Larry McVoy

Larry McVoy (born 1962 in Concord, Massachusetts, United States) 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–Madison and has been employed by Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics.

[1][2] His work generally included performance enhancements to the various Unix operating systems developed by his employers.

"[7] In this essay, Stallman thanks McVoy for inadvertently strengthening the case for adopting free and open-source software more generally as to avoid similar scenarios to BitKeeper in the future.

While working at Sun in the early 1990s, McVoy and a number of other high-profile Unix community members urged the company to open-source their flagship Unix product, SunOS, in cooperation with Novell, to compete with Microsoft's new Windows NT operating system.