How the FreeBSD Project

FreeBSD is a widely deployed open source operating system. [3] Found throughout the industry, FreeBSD is the operating system of choice for many appliance products, embedded devices, as a foundation OS for several mainstream commercial operating systems, and as a basis for academic research. This is distinct, however, from the FreeBSD Project, which is a community of open source developers and users. This paper discusses the structure of the FreeBSD Project as an organization that produces, maintains, supports, and uses the FreeBSD Operating System. As this community is extremely large, I approach this from the perspective of a FreeBSD developer. This necessarily captures the project from my perspective, but having had the opportunity to discuss the FreeBSD Project extensively with many people inside and outside the community, I hope it is also more generally applicable.