The FreeBSD Foundation has announced its twentieth anniversary. Founded as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization by early FreeBSD developer Justin Gibbs in March 2000, the FreeBSD Foundation has helped FreeBSD to become one of the most widely distributed open source operating systems, and is used by Netflix, Apple, Sony, Intel, Microsoft, and tens of millions of deployed systems.

From 2000 to 2005, FreeBSD Foundation activities were managed by its board of directors comprised of volunteers, including Gibbs. During this time, FreeBSD partnered with Sun Microsystems to license FreeBSD Java binaries, funded early work on network scalability for SMP systems, and fostered BSD conferences. In 2004, the FreeBSD Foundation acquired the FreeBSD trademark from Wind River.

In 2005, the FreeBSD Foundation hired its first employee, Deb Goodkin, who came to the foundation with a technical background of 20 years in storage development as firmware engineer, logic designer, applications engineer, technical marketing and technical sales.

Now its Executive Director, Goodkin is said to have been instrumental in creating policies and a corporate structure to ensure that as volunteers, board members and staff change, the FreeBSD Foundation continues to thrive and support the FreeBSD Project.

“We’re thrilled that the FreeBSD Foundation has entered its third decade of supporting FreeBSD and its community of developers,” said FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Deb Goodkin. “As more companies and individuals discover the benefits of FreeBSD, its permissive business-friendly licensing and its democratic development philosophy, we anticipate its reach to expand to more industries and countries,” she added.

Since 2005, the FreeBSD Foundation has seen the open source OS being implemented around the globe by top corporations.

The FreeBSD Foundation has added Senior Software Developer Konstantin Belousov, Director of Project Development Ed Maste,, Software Engineer Li-Wen Hsu, Marketing Director Anne Dickison and Administrator Manager Loren Gurkowski to the full-time team.

In 2014, the Foundation launched the FreeBSD Journal, and began working with ARM and Cavium to enable a FreeBSD OS port to ARMv8, specifically AArch64, to help bootstrap this effort.