[FUGSPBR] Jordan Hubbard news

Sex Jul 6 14:59:23 BRT 2001

Não há como negar o comprometimento da Apple com o Mac OS X. O último 
investimento no desenvolvimento do sistema operacional foi a contratação 
de Jordan Hubbard, co-fundador do FreeBSD.

O núcleo do Mac OS X, conhecido como Darwin, é baseado no BSD (sigla de 
Berkeley Software Distribution, o primeiro Unix não proprietário, 
lançado em 1979). Jordan Hubbard será gerente do departamento de 
tecnologia BSD da Apple, cuidando do projeto open source do Darwin, 
entre outras coisas. Ele começou sua carreira nos anos 70 e sempre 
esteve envolvido com a comunidade open source, tendo fundado em 1992 o 
projeto FreeBSD.

Hubbard afirmou em recentes entrevistas que tem acompanhado o 
desenvolvimento do OS X desde o lançamento da versão Beta Pública no ano 
passado.

--

Dear members of the FreeBSD community,

As many of you know, I've spent the last 7 years working at Walnut Creek 
CDROM, BSDi and, for the last 3 months, WindRiver Systems as a general 
FreeBSD evangelist and product manager for the FreeBSD CDROM product 
line. That work has certainly been important to the community and it's 
been very satisfying to see FreeBSD products appear on store shelves and 
on web sites, to say nothing of the many thousands of CDs we've been 
able to make available to schools and people doing FreeBSD promotional 
events. We've also gone from being just one person working on FreeBSD 
releases to a small team which also works on FreeBSD infrastructural 
support and "focused efforts" like the SMPng project. By any metric 
given the economic situation these days, FreeBSD's progress has been 
very strong and it's been my privilege to be able to work with so many 
talented people in enhancing its commercial potential. It's my sincere 
hope that WindRiver will continue these initiatives as well as providing 
unique and significant value of its own to the FreeBSD community.

Those who've been following my writings about and general enthusiasm for 
Apple's OS X lately also won't be surprised by the news that I'm going 
to work for Apple Computer. Ever since Apple released the initial public 
Beta, I've been following OS X's progress with great interest and an 
increasing desire to get involved with it somehow. For those who've been 
living under a rock this last year, OS X has finally managed to achieve 
what's been something of a holy grail for the Unix community - take a 
powerful Unix core (BSD) and mate it with a usable desktop, GUI 
development tools and some real applications, all without sacrificing 
access to the underlying features of Unix. Apple has even bundled tools 
like PERL and EMACS as part of the base system, proving that they're 
more than willing to appeal to the techies out there as well as the 
general consumer who may never get past the desktop. From the Open 
Source perspective, Apple is also making a strong play with Darwin, the 
core OS component of OS X. Full sources are available to the general 
public and Apple is making full use of CVS and other tools which will 
help keep the development process coherent, just as FreeBSD has done. 
For a "day job", I really couldn't ask for a better combination of open 
source community work and cutting-edge commercial development which will 
help me expand my horizons and hopefully learn more about the 
intricacies of user interface/human factors engineering. I expect both 
to help me significantly in the FreeBSD work I will also continue to do. 
Which brings us to the next topic: "What does this mean for FreeBSD?"

Let me assure you all that Apple does fully understand the importance of 
FreeBSD and they don't want me or anyone else to stop working on it. 
FreeBSD doesn't compete with Apple's product offerings in any way and 
provides an excellent source of technology for them. Darwin is 
substantially based on FreeBSD 3.2 and Apple certainly doesn't want the 
technology transfer to end there or to be strictly one-way. Part of my 
mandate will in fact be helping Apple to be an even better Open Source 
citizen, increasing collaboration and strengthening relationships with 
FreeBSD and other Open Source projects.

With the release of OS X, Apple will literally be the largest Unix 
vendor on the planet. They take this very seriously, and realize that 
their involvement with the Open Source community is a critical component 
of their success. They've also been very good about giving FreeBSD 
credit for its contributions during their presentations and on their web 
site, so this is far from being just another (usual) case of someone 
taking FreeBSD and burying it deep into some completely closed-source 
product. Apple is proud of its BSD-derived technology and it's not 
afraid to say so, something which removes a lot of the concern over a 
potential conflict of interest from my shoulders. I think that an 
expanded relationship between FreeBSD and its "sister" project Darwin 
can only be to the benefit of both groups. If you think about it, our 
"mandates" are essentially identical: To provide BSD technology to the 
mass market and work on making it as approachable and robust as 
possible. Only the types of hardware each focuses on are different, and 
in areas where there's overlap (USB, firewire, etc) we can certainly do 
our best to collaborate.

As has probably already become rather obvious, I'm very excited to be 
joining Apple and look forward to working with some fascinating people 
and products. Wearing my "FreeBSD.org hat", I will also continue to 
support WindRiver's efforts in any way I can to ensure that the FreeBSD 
product line there continues and that FreeBSD can continue to be a 
solution which is broadly applicable to a wide array of markets. The 
FreeBSD product line has reached the stage where I feel comfortable 
taking a job which allows me to focus more on Darwin. While I have 
enjoyed my time working with the people and projects at BSDi and 
WindRiver, I simply couldn't resist the opportunity of working at Apple.

Sincerely,

- Jordan
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