 My SLSR from the beginning, my name is Deb Goodkin, I'm the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation, and I'm here to represent the FreeBSD project, and I talk about FreeBSD, and it's sort of similar to Benny's talk, an introduction of FreeBSD, but I also try to incorporate things for people who are already involved in the community too, and so if you are a contributor already, some things might be new, some things might you already know, so I try to make it so it was informative and welcoming talk to people from all areas, and the talk that I'm giving now is a talk I typically give to people at like Linux conferences and other open source conferences around the world. So we will get started here. So my goals today is to show the long history, and I know Benny, so actually I'm sort of assuming a lot of people in here was here for the previous talk, but also I know a lot of people have, so there's probably a lot of new people in here. So first I want to start before I go over the goals of my talk is to find out, so who is new to BSD in general? So that's a good number, so that's awesome. And who in here uses Linux? Okay, so almost everyone in here raised their hand, so that's okay. So my goal here is to share information and our history about FreeBSD in particular, and I'm going to talk about why people use it, what FreeBSD is, and why you should use it and maybe hopefully contribute to our project. And then lastly I'm going to highlight what we as the foundation and project, what we've been doing around the world and advocating for the project. So I'll start with FreeBSD, since there's a lot of people in here who are new to the BSDs, and so I assume that's also FreeBSD. So I use this slide, not to be mean to a tux, because I think tux is really cute. But it's really, a lot of people do still think that FreeBSD is a Linux distribution, and so I use this to make a point that it's not, it's totally separate, and it came from a different place, and so I'm going to highlight that. But I want to share those slides here too, right? And this is recent. I mean this was, I think, opensource.com, which is, it's basically a website that's hosted by Red Hat, and they were doing this poll, and so this is another reason why people get confused that, I mean if I were new to Unix and Linux, and any of the Unix-like type of operating systems, I would just think that FreeBSD was another distribution. And so, I wonder, well we could probably find out. And so, and I did read in the comments to you on here that one of the reasons why they did this was because they wanted to include FreeBSD. But what they really should have done was, what's your favorite Unix-like operating system? And I think that would have been better, at least for us. Well, and I think for people in the world. So FreeBSD, I look at FreeBSD, the FreeBSD world as three different components. And so on the top there you have the actual open, or the open source operating system. It's the binary that you download off the FreeBSD.org website onto your computer and you run it. The metal one there is the actual project. And there are some people here from the community, but the project is made up of thousands of contributors. And then the last one is the foundation. And that's what I run and represent. And we are a 501c3, which is U.S. It's a designation within our government and how we file taxes. What it means basically is we're a public charity and we are for the public good. And so our whole focus is to support the project and the community. So we're not a trade association, which is what the Linux Foundation is. We're actually here for the community for the project and to support them. So what is FreeBSD? I mean it's one of the oldest, largest, most successful open source projects in the world. And we've been around, we'll be celebrating our 27th anniversary in June. And it's a complete operating system. So when you think of, so I will compare FreeBSD with Linux just because that's what most people are familiar with. But when you talk about Linux, that's the kernel. And so then you have all these distributions. That's why you have this whole list of distributions and that puts the whole operating system together. So when you're running your computer, you're not just running Linux. You have to have that whole user limit, the tools, documentation, all that kind of stuff. So FreeBSD is all of that. This is very cohesive, coherent operating system. We support over 33. Actually, I think the number increases every day. We may be at 35,000 third-party packages, which really means that when you're using it as your desktop and you want to access the internet, you could have a browser that you can install. And a word processor and whatever software that you want to use, almost anything is supported. Like I said, we have over 1,000 contributors or thousands. We have 400, between 400 and 500 active source committers. And we run on many platforms. And so it's hardware as well as cloud platforms. And there's millions of deployments out there. So someone from Netflix gave a talk last year at the main track. Actually, it was really good. And so I actually stole his abridged version of where FreeBSD came from because I really liked it, but I added nice graphics to mine. But it's really AT&T and it started in 1969. And so you may be familiar with the anniversary that was celebrated. I think it was last November in New Jersey where UNX was created. And then the BSD started from that. It was AT&T. Actually, if you heard Warner Lash's talk yesterday or if he didn't, I would recommend watching the video of it. He gave a talk in the main track on the early UNXs. It was really interesting. So that's available as well as I believe Mad Dog, John Hall is giving a talk, a keynote later today. He's like the Google of UNX and computing. He's pretty, he's amazing. So I would recommend both those talks. But the BSD is Berkeley Software Distribution. And so UNX was licensed to a few universities in Berkeley. It was one of them. They came up with Berkeley UNX. It's also referred to Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Research UNX. There's various names of it. And that's where a team of people actually worked on improving it. And it became the platform for FreeBSD and NetBSD. And so this is a little visual of the timeline. Let's see if I can get it to play. So I just talked about how UNX started in 69. And then the C language was developed there to make it more portable. And then different versions of BSD, some of the research and features that were added to it. And I'm not going to go over each one. Because for me, really what I care about is in 1993 FreeBSD starting. And that's also when that BSD started. So let's see if I can stop this. But we have a great timeline on our website. And when I say our website, it's the freebsdfoundation.org website. And it was fun to put together. So let me start again. Let's see here. Let me show from here. What's happened? Here we go. A little technical difficulty here. So it's starting there. And I believe I need to go here. I know this is actually this is nice because everyone's pretty close in. So I like to use this because it really shows the lineage of FreeBSD. It shows UNX at the top and how it branched into a lot of proprietary, close source type of operating systems. I mean, when I graduated college, which was a few years ago, I used IBM AIX. And so it was sort of in the prehistoric days. And so that's what we used at IBM. It was actually before PCs came out. But HP had their version and various companies, like those large corporations, they had their version of UNX. But if you look here on your left, and so here I zoom in a little bit more. So what I'm trying to show here is the lineage of FreeBSD and how it descended from the Berkeley UNX, which descended from the original UNX that was developed by Ken Thompson in 69. And then I have an arrow there on the left of Linux and how, I mean, it didn't just magically appear, but he did model it after UNX, but it didn't descend from that years of development. And when you look at the people who worked on BSD at Berkeley, they were university students. They were mostly PhD students. Some of the people, Bill Joy, if you don't know who he is. I mean, he's one of the co-founders of Sun. And he oversaw the BSD project. And so you had these years of development at Berkeley of these college students. So if they're PhD students, they're probably, like in their early 20s. And so then when FreeBSD started a decade later, then you actually, we still had a lot of those people continuing to support and develop on it. So the difference in age, when you look at when Linux started versus when FreeBSD continued or started, that you actually had 10 years difference in the age of the developers. And so you had sort of a more mature group of people who were developing that. And you could look at that in two different ways. You could say, well, it was young and maybe it's more innovated. But I'm just trying to highlight what the differences were in the people who are part of that. So who uses FreeBSD? So when I tell people that you're probably using FreeBSD, they're always surprised because most people haven't heard of FreeBSD before. But what I did hear, these aren't the only companies that use FreeBSD. What we try to do is choose marquee companies, recognizable companies that you're familiar with that use FreeBSD. So most likely you use FreeBSD. I mean, if you have an iPhone, you know, macOS and iOS were developed from FreeBSD, they still follow for the command line. They actually come to our conferences still. Netflix is a big known company that uses FreeBSD for the high performance they get on the streaming. So when you're watching a Netflix video, you know, TV show, whatever, that's all streaming on FreeBSD servers. Travago, the PlayStation, and I understand the 5.2 will be FreeBSD. So I won't go through all these bullets, but really, you know, the main reason why people, why users use FreeBSD, and it will be different between like an individual user like us in this room, versus like a corporation, a corporation like, say, Sony is a good example, why they may use FreeBSD is because of licensing. And so we do follow the BSC license. And so Linux's GPL, FreeBSD is BSC, and so it's a permissive license, which means you can take the code and you can make your own changes and you don't have to give it back to the community. And it's a philosophy that the community believes in, that they are happy that someone else is using their code, so they don't feel the need that they need to get recognition for it. But there's also companies that use it for the same reason, but they actually upstream almost all their changes. So Netflix actually is a really good example of a company that does that. And I would highly recommend watching Jonathan Looney's talk from FOSDOM last year, it was on the main track, and he talked about how Netflix follows the developer current branch of FreeBSD and how they successfully do that. So it was a really popular and well-received talk. And then just the fact that it's a cohesive operating system and then just its history of development, too, is another reason why people like to use FreeBSD users like us, then we'll use it because of stability and reliability, actually that's why companies will use it, too, but also for the community. So we're also known as a very friendly and welcoming community, too. And the documentation, we're known for excellent documentation. So when you're installing FreeBSD, and I'm actually going through this process right now. So I have FreeBSD on here. I run it on a virtual machine, but I also have another new laptop that I have at home just sitting and waiting for me to install FreeBSD. And since I don't do this a lot, I can search for help on when I run into issues. There's also a really good community that I can reach out to and get questions answered. So how the project works. So first I'll start off with, since we descended from Berkeley, they had a whole model that they followed on development since it was a fairly large software development effort on their part and how they control everything. And so we still follow that model. And so the first thing that I include is just the fact that, so I work for the FreeBSD foundation and then we have the FreeBSD project. And actually in the next slide, I think I have a better graphic of this, but we are a separate organization. So we don't run FreeBSD the project. We can't tell them what to do or have any control. Our whole purpose is to support them. And so if there's any critical needs, any holes in the project, then if we have the funding, we step in and help fill those needs. We have a core team. Actually one of the core team members, he's not in this room right now, but we do have a FreeBSD table in, let's see, what room? Oh, one of the buildings. In age, I think. No, no, no, no. Okay, yeah. So it's the main building where when you go in and they had the FOSDA on T-shirts and all that kind of stuff. So we're there. And so Bendic represents the core team. And that's actually elected every two years. We're coming out for elections in, I believe, May. And anyone who's a committer has a vote. And then it's a mentoring system to get your commit bit. So for example, I'm doing documentation. And so I submit patches for changes. And so eventually someone will recognize that and then they'll offer me mentorship. And then hopefully I'll get my commit bit that way. I just need a little more time to do that. And it's very collaborative. So this is my version of org chart for the project. So it's nothing official. And really I didn't have room for all the functional teams. But basically we have these functional teams. And it's a great way to sort of organize how things are supported within the project. And it also allows people who are interested in different areas to get involved in those areas that they're interested in. So say for example, if you're interested in security, and you have background, then you can be part of the security team. We have release and ports. And so we have various different type of functional teams that make up the project. And then the way I did it was sort of, you know, a top-down approach where you have the core team. And the core team is basically like a, I view them as like the board of directors of the project. And so they oversee it, but they also don't have control. You can, I mean as a developer you can work on what you're interested in working on. And that's philosophy of the project. And the core team steps in the help with, you know, sometimes it's administration and sometimes it's, you know, developer relationships. But they're sort of like those managers that you go to. And so I just talked about the core team and that's actually a list of what they work on. And so what I'm trying to point out here is that we don't have one person who oversees the whole project and has the yay or nay on what goes in or how things are run. So it is definitely a democratically run. And I'd like to show this graph. So we did this graph back in, so about a half a year ago. And what I'm trying to highlight here is the age distribution of our, and this is actually the committer. So not all the thousands of contributors we have. And showing not only are we diverse as far as countries and cultures represented, but also age. So we are getting new people involved in the project and probably more importantly getting younger people involved too because they're the ones who are going to continue. The one, the age, you know, near the end of that graph. A lot of those are actually people who've been with the, with previous C and BSD since the beginning, which is really cool because we have new people who are joining and we love working with them. And we have these older, more experienced people who are part of the project and know the history. And they're so welcoming that they love talking to the younger people and helping them along with the project. And so it's really neat to see. So how the releases work. So it's basically the, so we follow this, the principle of least astonishment. And it's basically things work, don't, don't change them. And don't, don't break things that already work. And, and also across major releases. So when you, when we have a new release, then it's going to, you know, I don't know, 99% that, you know, confidence that it will work, that you won't have to back out that, that update. So we have two types of releases major and the point releases. And so right now where we're at is the next major release will be 13.0. There wasn't a schedule for that yet, but I would guess the end of the year, early next year, it's every couple of years where there's a release schedule for 12.2 to come out. And I believe 11.4. And, and so we also have these sort of policies or rules of not breaking the ABI's and API's. And then like I mentioned earlier with Netflix, we have the, the two different branches. And so we call current also referred to as a developer branch and then the stable branch. And so like, so for example, on my computer that I'm installing for BSD, I'm actually using the current branch. So it's the latest and greatest version of free BSD. And what, what we do is we, we as a project provide what's called a snapshot. And so every week those are run. And so that's the image that I downloaded on my system. But if you're, you know, if you, but if you want a more stable, not the development branch, then we have the stable branch too that a lot of people use. So like if I, if we do real workshops at universities and various places and, and we'll always use the stable branch for that. So how you can, or how you contribute to the project, there's very many ways you can contribute. Like I said, I write documentation. I don't write code though my background. So my background is an operating systems, even though I've been working with them now for almost 15 years. And I'm trying to learn as much as I can, but my background is that I was a firmware engineer for many years for storage devices, which is so different than operating systems. So that's why I, I could get back into writing code, but I choose not to and I'm doing it because I'm already running the foundation. So it would be difficult. But it's easy to get started contributing. And some of the suggestions that we have would be, one would be it's working on documentation so you could translate or improve the documentation. You could, there's many ports. Like I was saying, there's over 33,000. And so we always need ports, maintainers. And you could just go through the peer list and pick a, you know, a problem out there that you could fix and submit a patch for. And so yes, so earlier I talked about why people or why users use FreeBSD. This is a list of why companies will use FreeBSD. And really if someone asked me, I would say the two top reasons really, so the license and then ZFS. And especially for data centers, people who really want that, you know, that reliability that they use ZFS. And it's been supported in FreeBSD for a very long time. And all these places where FreeBSD stands out and the one thing that we don't have on here that we are working on is support on the laptop. And so that's always an issue, especially with people like us, that we want, I wasn't sure if that was like a fire alarm. And so that's an area that we are working on. It's a hard area to support because you have so many different technologies and then you get new one, new generations, new technologies, CPUs and everything. But we as a foundation actually are working on trying to support some of the newer hardware so more people can get FreeBSD running on their laptops. I am highlighting some of the kernel features here. I'm not going to go through each one. It's basically a list of a typical kernel that has to work in this day. The user land features are more what I think sets us apart as far as making it a coherent system that our user land is developed and tested and integrated with the kernel from our community. So it's one group of people that are working on all of this. And so it's very consistent, coherent and integrated. Some of the other features we're known about. So like I said, ZFS and we're very active in the OpenZFS project, D-Trace, which was brought over from Sun back in, I think it was about 2005. It's a dynamic tracing tool, gels. I mean, we really came out with the first containerization. And actually there are projects that are working to product size that a little bit better. Beehive, actually I just came from Australia for Linux Conf EU. And when the original Beehive developers gave a talk there and he's getting involved in the project again, it was originally developed for NetApp. And then they open sourced it. And so that's been a very successful feature. And the TCP IP, we're still using as reference platform even though that was originally developed in BSD. And Capsicum actually is getting a little more publicity. I mean, it's very recent. Well, they've been working on this for years. It's coming out of the University of Cambridge and they're working with ARM on a recently announced project that ARM is integrating the instruction set into a version, a CPU version that will be on what's called the Morolla board and that will be very secure. And they have millions of pounds funding for this project. And FreeBSD has been working on this for, I think they've been working on it for five years. So it's very promising for a secure platform, maybe IoT area, but a great collaborative effort with FreeBSD and ARM. So I'll talk a little bit about the FreeBSD foundation so you can understand who we are. And we are celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. We're going to celebrate it all year, but we were founded in March 2000. We are based in Boulder, Colorado. That's where I am based. But we are a distributed organization. We're very small. I have, I haven't counted recently, but I think I have six to eight employees. And we have interns too. So that's why, but we have an office up in Canada too in the Waterloo area. And so we have a lot of development going on up there. And then we have a board of eight board members and we do have Benedict who's down at the table. He's also on our board. We are 100% funded by donations. So we're not a membership organization. And so we do reach out to companies and ask them to help fund our efforts. And so we're constantly doing that. If your company is using FreeBSD and benefiting, then I would ask if you could either connect me with the right people or ask your company too to help us with our funding. The more money we get, the more software development that we could do as well as advocacy for the project. So this list, I know this, so I don't know, you might be able to read this. So what I try to do with this, and this is where the FreeBSD around the world comes from. So we went to, we participated 38 conferences in 21 countries. This was all last year. And the whole reason is to raise awareness about FreeBSD. And so at a minimum, people understand what FreeBSD is. And hopefully spark an interest in people trying FreeBSD and hopefully either becoming a user or contributing back to the project. And so you can see here, basically I went in order. So I didn't go by country or anything. And this doesn't include BSD conferences or just conferences that we sponsor around the world. But one thing I do want to point out here is that like open source summit, we did give FreeBSD talk at both the North America and the European one. And if you don't know, open source summit is a Linux foundation conference used to be called LinuxCon. And so it's really important that we include our voice in these open source conferences. And that's what we're doing. And so I actually included a list of sort of like the key conferences that we're going to be at or that are happening this year. I mean, as far as conferences we're going to be at, we have a really long list like that one earlier. But if you're interested in getting involved and or finding out more about FreeBSD, we have three major BSD conferences that have listed up here, as well as other conferences that we're out. So people, so this slide really is for people who are part of the community already or people who want to get involved and who want to help us advocate for FreeBSD. And so what, because I wasn't sure what, who all was going to be in my talk. And so with this slide, I was hoping to convince people to go out there to come to conferences like this. Actually, this is one of our best represented conference, I think, because we have, well, we had Rigo who he organizes this room and a lot of people from the community come and if you go to our table, you'll see that not only are there usually like four people behind the stand, but there's actually a group of us in front of it. And it's just that because there's so many of us, we can't all stand behind it. And so it's a great conference for us. So to go to a conference, go to a Linux conference and my slides are available to share, to introduce people to FreeBSD. And or go to a meetup or run a meetup or go to university. And these are all things that we're doing. It's just that the foundation is very small and we can't get to all these places. And you can install, you could hold the install fast, which basically means that you go to something, you go to a meetup and everyone brings a little laptop, you install virtual box or some VM, install FreeBSD. And that's just the basic. And now you can start playing with FreeBSD and learn about it. And I have resources actually on the right of that slide is a list of a lot of the resources that we do provide from flyers to stickers. Someone was asking me earlier about could they get the like PDF for the stickers. And so we do have people who run their their local events and they print their own or have their own stickers made. So this slide I like to use for when I go to like a Linux conference for people who are new to FreeBSD. And I love this graphic. I don't know who did it and I wish I did because I'll probably someday get in trouble for using it. But it's showing us working together. And so why should we work together? It's, I mean first, so say you're in here and you're just learning about FreeBSD and you have no interest in switching. But you're a Linux, I don't know, sys-edmet. This way, I mean it's so important just to have that knowledge, understand how other operating systems work. And it'll just make you better at what you do. Because you may say, I hate how they do all of this stuff. So I'm going to do, you know, my, whatever my development, my work better. And that's, that is how you improve things. So we really could learn from each other, whether it's successes or failures. And we do have different coding methodologies and philosophies. And so understanding the reasons for both. And so I do know people who contribute, especially developers, who contribute to FreeBSD. Companies like Google and Facebook try to hire them, which is really bad for us. But because they don't usually contribute anymore. But it's, it is a good way to get really good training. And they have, we just have a good reputation for producing very good software developers. And that's why that happens. Our code base is smaller. And so it's a great reference platform. So for learning about open, or learning about operating systems, it's, so you, so I mean, so we have, if you just compare the two kernels. So we have about five and a half million lines of code. And Linux is 35 or more million lines of code. So right there, you can see like, well, if I just want to look at source code, and you know that they're both good, then I would choose a smaller one because it's going to be easier to find what you're interested in or what you're looking, you know, to find what you're looking for. FreeBSD, if you look at the whole operating system, it's about 17 million lines of code. So, and distribute Linux distribution, I don't, I can't even tell you how many lines of code because they're all going to be different too. But it just gives you an idea that it's a great place to learn about operating systems. It's a great, if you're interested in becoming a system programmer or to improve your system programming skills, then it's a great way to do that with FreeBSD. And I had that quote, because this was when I found, when I was just reading, I forgot what, where I was reading this at, but I thought this was a really good point that this person said that they became a better Linux, this admin, by learning about FreeBSD. And I think that that's really important. And so why I contribute to FreeBSD, and I know I, I could actually make like, probably a book on this, and that's why I try to squeeze as much as I can, because here is why I'm trying to convince people to contribute to FreeBSD. But it is a very inclusive and welcoming community. I, so we had a developer summit on Friday and there's a contributor, and I can't remember how many years she's been involved in the project. I just met her for the first time here. And she submitted a patch, and she, so she tweeted it. I just submitted my first patch to FreeBSD, and everyone's like, you know, commenting like congratulations and all this stuff, which is great, because then it makes you want to contribute more. As well as also people are there reviewing and giving you constructive feedback too. So we're assuming people aren't perfect when, you know, when they start contributing. Like I said, it's a great way to learn about operating systems, and because of the size of the project, since it is smaller, it's easier to make a more notable contribution. So we've had like some of our interns, I mean, they've become sort of the like main people, like on risk five is a really good example of one of my interns. And, and so it is, it's much easier to, to stand out or to become an expert in a particular area that you're interested in, and get involved. And like I said earlier, some of those original people, like Kirk Mekusek, he's one of the original BSD developers and from Berkeley, and he's on my board, and he's still very involved in the project. I mean, you go to a conference and he's there, and he's there talking to people, and he's not, you know, I mean, you don't have to line up, talk to him, he's just very approachable and very friendly too. And, and then the fact that it's democratically run too, that that makes a difference, it's first getting your contributions accepted. So, what I would recommend is if you're interested in trying out previous D, just to try it. And there's many ways of doing that from, like I have it, like I was saying, that I have VirtualBox, that's typically how we do it with a workshop, but you could actually get an account on Azure, AWS, they have free accounts for new people, and a digital ocean actually is another one that's really good. And, or, or we also have how-to guides on our web, our website. So the FreeBSDFoundation.org website does have how-to guides. And so if you want to just install FreeBSD, like I'm doing on my other computer, then we have a guide for that. And then this last one, I think the slide will disappear. But this is some of the main resources that I use, and most people will use for getting more information about FreeBSD. And, but there's a lot more information, it's really, you know, just Google for FreeBSD and you can get what you, hopefully what you want to know about FreeBSD. And there's also a good Facebook group there too, but there's forums, email lists, there's many different ways to engage with the community. So I have one minute left, which I timed it perfectly, so I won't get too many questions, but I'm kidding. But, but if you do have questions, I will take questions now. But the other thing too is we do have that table. I'll be down there, but also we do have developers down there who, so if you have real, you know, specific or technical questions that they should be able to answer those for you. So anything in this last 53 seconds that I have. So who's going to try FreeBSD now? That's awesome. Okay. Okay. That's great. Okay. Well, that's all I have. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.