- Larry McVoy
Larry McVoy (b. 1962 in
Concord, Massachusetts ) is theCEO ofBitMover , the company that makesBitKeeper , aversion control system that was used from February 2002 to early 2005 to manage thesource code of theLinux kernel .He earned BS and MS degrees in
Computer Science in 1985 and 1987, respectively, from theUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison and has been employed bySun Microsystems ,Silicon Graphics andGoogle . His work generally included performance enhancements to the various Unix operating systems developed by his employers. While McVoy worked at Sun, he worked on a peer-to-peer SCM system namedTeamWare that would form the basis of his later BitKeeper product.Linux
McVoy started working with the Linux project around its 0.9.7 version and developed the
LMbench kernel benchmark "to make sure Linux didn't turn into a bloated mess like most commercial Unix offerings". LMbench is still active as of 2007, withCarl Staelin acting as maintainer.The BitKeeper source control system was also developed and integrated into the Linux development process, but disagreements between McVoy and some members of the community prompted the development of Linus' git tool that eventually superseded the use of BitKeeper for the Linux kernel in 2005.
Sourceware Operating System
While working at Sun in the early nineties, McVoy and a number of other high-profile Unix community members urged the company to open-source their flagship
Unix product,SunOS to compete withMicrosoft 's newWindows NT operating system . [ [http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html The Sourceware Operating System Proposal ] ] The proposal would have created acopyleft version ofSunOS at a time before Linux had reached its 1.0 version.Bibliography
*McVoy, L. & Kleiman, S. (1991). [http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/mcvoy91extentlike.html Extent-like Performance from a UNIX File System] . "Proceedings of the 1991 Winter USENIX Conference".
References
External links
* [http://www.linux.com/articles/44147 BitKeeper and Linux: The end of the road?] (April 2005
Newsforge interview about Linux controversy)
* [http://kerneltrap.org/node/222 Interview with Larry McVoy]
* [http://home.swbell.net/depsgp/chapter9b.htm Open Source by Dan Pickett and Joe Gamboa] - Chapter 9
* [http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/mcvoy.html Thank you, Larry McVoy] ,Richard Stallman regarding the end of zero-cost BitKeeper licenses
* [http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html The Sourceware Operating System Proposal]
* [http://lmbench.sourceforge.net/ LMbench] performance-analysis tools
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