%0 Journal Article %J Open Source Business Resource %D 2010 %T How the FreeBSD Project's Processes Help Companies Build Products %A George Neville-Neil %X The processes that open source projects use to produce new work and maintain the quality of their code base is a subject that comes up infrequently in discussions of open source. One reason for this is that engineers and programmers are usually loathe to deal with issues that are not directly related to the piece of code or technology that they are working on. Successful businesses know that good processes lead to continued success. The attributes that attract a business to an open source project are stability, reliability, and longevity. Stability gives a business the confidence to invest time into developing products on the project's platform, safe in the knowledge that the next incremental step in development won't be torpedoed by some unforeseen change. Reliability is often not associated with open source and many projects are perceived as being too cutting edge for a business to build upon. Longevity is of value as many businesses are inherently conservative in their approaches, attempting to reduce the risks of adopting any technique or technology. One way to reduce risk is to work with an open source project that has a proven track record of delivering quality products, on schedule. This article attempts to dispel the myth of the perceived tension between a formally run business and the apparently less formally run open source projects with which a business interacts. We describe how one particular open source project has developed processes which provide its users, customers, and partners with a product that is stable, reliable, and long lived. %B Open Source Business Resource %I Talent First Network %C Ottawa %8 01/2010 %G eng %U http://timreview.ca/article/315 %N January 2010 %9 Articles %1 FreeBSD Project George Neville-Neil works on networking and operating system code for fun and profit. He also teaches various courses on subjects related to computer programming. His professional areas of interest include code spelunking, operating systems, networking and security. He is the co-author with Marshall Kirk McKusick of The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System and is the columnist behind ACM Queue's "Kode Vicious." Mr. Neville-Neil earned his bachelor's degree in computer science at Northeastern University and is a member of the ACM, the Usenix Association and the IEEE. He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who currently resides in New York City.