Larry McVoy

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Larry McVoy (b. 1962 in Concord, Massachusetts) is the CEO of BitMover, the company that makes BitKeeper, a version control system that was used from February 2002 to early 2005 to manage the source code of the Linux kernel.

He earned BS and MS degrees in Computer Science in 1985 and 1987, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin and has done stints at Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics and Google. His work generally included performance enhancements to the various Unix operating systems developed by his employers. While Larry worked at Sun, he worked on a peer-to-peer SCM system named TeamWare that would form the basis of his later BitKeeper product.

1 Linux
2 Sourceware Operating System
3 Bibliography
4 External links

[edit] Linux

Larry 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 2006, with Carl Staelin acting as maintainer.

The BitKeeper source control system was also developed and integrated into the Linux development process, but disagreements between Larry and some members of the community prompted the development of Linus' git tool that eventually superseded the use of BitKeeper for the Linux kernel in 2005.

[edit] Sourceware Operating System

While working at Sun in the early nineties, Larry and a number of other high-profile Unix community members urged the company to open-source their flagship Unix product, SunOS [1] to compete with Microsoft's new Windows NT operating system. The proposal would have created a copyleft version of SunOS at a time before Linux had reached its 1.0 version.