Robert Nicholas Maxwell Watson (born 3 May 1977) is a FreeBSD developer, and founder of the TrustedBSD Project.

As well as Cambridge, he has worked at the National Institutes of Health, Carnegie Mellon University, Trusted Information Systems, Network Associates, McAfee, and SPARTA.

His main open source software contributions include his work in developing the multi-threaded and multi-processor FreeBSD network stack, the TrustedBSD project, and OpenBSM.

His writing has been featured in forums such as ACM's Queue Magazine,[12] the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, BSDCon, and a Slashdot interview.

[14] Watson is coauthor of the standard textbook The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System (2nd ed., 2015) by Marshall Kirk McKusick.