CANDIDATE FOR DIRECTOR
Marshall Kirk McKusick
The goal of the USENIX Association as stated in its charter
is to "bring together the community of engineers, system
administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the
cutting edge of the computing world."
I believe that USENIX conferences and workshops with their
refereed papers and associated Proceedings are the most
valuable service that USENIX provides. I am dedicated to
ensuring that they continue to be the centerpiece of the
organization.
I feel that it is vitally important that USENIX continue
to bring the next generation of students into the organization
through the continuation of its student conference travel
stipend programs.
I have spent much of my career helping to create, nurture,
and evolve the freely redistributable software movement.
Much of the work done at the Computer Systems Research
Group for the BSD releases was vetted to ensure that it
could be freely redistributed. Legal battles were fought to
keep the code free after it had been released under a
freely-redistributable-source license. And recently,
similar work has been needed to help defend the free
redistribution of Linux.
I have helped raise the profile of freely redistributable
software at USENIX through the FREENIX track, which has
been part of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference for
the past seven years. FREENIX has striven to bring together
the work of the Linux community and the *BSD community, as
well as the many other groups working on freely redistributable
software. I have participated as a FREENIX program committee
chair, panelist, and presenter.
I have also championed the USENIX sponsorship of BSDCon
and the inclusion of both a Linux and a BSD track at the
upcoming Annual Technical Conference in Boston at the
end of June.
I have spent most of my efforts in my two years as president
helping to streamline the organization and get its conferences
back in the black. I am pleased to say that the organization
is well on its way back to health. While it was tempting to
stay on for another two-year term as president, I strongly
feel that the organization is best served by a fresh and
enthusiastic president every two years. However, I ask for
your vote as an at-large board member so that I can help
finish the changes that I have helped put in place over the
past two years.
Biography: Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick writes books and articles,
consults, and teaches classes on UNIX- and BSD-related
subjects. While at the University of California at Berkeley,
he implemented the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and was the
Research Computer Scientist at the Berkeley Computer Systems
Research Group (CSRG) overseeing the development and release
of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD. His particular areas of interest are
the virtual-memory system and the filesystem. He earned his
undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell
University and did his graduate work at the University of
California at Berkeley, where he received Master's degrees
in Computer Science and Business Administration and a
doctoral degree in Computer Science. He was a member of
the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association from 1986
to 1992 and 2000 to the present; he served as president of
the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and 2002 to 2004.
He is also a member of ACM and IEEE.
In his spare time, he enjoys swimming, scuba diving, and
wine collecting. The wine is stored in a specially
constructed wine cellar (accessible from the Web at
https://www.mckusick.com/~mckusick/) in the basement of the
house that he shares with Eric Allman, his domestic partner
of 25-and-some-odd years.
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CANDIDATE FOR DIRECTOR