FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for modern server, desktop, and embedded computer platforms. FreeBSD provides advanced networking, impressive security features, and world class performance, and is used by some of the world's busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices. From providing the foundation to the PlayStation 4 operating system, to Juniper's routers making up the backbone of the Internet, to being at the core of Apple's OSX and powering the servers Netflix use to stream terabits of video every second, chances are you are using FreeBSD right now without even realising it.
The FreeBSD Project began 25 years ago in 1993, but is based on the work of Berkeley CSRG with a history going back to 1978. Over those years the code base has gone through continuous development, improvement, and optimization. The FreeBSD Project is a large, mature, and yet relatively tightly knit organization, developed and maintained by a large team of individuals.
There are currently over 300 developers with write access to the main revision control system, and hundreds more with access to our Subversion servers for experimental and third party development. This is also where our Summer of Code students have worked in previous years. We have an active mentoring program to bring all new developers into our community, not just those that we introduce to FreeBSD through the GSoC. There are hundreds of mailing lists, forums, blogs, IRC channels, and user groups all detailed on our main website. FreeBSD offers a complete operating system in which students can work, not just a kernel or specific userland stack. This allows for interesting work that spans the userland/kernel boundary.
In addition to producing an operating system, FreeBSD has incubated the development of key pieces of infrastructure which are used by other open source projects including bsnmp, jemalloc, libarchive, and OpenPAM.
- Twitter: Please look at our instructions for applying with FreeBSD which includes lots of details on producing a good proposal that stands a better chance of being accepted. We recommend that you submit your proposals as early as possible, as that gives us the opportunity to comment on your proposals and allow you to refine them. We also recommend that you discuss proposals with possible mentors beforehand too in order to make sure your proposal is achievable and worthwhile.