The FreeBSD Project is a large, mature, and yet relatively tightly nit organization. The FreeBSD Project began 15 years ago in 1993, but is based on the work at Berkeley CSRG with open source revision history going back 30 years to 1978. There are currently over 300 developers with write access to the main revision control system, and hundreds more with access to our Perforce servers for experimental and third party development (this is also where our summer of code students have worked in previous years). We have an active mentoring program to bring all new developers into our community, not just those that we introduce to FreeBSD through the GSoC. There are hundreds of mailing lists, blogs, irc channels, and user groups all detailed on our main website. FreeBSD offers a complete operating system in which students can work, not just a kernel or specific userland stack. This allows for interesting work that spans the userland/kernel boundary, and allows students to build up and package complete modified FreeBSD operating system CDs/DVDs to distribute as ISOs for testing, for example. Relevance to Google : Google has many tens of thousands of FreeBSD-based devices helping to run its production networks (Juniper, Force10, NetApp, etc..), MacOS X laptops, and the occasional FreeBSD network monitoring or test server. Research in FreeBSD security, networking, and other areas has also regularly been adopted recently and throughout its 30 year history to other open source systems. The most recent example from this month is perhaps the JEMalloc allocator which was introduced in FreeBSD 2 years ago and has recently been imported into the Firefox browser, also widely used at Google. This is an exciting time for FreeBSD as Cisco, Juniper, NetApp, Force10, and many other embedded networking device companies are moving towards FreeBSD (Cisco) or upgrading to more modern FreeBSD releases (6.0/7.0 for all the rest). We are also seeing these companies hire open source liaisons and making a concerted effort to contribute more code back.