GTABUG

Greater Toronto Area BSD Users' Group

Announcements

We're returning to in-person meetings! We had 37 virtual meetings while we waited for the risks of COVID-19 to subside to our satisfaction, and we're eager to return our discussions to the real world's low latency.

Since 2019-07-17, we've been experimenting with new meeting locations. The restaurant that hosted almost all our meetings from 1999 to 2019-06-19 has closed, so we've been forced to seek a new venue.

If you haven't done so already, please subscribe to our mailing list. We intend to keep this page up-to-date with our meeting plans, but our plans could change at any time.

About

GTABUG is an assortment of IT hobbyists and professionals in the Greater Toronto Area who enjoy the BSD family of computer operating systems. We've been meeting since 1999, and we're very informal.

Meetings

Invited: Anybody who's interested in BSD and/or the open-source software community. No previous IT knowledge or experience is required, but is certainly welcome.

Where: For our 2023-04-19 meeting, we'll be trying See-Scape at 347 Keele Street, Toronto. Our 2020-01-15 meeting was held there, and all the attendees agreed that it seemed like a good venue for us.

When: Third Wednesday of every month. We meet around 19:00 (7:00 PM), although some hungry people will typically arrive closer to 18:00 (6:00 PM). Want our iCalendar file?

Topics: Anything. We socialize, discuss technical issues, share stories, solicit jobs, use our brainpower in silly ways, and sometimes we even talk about BSD.

Cost: Free (gratis), but please order yourself something from the restaurant's menu.

Telecommunication

We offer two ways to converse with us outside our in-person meetings:

  1. Email via our mailing list. Any important updates that we might have are posted to this list, so if you plan to attend our meetings, please subscribe.
  2. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) via our IRC server. Have your IRC client use IRC over TLS/SSL to connect to irc.gtabug.ca port 6697, and then /join #GTABUG.

Our mailing list is hosted by Rejminet Group Inc. as a service to the BSD community in Toronto. Thanks, Rejminet!

BSD Introduction

BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) was a computer operating system that was forked in 1977 from UNIX, which began development in 1969. BSD evolved into 386BSD, and today, BSD has four main open-source descendants under active development:

The BSD family's source code has undergone decades of public scrutiny, testing, and refinements by governments, businesses, academia, non-profits, enthusiasts, and others. All this work has enabled BSD's source code to become some of the most clean, secure, reliable, efficient, portable, and powerful available. BSD licences are very permissive, which makes it much easier to incorporate BSD source code into other projects.

A few examples of projects that have benefited from using BSD source code in part or in whole:

BSD is used quite extensively by the vast majority of modern computers and IT services, but it's ingrained so deeply that most people use it unknowingly. For example, the device you used to access this website probably uses the BSD TCP/IP stack. If you've ever watched Netflix, then you've used a service that's powered by a BSD operating system.

Some more links to introduce you to BSD and its history:

GTABUG Members

This isn't a complete list: