Michael J. Karels[1] (August 2, 1956 – June 2, 2024) was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX.
[2] In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Karels, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.
However, BSD/OS development had ceased, so Karels was involved in transitioning SecureOS to use FreeBSD as its base, and porting its unique features over to the new kernel.
Secure Computing and the Sidewinder firewall team went through a series of acquisitions and spinoffs, including McAfee, Intel, and Forcepoint, so while Karels appeared to have several different jobs from that point onward, he had remained in roughly the same role from 2003 until his retirement in 2021.
[8] The Sidewinder product was eventually discontinued, though Karels fed some SecureOS changes back into the main FreeBSD codebase.