FreeBSD Foundation

Ever wondered how the backbone of streaming giants like Netflix or gaming consoles like Sony PlayStation ticks? Dive deep with us in this episode as we unravel the legacy and impact of FreeBSD, one of the unsung heroes of the tech world. Join us in an insightful conversation with Deb Goodkin, the Executive Director of the FreeBSD Foundation, as we explore the history, evolution, and significance of FreeBSD. From its roots in Berkeley UNIX to its integral role in modern technology, Deb sheds light on why this powerful, cohesive operating system stands out from Linux and how its permissive licensing has attracted major players. Discover the fascinating story behind FreeBSD's stability, performance, and community-driven development. Tune in for more intriguing details and expert insights you won't want to miss!

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Welcome back, everybody. I'm super fascinated and excited to talk to Deb Goodkin, the executive director at the FreeBSD Foundation. Deb, welcome, and thank you for your time. 

Thank you for inviting us to join you. 

I'm always curious to know. I feel my age sometimes when I'm on these podcasts, wondering whether the younger members of the industry who listen have any idea of some of the projects I was talking about. FreeBSD and BSD, in general, for those who aren't so aware, can you give our audience a high-level overview of what it is and what you do in the organization? 

What Is FreeBSD

A quick history is that you had Unix that was developed out of Bell Labs over 50 years ago. Berkeley then took it on, not to own it, but they started doing research with it and they started developing with it. They were funded by the government to do work and they developed the TCP IP stack that a lot of operating systems currently use. They started open-sourcing for the operating system. They referred to it as Berkeley Unix back then.

What eventually happened is that the funding dried up and the project was forced over to the BSD or Berkeley Software Distribution. FreeBSD and NetBSD branched off of that. They both had different purposes and goals. OpenBSD also came out of NetBSD. FreeBSD has been around for over 30 years now. It's a Unix-like operating system. It became FreeBSD around the same time as Linux did. 

It has some differences from Linux. Linux is just the kernel and FreeBSD is designed to be an entire operating system and platform, right?

That's correct. Linux is just the kernel. You have hundreds of different distributions. FreeBSD is the whole operating system, which means the kernel, the userland tools, documentation, and everything. We like to refer to it as a cohesive operating system. You have the same people working at FreeBSD who are working on all those different components or parts of the operating system. 

The same people who are developing both kernel and userland are also doing the testing of it. It is much more cohesive and integrated. Another big differentiator is that the Linux kernel is about 35 million lines of code. It's really big. FreeBSD, just the kernel itself is about 5 million, and then the whole operating system is about 17 million. It's a much smaller footprint than Linux. 

It's interesting the history right from the start as you described it, folks and changes in ownership and things like that. Was there a specific reason why the BSDs are designed as an entire platform as opposed to just a kernel or did that happen organically? 

I think that was part of the original UNIX operating system. It was one big operating system. Why is Linux just the kernel? Originally, he was making an open-source version of Linux, which wasn't open-source at the time. I believe that's why it was developed as a whole operating system originally. 

BSD License Vs. GPL License

The other big difference between Linux and FreeBSD from my point of view anyway is the licensing around the source code. Finally, our Flagsmith uses a BSD license as well. For those people who aren't clear, can you talk about the differences between the BSD license and the GPL license that the Linux kernel is licensed under?

The major difference is that BSD is a permissive license. You have permission to do anything you want with it. You have to include the license in there, but you can add your own proprietary code or IP and you're not required to give it back. Versus with a GPL, you are. If you are a company, you create this product and you put things in there to make your product high-performance or something like that, then if you're asked, you have to provide that source code to whatever you've added. 

It's funny, I don't have it in front of me, but if you compare the two licenses, because I've seen people do this on slides when they're giving presentations, and BSD is like 2 or 3 paragraphs at most. You can both put them on one slide and with the GPL, to fit it on one slide. It has to be like an itty bitty font. With the BSD license, you can read it. It gives people permission to use it for any purpose that they want. No strings attached. 

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BSD is really a permissive license. You have permission to do anything you want with it.

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The upshot of that is that it has some quite famous platforms that people might not realize have some part or maybe a whole bunch of their roots as part of that original software stack, right?

That's correct. There are a lot of companies that use FreeBSD right now. One thing about the license is that because it's permissive and they're not required to give back, then you don't always know all the users of FreeBSD. That's okay, but most of them, even if they put their own proprietary stuff and they may not upstream many of their changes. 

Companies Using FreeBSD

We’re talking about the more popular or well-known companies using the platform. 

I would call them marquee companies that most of your listeners would recognize. Let's start with Netflix. It's very well known that they are FreeBSD users. Netflix is an entertainment company. They stream content all around the world. They have their own servers that they install in local facilities. They're closer to their users and they stream at extremely high transfer rates. They have been able to achieve data rates of 800 and 900 gigabits per second from one server. That means as a viewer, you're able to watch your movies and TV shows along with many other people on the internet without seeing any slowness.

They are able to achieve this by being able to put some of their changes that are proprietary into the kernel, as well as they've done a lot of improvements. They call it kernel TLS, and they're able to put those changes right directly into the kernel. Most of the stuff they do, they do upstream for changes and they stay current. We have our releases, I go through the whole release process and it's fully tested and everything. 

We then have the developer or the current source tree. That's like if you made a change and you made that commitment right now, that would be considered current. It's going through testing, but not the full range of testing that is released well. Netflix does stay current and they do that so they can get any type of fix that is in there. They don't have to wait for it. They also find it easy to make their own changes and improvements. Also, another benefit of upstreaming your changes and staying current is your stuff gets tested by others. 

You don't have to get behind when all these changes are happening to the tree. When you want to get to whatever the current releases, then you don't have to worry about installing thousands of patches. Some other companies that a lot of people may not be aware of is the Sony PlayStation. It is based on FreeBSD. Even though they're more current, the PlayStation 4 and the 5, both are based on FreeBSD. That's an example of FreeBSD being used in embedded systems.

Apple, there's not a lot of information out there on how Apple uses FreeBSD, but they're very involved with the project. If you look at the conferences that are put on for the BSDs, they're almost always a sponsor of a conference. It shows that they want to show their support as well as their involvement with FreeBSD. Historically, Apple, with their Mac OS, came out with earlier operating systems. I mean they had their own version of their operating system.

When they purchased Next, I don't know if you remember Next, which was started by Steve Jobs when he left Apple. Apple purchased Next, and so their operating system was BSD-based. Apple chose to use that operating system. The operating system was BSD-based and then over time, they started replacing the BSD code with FreeBSD. Now a lot of their userland is FreeBSD. 

Do you think this is one of the reasons for the fact these organizations can work on proprietary pieces of code that they don't have to make open source, as well as submitting things back upstream? 

The license is one reason why companies use it, but there are a lot of other reasons that companies use it. Maybe they don't care so much about the license. One thing about the license is that you don't have to feel or think about lawyers. That's one benefit. That's a big deal with them. I suppose that they have lawyers because they have to figure this out, especially when they're using so many different open-source software out there. The other reason why companies use it is for the high performance. It's known for stability. When you upgrade to a new operating and new version of the operating system, rarely do you have any issues with it. 

Another reason why individuals and companies will use FreeBSD is ZFS, which is fully integrated into the kernel. You get the performance, you get reliability, and data integrity by having ZFS, and whether you have full-blown RAID or if you are just an individual on a desktop who just wants a storage device, it gives you lots of benefits with the snapshot concept.

Also, as a developer, you may use FreeBSD because it has D-Trace which allows you to monitor the code and what's going on without it affecting the performance at all. I feel like the other reasons why companies are using FreeBSD besides the license are the simplicity of it and being able to configure it as you want.

A lot of the versions of other operating systems come with a lot of load and things that you don't even know what's happening. You could even think of it as this black box. You don't know what's inside. Whereas with FreeBSD, you do. When you install it, you have the minimum of what you need to run an operating system. That allows you to install through packages what you want and what you need. You don't need anything else. 

There's a company like Beckhoff that does embedded PCs for automation. They were using Windows CE and they had to switch to another operating system. They did pick FreeBSD because of the license originally. What they found is that because the operating system is so minimal, they were able to reduce their footprint by seven times the size of memory that they needed. Those are just a few things I can think of why companies choose to use FreeBSD besides the license. 

Governance And Ownership

That's super interesting. In terms of the governance and the ownership of the project and your relation and role in that, can you talk a little bit about how that works?

That's a great question. The foundation that I run, we are a 501(c)3, which is a US government tax classification, and it means we're a non-profit for the public good. A lot of foundations out there are 501(c)3, so they're considered nonprofits, but they're trade associations. There's a big difference there. Our whole purpose or mission is to support the FreeBSD project and community. They are our stakeholders. We are here to support them.

The project is made up of thousands of volunteers who support the project in various ways, from developers to advocates to technical writers to users. We do not control what they do. We're not an umbrella organization, but we do provide funding in various areas and we're fully funded by donations. We do work on getting corporations to support our efforts because of the benefit and the whole to the open source ecosystem in general, but also allowing us to step in and help with areas like security and other areas where it's hard to get volunteers.

We are considered a legal entity for FreeBSD. We can sign NDAs and MOUs, and we work with lawyers also with any type of question that comes up. Usually, legal questions that come up are mostly patent-related. If a developer has a question on a patent, then they may ask us to help with that. 

In terms of your role there, that's something that you've been working on for quite a while, right? 

Me personally? Yes. I've been with the foundation for 17 or 18 years now. 

How has the landscape changed in that time?

We've grown so much as a foundation. I was the first employee. I had to figure out like, what does that mean? There are federal and state employment regulations that you have to follow. I had to figure out all of that kind of stuff. I became the first employee and then we hired two more people after that, and so we had to slowly put things in place. It's interesting because business is not my background. Engineering is my background. It's a lot of learning, not only for me but for the board members too. We knew what our purpose was, but also as a corporation, there are laws that we have to follow. 

It’s making sure we understand that. The board was hands-on back when I started and they've slowly transitioned to a truly governing board. They had a fiduciary responsibility. They also helped provide input on our long-term direction. Some of them are in different industries, all tech. They also provide input on what we should do. We've grown our team with many software developers. We have software developers who step in and debug issues that come up. If there's a known vulnerability out there, they can step in. If it's hardware, they can put work around it. We can provide that quickly versus relying on a purely volunteer community. 

We also look at what features and functionality our users want. We determine what isn't being supported and what should we step in and work on, and it changes quickly. We try to be pretty agile and focus on what are the gaps and the critical needs of the project. We fill those. We also have folks on staff who are on our security team. That means that we're on top of anything that comes in. Not only the software developers who are debugging and fixing problems but the bigger picture of security, what's out there, and being involved in others.

BSD Vs. Linux

Sometimes there are folks from all different open source projects around the world that will meet monthly and talk about like any type of security issue so other projects are aware of that. We're able to keep on top of that. Now that we've grown, we've brought in someone who is working on partnerships and policies, as well as doing research for us. That's helped us work with more of the corporate users and understand what their needs and challenges are. In the past twelve months, we've increased the number of new partners. Partners to us aren't numbers. They're companies that do give us money with no strings attached. Sometimes it does help fund work that they may be interested in but benefits FreeBSD overall. 

Linux famously had this leading light figure. Linus Torvalds sometimes says things a bit more forcefully than he needs to around design decisions and what’s going into the kernel and what's not. You guys have taken quite a different path. There's no famous name associated with the project who has that role. Is that correct?

The organization of the project is different. A lot of people refer to Linus as a benevolent dictator. He's the one on top of making the final decisions. They have a whole lieutenant hierarchy for reviewing and making decisions. Our organization is flat. We refer to ourselves as democratically governed. We have a core team that's elected every two years. In fact, we're going through the election process right now. They're considered the governing team of the project. If you look at how code or changes are made, it is easier to submit your code changes or patches. 

The standards are still high, so you don't lose that by not having this hierarchy. The code is reviewed and it can be reverted too. The structure is different. It's funny. What opened my eyes to the differences was a very good friend of Linus was meeting with me and he is a big-time Linux person, but also loves previous media and had his company donate to us yearly. He and I were having a coffee one day in China. There was a conference there. He goes, ”If I was a new developer or I wanted to find an open-source project to contribute to, I picked FreeBSD.” I was like, “Why?” It surprised me. He said, “Because it's so much easier to contribute because of the flat model. With Linux, it could take six months to get change to run.”

That's another reason why companies like using FreeBSD. They're focused on what they need whether it's a product they're developing or their IT, and they need those for their business. They want that change done. They have much more control over it. As I said earlier, it doesn't mean the standards are any less or you get junk submitted. That it is reviewed and discussions happen through the review process.

NetBSD and OpenBSD, are they forks as other listeners would regard them? How do you perceive those other projects? 

They were forks. All of them were forks from BSD. They have different focuses. There are reasons why people want to work on open BSD, BSD, and FreeBSD. FreeBSD is most popular as far as users out there but we all meet around three times a year at conferences around the world. There are a lot of similarities and overlaps. Sometimes a project may implement something and another project wants that. They can port that over. 

There's no longer a single source of upstream codes, right?

Only for each project thereof. The BSD, the last version was 386 BSD. You had a couple of companies that took that and they supported it. Eventually, they went away and you have these communities that support the project.

Funding And Support

In terms of the funding for that organization, is that made up of a mixed year of like a larger number of small donations and then some from larger organizations that are using the project? 

Yes. We get a lot of individual donations from $5 to individuals sometimes $10,000, $20,000 possibly. The larger donations are typically from corporate users, as well as corporations who want to support our efforts because they recognize the importance of FreeBSD within the open-source ecosystem.

Is it hard to try and persuade some of those organizations to submit upstream patches or does that generally come quite easily?

That is one thing that we are promoting right now. It is the importance of upstreaming your code. Some companies recognize it and they do it right away. Some companies are recognizing the fact that they got so far behind and how difficult it is to get back to the current or the latest release, so then going forward, they try to focus on upstreaming their code. 

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One interesting thing is when I was talking about Netflix and how they stay current and upstream all their code, they shared their model with other corporate users. To me, that was fascinating because they didn't have to, but I found we were meeting with a company and we happened to join them for drinks, and someone from Netflix had been there meeting with them that day to share. They were in the area and they were open to sharing their methodology. It was cool to see that. 

That's interesting to hear. In terms of the support around the projects, is there a red hat for FreeBSD? How do large organizations go about solving that problem of who do you call when you need help?

Currently, FreeBSD does not have a red hat, but there are some companies out there currently that are providing support for FreeBSD. The largest organization is a company called Clara Systems. They help companies upstream their code. They do work with a lot of companies out there. They've given a lot of talks on the value of upstreaming. 

We have a recording from the last vendor summit on our website and also help them with an article to promote the importance of that. They will not only help companies upstream but also will implement features and things that companies want specifically for their use case. They also provide support. That would be like the red hat type of company, and then there are other companies around the world that do hosting and stuff, and then they provide FreeBSD support too.

Security

In terms of the modern world, security in particular, do you feel like there are benefits with the FreeBSD model over other approaches?

One thing that helps FreeBSD is that we are a single operating system. We're a whole operating system. We have much more control over everything that goes into our build systems and testing and all that kind of stuff. We do support over 30,000 software packages and those are all integrated into our own build system. We're not using their build systems on that. We have a very active security team. We're involved in other types of meetings that involve other open-source projects.

BSD is a single operating system. We're a whole operating system, so we have much more control over everything that goes in our build systems, testing, and all that kind of stuff.

I have two staff members who are on the security team, and one is a deputy security officer. They stay on top of what's happening out there. If there is a vulnerability, we're notified right away and they step in and evaluate it and see if it impacts FreeBSD. We also have fully integrated CI and the person who runs CI for the project is also a staff member. The other thing too is that when you talk about security, that's the talk now. All the governments around the world are talking about cyber security and how we protect our digital infrastructure. 

All the governments around the world are talking about cybersecurity and how we protect our digital infrastructure.

FreeBSD is part of the digital landscape. It's critical software and we recognize that. One thing that's changed since we've been able to grow internally is that our voice is being included in these discussions. We're involved with CISA and there's an organization through OSI called OPA. We're a member of that, and then also staying on top of the CRA. There are so many different discussions happening that we're being invited to, as well as events and discussions out there. CISA had an open-source event pretty recently. We have someone who is there.

There's another one coming up in July through the UN. It's called OSPOS for good or something like that. We're also going to be there. We're staying on top of this. We’re not only just staying on top of it but we're part of the conversation. We have input into it. It's important because when you have other foundations out there that are humongous and have a lot of open-source projects underneath them, they tend to be recognized as the voice of open-source in general. There are a lot of open-source projects that aren't part of that umbrella. 

We have our own users’ interests, needs, and challenges. We want to make sure that our voices are included in those. Secure by Design has been a big thing recently with the US government, asking tech companies to sign this agreement. Basically what it's saying, and I think this is a good idea, is if you produce a product, so you produce this software, so I'm a producer and I produce the software and you buy my software. The security responsibility should be on my plate. 

You shouldn't have to be required to make sure this product you purchased is secure. It's like buying a car. It's like saying, “You need to check and make sure the brakes work and that you'll survive driving this vehicle I just sold you.” Even though we're not a for-profit corporation selling you this product, we still provide the software. It's in our best interest globally that we do what we can to make sure it's secure. 

Do you feel like it's maybe time for governments to do more around things like funding and things like that? It seems like the American Federal budget is fairly large. Does the organization that you lead have a position on that or an opinion on that? If they offered you some money, would you take it?

If the government offered us money, I believe that we would take that. We will not take money if there are strings attached. We cannot if there’s a tax structure. One thing that's interesting that I could connect government funding and related to security is that in the UK, the UK government has put millions of pounds into research and development of a secured hardware option for one reason. It is for these whole memory safety vulnerabilities that everyone is talking about. What I'm talking about or referring to is there's a partnership between ARM and the University of Cambridge. 

The University of Cambridge has done a lot of research on security and they've come out with CHERI and CAPSICOM and these ways of protecting memory. ARM, with one of its processors, has integrated some RISC instructions to enable this fine-grained memory protection. They call this Murillo. This ARM chip is on this Murillo board and it's running CheriBSD. CheriBSD is based on FreeBSD. There are over 70 companies, I think there's a lot more now, who are experimenting with it. The UK government, as well as the US government, is putting money into those. 

I don't know how much as far as the US government is, but I do know that they've given a demo of the product or this project at the White House and they've met with the Department of Defense, and there's a lot of interest in us. When our government came out with guidelines for how to protect memory, we talked about these memory-safe languages like you should program in us. As I said earlier, there are millions of lines of code in these operating systems, and they're mostly written in C and C++. 

The effort to convert that would be outrageous. It would take so much. If you could put this in the hardware, and the hardware is now, the CPU is now limiting, and it has more control over how the memory is accessed, then that would be such a great solution for this. In Biden's guidelines for software development, there was a paragraph that referred to this project.

That's fascinating. As someone living in the UK, I wasn't aware of that program. It's interesting to listen to you talk. I was thinking back to the recent vulnerability that got into OpenSSH, and the real vector for that was abusing people's implicit trust in upstream repositories. As far as I understand it, the attacker tried to get someone to bring in a package from an upstream repository in a rushed way, which I guess if you own the entire end-to-end toolchain for building and packaging, the distribution is much harder to pull off.

That's why we do have outside packages that are integrated into our own system instead of theirs. There's a discussion internally within the project on how to protect against bad actors and how we can verify identities too. At our BSD conference that is taking place in Ottawa, Canada in a week and a half, that is a conversation that's going to happen. That’s the nice thing about having the conference and it being fairly small too. How they can coordinate this effort? They've already been discussing this. 

Try BSD

I have a couple more questions before we wrap up. For someone who maybe is like me who has an open source project or something they're working on that generally is packaged and deployed under Linux, what's the easiest way for me to learn about and test out deploying my software on FreeBSD instead? 

You would go to the FreeBSD.org website and there is a button. It's something like, “New to FreeBSD.” It's pretty obvious. It's on top. You click on that. It takes you to a page that talks about FreeBSD in general, and then what you could do with FreeBSD. Do you want to use it? Do you just want to learn about it? Do you want to contribute? At the bottom of that page, if you're interested in contributing, then it'll take you to another page to tell you about different ways to contribute.

I always recommend that you download FreeBSD and do it. You could do it on a VM. It's the easiest way and play around with it. Install packages that you're interested in. One thing about FreeBSD is that we're known for excellent documentation and it's all in one place too. If you install it on your laptop there, you start playing around with it, and then all the documentation is installed with it. There's a lot of information out there too. You can find out how to do things. The foundation has written a lot of how-to guides on how to get started.

If you want to install it, we have a how-to guide on that. We have how-to guides on installing a GUI. You can pick your favorite one. We support most of them. One thing is that you have that choice of what you can install. If you are interested in contributing, then I always suggest contributing documentation at first because even if you're a developer, it's a good way to learn about how you contribute a patch or a bug report so you understand the process. Also reading the documentation helps you to learn about FreeBSD.

A FreeBSD handbook is great. It's so funny because if you think of it as like, “This manual is like the things I used after reading as a firmware developer.” It's well written. You learn a lot from it. There's stuff like books out there too. I would always suggest reading the handbook to get started and install it. I think contributing is great. We're always looking for people to contribute to the project. You start getting involved, and then if you do want to become a committer, that allows you to commit your patches to the source tree. Someone will mentor you. It helps with learning where the best coding practice is and gives you guidance on it. 

We have a lot of people in the project who have been around for a long time. We have some of the original BSD developers. BSD was started out of Berkeley by Bill Joy. The young people here may not know that name, but he started in Sun Microsoft. There are a few people who are still on FreeBSD who came out of Berkeley and worked with him and Ken Thompson and some of these original people. This is so cool because not only are they still involved, but they're interested in helping new people come on board. They're there to help you. 

We look at them as rockstars and they know everything. It's so great but the thing is they're open to change if it makes them. We don't change just to change. That’s the best story that they love to tell, but also they're there to help you. If you have a question and they're available, they'll answer. That's cool too. If you go to a conference, at least three of them will be there in attendance, which is cool. 

The other thing too is that FreeBSD is a great way to learn about systems programming. Because it has smaller lines of code versus Linux, it is much easier to go through the code. You also have D-Trace, which helps you in real-time to monitor what's happening. Once you start wanting to contribute because it's a smaller project, it's easier to make an impactful contribution. There's a lot more opportunity there. 

What's the best place to go for community access? How did you get involved online with the community? Where are the best places to be for that?

There are different ways. There are emails, forums, Facebook groups, and Twitter. You have Discord. You have all these different communities who like to communicate in different ways. A lot of the key developers are on some of these different platforms too. It's not if you're on Discord, you're not just getting the uncreatable. I'm on Discord. I get tagged. Someone tagged me this morning and I responded to them. To find out about them, you can go to FreeBSD.org. Somewhere under one of the drop-down menus, you'll find a way to find the mailing lists as well as forums.

Future Of The Organization

In terms of the future of the project and the organization, what do you see over the coming years?

I see so much opportunity out there. I know I'm an optimist. I know it's not an easy path. Within the FreeBSD, we have more partners than we've had more new partners. Recently, we have at least five new partners, as well as a bunch of partner proposals out there for companies. There are the ones who have been giving us money or continuing to give us money, which says a lot. We're seeing a lot more young people interested in FreeBSD, which is interesting. We see it through first, the opportunity. 

Even though FreeBSD has been around for over 30 years, it's what the co-operating system is because it's not big and industrial like all the other operating systems out there. Through the GSoC program, the Google Summer of Code, this is the 20th year of that program. We've been accepted into it every year. We have eleven projects and students who are participating this year. We do get committers out of the program. In the last couple of years, I think we've gotten six, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it is. It says that young people are interested in FreeBSD. 

If they're coming in through internships or the Google Summer of Code, they're interested enough that they're sticking with it. They see the opportunity. The fact that our voice is being included in these government discussions shows that FreeBSD is recognized as critical software. They want to hear what we have to say. More hardware vendors are working with us, like ARM and AMD, who want FreeBSD to work on their new processors and to work out of production. There are also hardware vendors who want FreeBSD to work out of the box, so like in laptops. 

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The other thing too is part of what we're trying to do besides the software development that we're working on, we're advocating a lot more for FreeBSD. We have grown our team within the foundation to support this effort and we've recognized a lot more journalists and publications are reaching out to us and asking for our stories. It shows that there's interest out there. We're also finding journalists are writing articles that include FreeBSD. Maybe they won't focus on FreeBSD, but a lot of times they'll write about technology, and they'll go, “It supports Windows and Linux.” FreeBSD is being included in that now, which I think is big.

We're providing content to help users and companies out there who have a problem and they're looking at how do I solve this problem? We're providing more context on how FreeBSD could be the solution to the problem that you're having. I see FreeBSD has a bright future, but we're staffing up to take advantage of this because we cannot sit back. There's always going to be users out there who recognize FreeBSD, but we're helping step that up to make sure that folks out there know that it's an option. 

That's why companies like WhatsApp chose FreeBSD, and other companies chose Linux. There are reasons and a lot of times, it's because they didn't even know FreeBSD was an option. One more thing too. We've been also looking at more grants to help with our funding. The Alpha Omega project awarded us a grant early recently, and it's to go towards us auditing a couple of our critical systems within FreeBSD. That's going to be a great investment as far as not only having the chance to audit some of the code but maybe improving our coding practices too. 

Deb, it's fascinating talking to you. It's great to hear about these titan platforms like Netflix and WhatsApp that are powering our lives. It's great to get that story out there. I'm happy that you took the time to do that. 

Thank you again for having me. Sometimes it's fun to think through. Why do we think previous youth is great and why are we so passionate about it? It was fun doing that.

Thanks again and we wish you all the best in the future. 

Thank you.

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Important Links:

• FreeBSD Foundation

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