FreeBSD Community member and former Core Representative, Dave Cottlehuber, was elected to the FreeBSD Foundation Board during the Annual Meeting on June 15, 2026. We sat down with Dave to learn more about his history with FreeBSD and what he’s most looking forward to accomplishing during his tenure. 

Tell us a little about yourself, and how you got involved with FreeBSD?

I’m a relative newcomer to FreeBSD. I didn’t use it at university, and I only started my UNIX experience in early 2001, with an OpenBSD 2.8 CD and poster.

I spent most of my teens and early twenties climbing mountains and skiing down them. Computers were of little interest to me at that time, but midway through a Science degree, I found my niche, and eventually started working part time at the University computer centre. 

I remember a colleague eagerly rushing through with a FreeBSD CD, probably 3.something, in 1998 or 1999, but that was as close as I came.

The next decade was a move from New Zealand through France, Slovak Republic, and back to New Zealand, and in parallel, shifting from hands-on tech, into middle management, at various large corporations and telcos.

In 2010 I made an intentional decision to move away from that, and moved to working with open source software projects, and communities, in part to allow us to relocate back to Europe.

Around 2013 I actively switched to FreeBSD, and made it to my first BSDCan conference in 2016. The first people I met there were Peter Hessler from OpenBSD, Mark Linimon and Li-Wen Hsu from FreeBSD. With such friendly introductions, I was hooked!

Under Joseph Mingrone’s mentorship, I gained a ports commit bit in 2017, and became progressively more involved. In 2024, I began helping out with release engineering, under Colin Percival’s watchful eye, and in mid 2024 I also joined the FreeBSD Core team, for my first term.

This brought me into contact with a much broader range of people, within the community, the Foundation, and the wider project, and the complexities of both understanding and running such a distributed group of people.

Why are you passionate about serving on the FreeBSD Foundation Board?

The FreeBSD community was an unexpected, but very welcome, engagement later in my life. 

Much of our daily commercial work is necessarily focused on delivering to shareholders and customers, and it’s both satisfying and important to do things for the long term, to contribute to the common good. I get a great deal of personal satisfaction out of helping and seeing people, and the project itself, thrive.

What excites you about our work?

The Foundation operates on a longer timescale than most of us get to work on day-to-day — funding development that wouldn’t otherwise happen, supporting infrastructure, advocacy, and the conferences that hold the community together. Bringing people and organisations together for that kind of long-term work doesn’t happen overnight, and being part of it is a unique opportunity.

What are you hoping to bring to the organization and the community through your new leadership role?

I don’t see this as a new leadership role so much as a continuation — a branch, if you will, of my existing involvement. Coming to the board directly from Core, I hope to help strengthen the connections between the Foundation, the developers, our users, and the wider community, and to keep fostering a shared sense of identity and purpose across them all.

How do you see your background and experience complementing the current board? 

Helping people understand each other’s strengths and perspectives, and finding ways to be successful together as FreeBSD, is challenging work — and genuinely rewarding.

I’ve worked on a number of transition and transformation programmes over the years, both technical and people-focused, and more recently in open source community building. I’m looking to bring both a community context and an active contributor’s viewpoint to the board, and to continue working across ‘the whole project’ in the widest possible sense.