# Pierre Pronchery runs BSD I'm a freelance IT-Security Consultant. This position I am in just sort of happened, a lot like my relation to the BSD community. I will try to remain brief while not skipping the important parts. I had access to the first computer at home when I was around seven: a 286 with 640K of RAM, running MS-DOS and Windows. By then it was mostly about video games for me, but I was also into figuring out how the system worked, from hexadecimal editors to productivity suites. I did not have regular Internet access until around 1998 though, when I was also introduced to Linux by a friend in high school. I got hooked by Open Source, gave [FreeBSD] and [OpenBSD] a try but held onto Debian. Never fully satisfied by major distributions, I first tried to fork Debian in 2001, with a graphical install CD, before basing this new distribution on [Linux From Scratch](http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/). I gradually gave up gaming in favour of programming at the same time. I figured that I would learn more by reimplementing the wheel than by packaging software, and started an Operating System project called [DeforaOS](https://www.defora.org). A lot of this work got me interested in security and into this community, eventually landing a job there. This is also when I was introduced to [NetBSD](https://www.netbsd.org) during a Systems Administration class in 2004. We were in groups of four, with three computers per group. The assignment was to network a Windows client with a server and another client, enterprise-grade with shared authentication and roaming profiles. Our group was strong and the teacher wanted to make our life harder by forcing us to use NetBSD as the second client. I got instantly hooked by NetBSD instead. I re-oriented my Operating System project around NetBSD's kernel, and migrated all my systems to this platform. This included unusual hardware like an Ultra 60 that I used as my main desktop until 2009, or tablets like the Zaurus or Nokia N900 for instance. I keep working on my dream smartphone since then, which would of course run NetBSD. Finally, I became a member of the NetBSD Foundation in 2012. I am even serving on the Board of Directors since 2017. So what was meant to be a handicap on a school assignment got me pretty far into the project! You can find me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/khorben), [Mastodon](https://mastodon.sdf.org/@khorben), and [GitHub](https://twitter.com/khorben). _[12 Jan 2019](/raw/people/khorben.md)_ [FreeBSD]: https://www.freebsd.org/ [OpenBSD]: https://www.openbsd.org/