CANDIDATE FOR TREASURER

Theodore Ts'o

I am honored and grateful to be nominated for the position of treasurer of USENIX, and I accept that nomination in the hope that I may be of service.

Although the economy has been slowly recovering after the hi-tech implosion, with some signs of life in the computer industry, USENIX continues to face a host of challenges. Companies are still extremely conservative with travel budgets, a trend which continues to threaten attendance levels at USENIX's upcoming conferences. Most of the traditional UNIX companies have declined to continue funding their own proprietary UNIX systems at previous levels, so there have been fewer paper submissions from industry. Furthermore, as academic research becomes more specialized, authors have tended to favor topic-specific workshops over the more general Annual Technical Conference. And on top of that, the rise of newer OSes—which claim UNIX heritage although perhaps not with an AT&T–derived codebase—such as Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, has also been a challenge.

I am proud to say that since I first came to a USENIX conference in 1988, USENIX has never turned away from meeting these challenges and is quick to adapt to the changing conditions of our industry and our community. Starting with the first UseLinux track in 1997, and subsequent FREENIX tracks, we have tried to bring people from the traditional USENIX, BSD, and Linux communities together. And for the past three years, USENIX has provided the logistics for the Linux Kernel Summit. During this past year's Annual Technical Conference in San Antonio, it was my privilege to work with the USENIX Board and other interested parties in a long, careful discernment process about how the format of future Annual Technical Conferences could be changed to accommodate the challenges facing USENIX, while remaining true to its original goals and its high standards.

I am running for the post of treasurer because I am enthusiastic about finding new ways to help USENIX grow and thrive. Having served on the boards of other organizations, including the Free Standards Group and the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, as well as serving on finance committees of other nonprofit organizations, I am well aware of the need for careful budgeting and fiscal discipline, now more than ever.

As far as the future of USENIX is concerned, I think that between the deep tradition of technical excellence and the wide breadth of interests that form the USENIX community, our potential is limitless. However, just as we are experimenting with new formats and more diverse, specialized one-day workshops/special-interest tracks as a part of the Annual Technical Conference, I believe we need to welcome even more diversity into the USENIX community. Some of these newcomers may initially have very specialized interests, such as GNOME or KDE, or Eclipse, Linux, or Darwin. But by welcoming them, they may come to see, as I hope we all will, that wider connections and broader interests will serve to strengthen us all.

Biography: Theodore Ts'o's first USENIX technical conference was the San Diego conference in January 1989. At that time, he was employed as a "Watchmaker," or Student Systems Programmer, working on BSD 4.3 for MIT's Project Athena. He has been a Linux kernel developer since September 1991 (Linux version 0.10). Ted has served on several FREENIX and Atlanta Linux Showcase program committees, and he chaired the 2000 ALS Program Committee. He founded and continues to organize the Linux Kernel Summit, a USENIX workshop with industry sponsorship which brings together the top kernel hackers every year. He also serves as a founding board member of the Free Standards Group. Ted is a Senior Technical Staff Member of IBM's Linux Technology Center.

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