Apple has hired FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard to join the Core OS Engineering Department, the company confirmed today for MacCentral. Jordan will assume the role of manager, BSD technology at Apple, overseeing the BSD Technology Base for Darwin, the UNIX-based core of Mac OS X.
“A lot of great people are coming to Apple to be part of the team that’s doing great work with Mac OS X, Darwin and the Open Source community,” Avie Tevanian, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told MacCentral. “One of the important Unix foundations of Mac OS X is BSD and hiring a key contributor to the BSD movement is a great fit that will help Apple continue to be active with the BSD community.”
Before joining Apple, Hubbard was a Principal Technologist for Wind River Systems. Prior to that, Hubbard held various engineering and management positions at companies in the US and Europe, such as U.C. Berkeley and Digital Equipment Corp.
He began his career in software in the 1970’s, working on minicomputers, and he is a frequent contributor to the Open Source community. Hubbard has been writing free software since 1982, beginning with Volume 1 of the comp.sources.unix archive and continuing with various works on MIT’s X Contributed Software collection. He is also a co-founder of the FreeBSD project, which began in 1992.
“Those who’ve been following my writings about and general enthusiasm for Apple’s OS X lately also won’t be surprised by the news that I’m going to work for Apple Computer,” Jordan said in an online post. Ever since Apple released the initial public Beta, I’ve been following OS X’s progress with great interest and an increasing desire to get involved with it somehow.”