[5] Bushnell was previously a Debian developer,[6] and was employed by Google LLC from July 2010 until the January 2024 layoffs.

[8] Later on, he eventually graduated 1999 summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts Boston with Bachelor's degrees in philosophy and classics.

[9][10] In 2007 he completed his PhD at the University of California, Irvine under supervisor Professor Bonnie Kent [fr], with his dissertation titled Peter Abelard's Conception of the Good.

The project was experiencing delays however for various reasons, one of them being that Bushnell "several times redesigned and rewrote large parts of the code based on what he had learned, rather than trying to make the Hurd run as soon as possible", according to Richard Stallman.

[citation needed] Bushnell previously worked on Goobuntu, a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu created by Google.