Free BSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world.

It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, and it has powered everything

from high-performance networking infrastructure to game consoles and content delivery networks.

Over three decades, it has evolved through major architectural shifts,

from symmetric multiprocessing and kernel scalability to modern storage systems and predictable

release engineering. John Baldwin has spent more than 25 years working on free BSD as a developer,

contributor, and consultant. In this episode, John joins Gregor Van to discuss

the origins of FreeBSD, how its governance model differs from other open source projects,

its role inside systems like Netflix's CDN and the PlayStation 4, the challenges of maintaining a 30-year-old

codebase, and much more.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity,

cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be

found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn.

Hello and welcome to Software Engineering Daily.

My guest today is John Baldwin.

Thanks so much for being here with us today, John.

Thanks for having me.

So yeah, today we're going to be talking about all things free BSD.

Some of our listener base will already know exactly what that is.

Others will perhaps have some inkling

or have read that somewhere to do with something they use in their daily life which we'll get

on to but i think the first part to go through which is what we like to do on software engineering

...