Keith Bostic (born July 26, 1959) is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix and open-source software.

Biography

In 1986, Bostic joined the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley.[1] He was one of the principal architects of the Berkeley 2BSD, 4.4BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite releases.[2] Among many other tasks, he led the effort at CSRG to create a free software version of BSD Unix, which helped allow the creation of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

Bostic was a founder of Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi),[2] which produced BSD/OS, a proprietary version of BSD.

In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group, honoring 180 individuals, including Bostic, who contributed to the group's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

Bostic and his wife Margo Seltzer founded Sleepycat Software in 1996 to develop and commercialize Berkeley DB, an open-source, key-value database. Sleepycat Software was the first company to develop dual-licensed open-source software. In February 2006, the company was acquired by Oracle Corporation,[3] where Bostic worked until 2008.

Bostic and Michael Cahill founded WiredTiger in 2010 to create a NoSQL database management system. In November 2014, the company was acquired by MongoDB, which employed Bostic.[4]

Bostic is the author of nvi—a re-implementation of the classic text editor vi—and many other standard BSD and Linux utilities. He is a past member of the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, and several POSIX working groups, and a contributor to POSIX standards.[5]

Publications

  • M. McKusick, K. Bostic, M. Karels, J. Quarterman: The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, Addison-Wesley, April 1996, ISBN 0-201-54979-4. French translation published 1997, International Thomson Publishing, Paris, France, ISBN 2-84180-142-X.
  • McIlroy, Peter M.; Bostic, Keith; McIlroy, M. Douglas (Winter 1993). "Engineering Radix Sort" (PDF). Computing Systems. 6 (1). USENIX Association: 5–27.

References

  1. ^ McKusick, Marshall Kirk (1999-01-01). "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix - From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable". In DiBona, Chris; Ockman, Sam; Stone, Mark (eds.). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly & Associates. ISBN 978-1-56592-582-3.
  2. ^ a b Dougherty, Dale (2000-03-24). "Bostic on the BSD Tradition: An interview with BSD veteran Keith Bostic". ONLamp.com: BSD DevCenter. O'Reilly Media, Inc. Archived from the original on 2013-05-28. Retrieved 2008-04-05.
  3. ^ "Oracle Buys Sleepycat, Is JBoss Next?". InformationWeek. 13 February 2006. Retrieved 2021-03-05.
  4. ^ Wolpe, Toby (December 16, 2014). "MongoDB snaps up WiredTiger and its storage expert team". ZDNet. Archived from the original on March 12, 2017. Retrieved April 29, 2017.
  5. ^ "Keith Bostic". informit. Retrieved 19 November 2013.

External links