The FreeBSD Operating System 10 Year Anniversary Celebration: Silicon Valley is Alive and Kicking!

Hundreds of FreeBSD programmers, system administrators, and advocates from around the world gathered together in San Francisco to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the incredibly stable and reliable, high performance FreeBSD operating system.

San Jose, CA (PRWEB) December 8, 2003 --Eat. Drink. Be Merry...and Code. This seemed to be the prevailing theme while guests waited in line to party at San Francisco's DNA Lounge to join in the 10 year commemoration of the FreeBSD operating system.

The FreeBSD project had its genesis in the early part of 1993, partially as an outgrowth of the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit" by the patchkit's last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and Jordan Hubbard. The first resulting CD-ROM (and general net-wide) distribution was FreeBSD 1.0, released in December of 1993 by Walnut Creek CD-ROM, which is now FreeBSD Mall.

"FreeBSD has definitely progressed immensely in the past decade," says Murray Stokely, VP of Engineering at FreeBSD Mall and Core Team member of the FreeBSD Project. "It's encouraging to see all these FreeBSD fans supporting the project by being here."

OffMyServer, a Silicon Valley server and appliance manufacturer comprised of former BSDi employees, conceived the idea for the party in June and promoted it for months before the event. Obtaining sponsorship from large FreeBSD corporate users Juniper Networks, Yahoo!, Apple, Pair Networks, FreeBSD Mall, and ServePath allowed for expansion of the original idea for the party and turned it into a truly memorable event.

"Wow, what a great time! Why can't we have a 10 Year FreeBSD Anniversary Party every year!?!" exclaims Austin Stewart, Operations Manager at OffMyServer, and Master of Ceremonies of the event.

Matt Olander, CTO at OffMyServer and Coordinator for the event, presented the FreeBSD Core Team with miniature BSD daemon statuettes (http://www.linuxjewellery.com/beastie/)and a few Apple iPods in appreciation of their hard efforts. Apple iPods and a FreeBSD server were raffled off as door prizes. Many people that attended received a free commemorative t-shirt to prove that they were really there.

"That party rocked!" says John Gemma, a principal of KIS Communications. "We should make this an annual boondoggle!" Gemma and his partner, Chris Kirkwood, flew up from Southern California for the party. They were not disappointed.

Notable party goers included Kirk McKusick, who pioneered work on BSD in the 1980's, Eric Allman, author of the popular Sendmail application, Cliff Skolnik of the Apache webserver project, Elliott Chuang, President of the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG), Annelise Andersen, author of many political books and member of Arnold Schwarzenegger's transition team, Core Team members of the FreeBSD Project, and many others.

More Info
Check out pictures of the party at http://apollo.backplane.com/pics.bsdparty/. Support the project by purchasing the FreeBSD four disc set at http://www.freebsdmall.com. The FreeBSD 10 Year T-Shirt, created by ServePath, was a huge hit. Take a look at the shirt at http://www.servepath.com/servers/freebsd_teeshirt.htm.

Read the OS News article about the party at http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5224.

About OffMyServer, Inc.
Offmyserver provides internet infrastructure grade rackmount servers, security appliances, and managed hosting to a global marketplace. Offmyserver creates leading-edge hardware solutions and offers managed hosting on open-source operating systems including FreeBSD and Linux. Offmyserver has developed optimized web servers, email servers, and file servers to meet customers needs. The OffMyServer management team consists of executives and employees from BSDi and iXsystems.
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