Bruce D. Evans (1991 - 2019; RIP 2019)

Bruce was a programming giant who made FreeBSD his home.

Back before FreeBSD and Linux there was Minix, a toy "unix" written by Andy Tannenbaum, released in 1987, sold with complete sources on three floppy disks, for $99.

Bruce ported Minix to the i386 around 1989.

Linus Torvalds used Minix/386 to develop his own kernel, and Bruce was the first person he thanked in the release-announcement.

When Bill Jolitz released 386BSD 0.1 in 1992, Bruce was listed as a contributor.

Bruce co-founded the FreeBSD project, and served on core.0, but he was never partisan, and over the years many other projects have benefitted from his patches, advice and wisdom.

Code reviews from Bruce came in three flavours, "mild", "brucified" and "brucifiction", but they were never personal: It was always only about the code, the mistakes, the sloppy thinking, the missing historical context, the ambiguous standards - and the style(9) transgressions.

As Bruce gave more code reviews than anybody else in the history of the FreeBSD project, the commit logs hide the true scale of his impact until you pay attention to "Submitted by", "Reviewed by" and "Pointed out by".

Being hard of hearing, Bruce did not attend conferences.

The notable exception was the 1999 BSDcon in California, where his core team colleagues greeted him with "We're not worthy!" in Wayne's World fashion.

Twenty years later we're still not.

Kurt Lidl (2015 - 2019; RIP 2019)

Kurt first got involved with BSD while it was still a project at the University of California at Berkeley. Shortly after personalized license plates became available in Maryland, he got "BSDWZRD".

He began contributing to FreeBSD shortly after the conception of the project. He became a FreeBSD source committer in October 2015.

Kurt's most well known FreeBSD project was blacklistd(8) which blocks and releases ports on demand to avoid DoS abuse. He has also made many other bug fixes and enhancements to DTrace, boot loaders, and other bits and pieces of the FreeBSD infrastructure.

Earlier work included the game XTank, an author on RFC 2516 "A Method for Transmitting PPP Over Ethernet (PPPoE)", and the USENIX paper "Drinking from the Firehose: Multicast USENET News".

Frank Durda IV (1995 - 2003; RIP 2018)

Frank had been around the project since the very early days, contributing code to the 1.x line before becoming a committer.

Andrey A. Chernov (1993 - 2017; RIP 2017)

Andrey contributions to FreeBSD can not be overstated. Having been involved for a long there is hardly an area which he did not touch.

Jürgen Lock (2006 - 2015; RIP 2015)

Jürgen made a number of contributions to FreeBSD, including work on libvirt, the graphics stack, and QEMU. Jürgen's contributions and helpfulness were appreciated by people around the world. That work continues to improve the lives of thousands every day.

Alexander Botero-Lowry <alexbl@FreeBSD.org> (2006 - 2011; RIP 2012)

Alexander was best known as a major contributor to FreeBSD's Python ports and a founding member of FreeBSD Python mailing list as well as his work on XMMS2.

John Birrell <jb@FreeBSD.org> (1997 - 2009; RIP 2009)

John made major contributions to FreeBSD, the best known of which is the import of the dtrace(1) code. John's unique sense of humor and plain-spokenness either ruffled feathers or made him quick friends. At the end of his life, he had moved to a rural area and was attempting to live with as minimal impact to the planet as possible, while at the same time still working in the high-tech area.

Jean-Marc Zucconi <jmz@FreeBSD.org> (1994 - 2009; RIP 2009)

Jean-Marc was an astrophysicist who made important contributions to the modeling of the atmospheres of both planets and comets at l'Observatoire de Besançon in Besançon, France. While there, he participated in the conception and construction of the Vega tricanal spectrometer that studied Halley's Comet. He had also been a long-time contributor to FreeBSD.

Jun-ichiro Itoh <itojun@FreeBSD.org> (1997 - 2001; RIP 2008)

Known to everyone as itojun, Jun-ichiro Hagino was a core researcher at the KAME Project, which aimed to provide IPv6 and IPsec technology in freely redistributable form. Much of this code was incorporated into FreeBSD. Without his efforts, the state of IPv6 on the Internet would be much different.

Cameron Grant <cg@FreeBSD.org> (1999 - 2005; RIP 2005)

Cameron was a unique individual who contributed to the project despite serious physical disabilities. He was responsible for a complete rewrite of our sound system during the late 1990s. Many of those who corresponded with him had no idea of his limited mobility, due to his cheerful spirit and willingness to help others.

Alan Eldridge <alane@FreeBSD.org> (2002 - 2003; RIP 2003)

Alan was a major contributor to the KDE on FreeBSD group. In addition, he maintained many other difficult and time-consuming ports such as autoconf, CUPS, and python. Alan's path was not an easy one but his passion for FreeBSD, and dedication to programming excellence, won him many friends.