The project started when I was working for a renowned center for biomedical research after a discussion with a friend of mine. We wanted to implement a fast bin-packing tool to produce filesystem tree partitions with the same size and number of files. The tool quickly evolved and got support for hooks that can be triggered when a partition is generated.

At that time, we needed to move petabyte-scale filesystems to freshly-acquired storage arrays. With its new hooking system, Fpart seemed to be a good basement to launch small migration jobs in parallel through our SSH cluster. Initial tests (see our article in French) were successful but we were still depending on our on-site scheduler to orchestrate submitted jobs and it was to be retired sooner or later. We needed a new scheduler.

That’s where Fpsync comes into play : the tool wraps Fpart and embeds its own scheduler to trigger small Rsync jobs to parallelize data migration by itself. It can leverage your SSH cluster to get the best from your data servers, acting as a powerful, standalone, data migration tool.

Of course, as an ardent open source supporter, those tools were released with an open source license (BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License). They were quickly adopted by large companies (Intel, AWS, Microsoft, Alibaba, Oracle, …) as well as research centers to migrate petabyte-scale filesystems.

What attracted you to free software?

I first discovered free software by reading magazines that were surfing on Linux hype during mid-90’s (and trying their GNU/Linux distros offered on CDROM). But I really began to understand what free software meant later during my studies. I was immediately seduced by the thought that it exemplified humanity’s best attribute: the willingness to share knowledge in order to move forward together.

As a student, this was very important to me: it enabled me to learn more, as the code is freely available and the open source community very responsive. I quickly felt that I owed the community something in return; I didn’t want to use all that free software (as in free beer) without giving something back. So I started looking at how I could make my own contribution. This is where FreeBSD played a important role, acting as a catalyst…

Why did you come to FreeBSD as a development platform?

There are several reasons for that choice. As a curious student, I tried FreeBSD in the early 2000’s, testing version 4.5. What impressed me at that time was its documentation (“handbook”) and man (“manual”) pages. While GNU/Linux appeared complex to me, FreeBSD suddenly became more clear. With a very nice and welcoming community, it was the perfect platform for a newcomer into the UNIX world. I became hooked on FreeBSD and haven’t returned to any other system since.

I later came to understand another reason why FreeBSD appeared more clear. It is a homogeneous system, not a patchwork of very different projects. This makes a world of difference, as a specific version of FreeBSD represents a specific version of base components (called “world”) and kernel, offering up a complete system. World and kernel are all maintained by the same entity (FreeBSD developers) and, because of this, everything is consistent – from any options to the documentation and man pages. This delivers great value for users and guarantees a level of robustness and stability for the system.

FreeBSD is a good choice for developers because it is POSIX compliant. This is important if you want to produce portable code. Also, it is very easy to access source code for world, kernel and ports (third-party applications ported to FreeBSD). One can easily patch things and test the modifications, which is a bit harder on other systems where you would often have to install a dedicated source package to be able to patch it.

Finally, the system is a pleasure to administrate and update. I think I have not needed to reinstall my machine since the late 2000’s; I’ve only performed updates since. Third-party applications can now be easily installed and upgraded using binary packages, which was not the case when I first started using FreeBSD.

These are all the reasons why I use FreeBSD on my systems – not just for servers and development, but also as a daily desktop OS. Lots of people still think FreeBSD is not ready for everyday use on the desktop, but I am living proof that this is not true!

What other open source projects are you involved with?

I became a FreeBSD developer in 2011 and I now maintain more than 40 ports (A port is a set of patches and build options that makes a software work on FreeBSD. It also acts as the basis for binary packages). Maintaining ports is a fantastic hobby because on the one hand, you have the chance to work on your favorite OS, and on the other hand, you can contribute patches back upstream. This way, you are always connected with the different communities.

Aside from my FreeBSD activities, I have several personal projects. I mentioned Fpart and Fpsync, but I am also the author of ldapscripts, a set of tools used to simplify user and group management within an LDAP directory. They are quite old now, but they still do the job. I also worked on various smaller projects, such as sms1xxx kernel module (a port of Linux’ Siano DVB-T driver to FreeBSD, now deprecated in favor of webcamd), evtViewer (a viewer for Ms event log files) or Grpar (a Build engine group archive extract tool). I also wrote several courses (in French).

I also try to contribute to software I use when I find a bug (either by fixing it or at least by reporting it).

Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

I owe a lot to free software. That’s mostly what allowed me to learn computing, making my career possible. That’s why I contribute back the most I can.

But that takes time (that is, personal time) and money (we need machines to test on, as well as power to run them). I am glad to see more and more companies supporting open source. Recently, HPE provided me with a replacement for my old server, I’ll never thank them enough for that kindness! This HPE ProLiant ML350 allows me to perform faster Fpart and Fpsync tests as well as compile code far more quicker than with my old machine. This is a sign that things are changing. I think everybody now understands why it is so important to support open source development. Providing hardware is a simple yet very efficient way of supporting open source developers, sharing code is another one. Let’s encourage companies to continue that way!

As for individuals, do not hesitate to report bugs or share code. You will participate in making great things and get fantastic feedback from the community!