2025 BSDCan Report: The Community is Thriving with New Initiatives

By Greg Wallace, Director of Partnerships, NetActuate

This was my third BSDCan, the annual North American BSD conference held in Ottawa, and to me, this seemed to be the highest energy BSDCAN yet. Attendees ranged from seasoned committers to new contributors, from long-time users to newer ones, from well-known corporate attendees to first timers. The talks reached beyond the habitual kernel and server topics to include desktop and sound mixing.

FreeBSD’s birthplace at UC Berkeley endows it with an enviable network of computer scientists who, at some point, interacted a little, or a lot, with FreeBSD. The keynote from Dr. Margo Seltzer, Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems at the University of British Columbia, is a case in point. She earned her PhD at UC Berkeley, where she got to know FreeBSD and Kirk McKusick. Dr. Seltzer is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system and was a co-founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB.

Professor Seltzer’s talk challenged prevailing assumptions about the exploding need for memory and then took attendees on a fact-based journey through Moore’s law—10x computing power in 10 years to its plateau and its replacement by the GPU law—1,000x increase in 10 years. Whereas with CPUs we got 2x the power every 18 months at the same price, with GPUs, the power is increasing but so is the price.

Energized by the keynote, I dove headlong into a number of talks and hallway track sessions that ranged from CHERI Capabilities as Pointers to open source CrowdStrike alternatives that support FreeBSD endpoints. 

The event surfaced a few key themes—platform diversity as a security best practice and engine of innovation, the evolution of the FreeBSD Foundation’s development team, and FreeBSD’s pivot to growth.

Platform Diversity

I’m a wee bit of a DeNiro fan and I really enjoyed the recent Netflix Limited Series Zero Day. 

It’s not far-fetched to say that the series provides a glimpse of what could happen if a big chunk of the Domain Name System (DNS) stopped working. When your business operates the registry for .com and .net TLDs and two of the 13 global root nameservers, ensuring uptime requires diversity at every layer. Rick Miller from Verisign described the importance of Operating System diversity through a series of CVEs that impacted Linux or FreeBSD, but not both. XZ recently impacted Linux but FreeBSD’s policy of stripping out all third-party build tools from base immunized it from the attack. On the flip side, the Selective Ack CVE (2019-5599) targeted FreeBSD and not Linux. Rick also reviewed OS diversity as part of zero day and defense-in-depth strategies and organizational best practices around resilience and fault tolerance.

Speaking of DNS, Daniel Mahoney with a little outfit called ISC (the organization that gives away BIND and DHCP and that also runs a DNS root server) spoke later in the conference. Dan’s talk covered how ISC managed far-away installs and upgrades without remote hands during a global pandemic, and how they believe that in a Linux-centric world, BSD offers an advantage, not only in diversity, but also from the community.

The Common Good of the Common Good

Open Source is often described as a common good. If FreeBSD is a common good, then the FreeBSD Foundation looks after the common good for the common good. This isn’t anything new, but over time the type of development work the Foundation undertakes has changed and the absolute and relative volume has increased. The type of work has shifted towards longer, more complex, and outcome-based sponsored work. Examples are the Alpha-Omega funded security audit, the Sovereign Tech Agency infrastructure work (including reducing tech debt and adding Zero Trust Builds), and the Quantum Leap Research-backed laptop work.

Each of these efforts has a huge community component, but the funds to undertake the work were secured by the Foundation and much of the development work is carried out by Foundation contractors and staff.

These efforts seem to have injected some new life and excitement into the project and promise FreeBSD users—existing, new, server and desktop-–as well as developers, a better overall experience.

FreeBSD Growth

Talks ranging from improving the sound stack on FreeBSD, to replacing Linux servers with FreeBSD for a problem-free remote IT service, to pioneering ways to protect Chromium users from memory-safety vulnerabilities, demonstrated renewed momentum around the project.

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The Hallway Track

At least half the fun of every conference is reconnecting with old friends and meeting new people who are interested in the same topics. 

Wrap Up

There is tremendous energy and enthusiasm in FreeBSD these days. The project has benefitted from strategic investment and the Foundation has pivoted to a more active development role, while preserving the highly collaborative relationship with the community. A pioneer in open governance, FreeBSD is a powerful operating system used widely including in industry, but the development is community-led. This is 100% a feature, contributing to the project’s lauded stability.

I look forward to the next big BSD conference in September–EuroBSDCon. Maybe I’ll see you there!

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