in OpenBSD and related projects.
- How small business can contribute to and shape BSD development.
- Ideas about aggregating the resources...
20 Years of NYC*BUG
and can we handle 20 more?
NYC*BUG (https://www.nycbug.org/) launched in January 2004 with a motley group of previously disconnected souls. We kept sponsors (mostly) at a distance, and have remained a strong example that many others want to emulate.
NYC*BUG persisted for 20 years now, and earned an impressive resume of successes:
- five cons...
