Apple software engineering director departs after 12 years to join iXsystems

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
A leader in the development of BSD and Unix technologies for both Apple's iOS and OS X is now leaving the company, it was announced on Tuesday, in order to take the engineering reins at iXsystems.

aye


iXsystems revealed on Tuesday the hiring on of Jordan Hubbard, who lists himself as Director of Software Engineering at Apple on his LinkedIn profile. Hubbard, according to iXsystems' announcement, will lead engineering and development at iXsystems, taking up control of open source storage platform FreeNAS and looking to expand the user base for the TrueNAS Unified Storage Appliance. Hubbard will also work on other future projects for emerging enterprise and consumer markets.

A software engineer for more than 25 years, Hubbard was a co-founder of the FreeBSD project before signing on with Apple in June of 2001. Since then, he has served as a director of software engineering, developing the BSD and Unix technologies underlying Mac OS X and iOS.

Hubbard describes himself as a "long time advocate of and contributor to open source as a method for engineering collaboration and building new communities." He counts user interface design and the making of developer toolkits among his specialties.

"I?m very excited to have this opportunity to help guide iXsystems through its next phase of professional and technological development,? Hubbard said in a statement. ?This is not just a great opportunity for me to be part of a company known for its strong support of FreeBSD and other open source software, but I?m also looking forward to helping it achieve new levels of success with the TrueNAS storage appliance and having the opportunity to create future innovative products."

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 19
    macinthe408macinthe408 Posts: 1,050member
    A worker left Apple. It's over. Samsung wins.

    Samsung hasn't lost an employee in 50 years, and they've hired 10,000,000 in the last 5 months alone.

    As an analyst, I will now write an article prognosticating the death of Apple based on a 0.4% attrition rate.
  • Reply 2 of 19
    512ke512ke Posts: 782member


    "Samsung hasn't lost an employee in 50 years, and they've hired 10,000,000 in the last 5 months alone."


     


    Wow, that is an amazing statistic.  I'm blogging it all over the internet.  Signed, An Analyst


  • Reply 3 of 19
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by macinthe408 View Post



    A worker left Apple. It's over. Samsung wins.



    Samsung hasn't lost an employee in 50 years, and they've hired 10,000,000 in the last 5 months alone.



    As an analyst, I will now write an article prognosticating the death of Apple based on a 0.4% attrition rate.




    Make sure you footnote that Samsung doesn't specify actual employees, just estimated number of employees.

  • Reply 4 of 19
    Sad news. Hope he will be replaced with someone of his own calibre.
  • Reply 5 of 19
    jragostajragosta Posts: 10,473member
    sflocal wrote: »

    Make sure you footnote that Samsung doesn't specify actual employees, just estimated number of employees.

    And Google specifies employee activations.
  • Reply 6 of 19
    drblankdrblank Posts: 3,385member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by macinthe408 View Post



    A worker left Apple. It's over. Samsung wins.



    Samsung hasn't lost an employee in 50 years, and they've hired 10,000,000 in the last 5 months alone.



    As an analyst, I will now write an article prognosticating the death of Apple based on a 0.4% attrition rate.


    Samsung lost their chief ARM processor designer to Apple about 5 months ago or so.  It was right around the same time one of Apple's ARM designers left to go to AMD.

  • Reply 7 of 19
    captain jcaptain j Posts: 313member
    Amazing (or sadly not) how for many this instantly degenerates into a Samsung rant. Can't just discuss the issue and the results/fallout/repercussions for Apple. :rolleyes:
  • Reply 8 of 19
    richard getzrichard getz Posts: 1,142member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Captain J View Post



    Amazing (or sadly not) how for many this instantly degenerates into a Samsung rant. Can't just discuss the issue and the results/fallout/repercussions for Apple. image


     


    I think this was an analyst rant more than a Samsung rant. 

  • Reply 9 of 19
    lkrupplkrupp Posts: 10,557member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Captain J View Post



    Amazing (or sadly not) how for many this instantly degenerates into a Samsung rant. Can't just discuss the issue and the results/fallout/repercussions for Apple. image


     


    Not so much a Samsung rant as an analyst rant. There's already a story out there by some analyst saying Apple employee defections are accelerating. Same thing happens every time an Apple executive sells some stock. We get the "rats deserting the ship" spin from analysts.

  • Reply 10 of 19
    ksecksec Posts: 1,569member
    I absolutely love those inflated titles that US gives to its employees.

    So is SVP higher, or Director? Where do Director Sits? Right Below SVP?
  • Reply 11 of 19
    drblankdrblank Posts: 3,385member

    Quote:

    Originally Posted by ksec View Post



    I absolutely love those inflated titles that US gives to its employees.



    So is SVP higher, or Director? Where do Director Sits? Right Below SVP?


    SVP is above a VP, and VP are above a Director.  It's hard keeping top talent and giving them pay raises and promotions since the higher up you go, the lest positions are available.


     


    I think you are confusing a Director with a member of the Board of Directors.  In the case of a member of the Board, they kind of are in charge of dictating what the CEO does and choosing the CEO.  But members of the Board of Directors don't typically make much money, they typically just get a decent amount of money, but nothing too outrageous and then they get stock options and maybe some stock, but generally it's very much a part time job.

  • Reply 12 of 19


    Must be a slow news day for AppleInsider! I am sure there are plenty of Director of Software Engineering at Apple.

  • Reply 13 of 19


    Hey AppleInsider - I just heard that an undocumented Janitor at Apple was just deported! Go print this today!

  • Reply 14 of 19
    adamcadamc Posts: 583member
    radster360 wrote: »
    Must be a slow news day for AppleInsider! I am sure there are plenty of Director of Software Engineering at Apple.

    Ki
  • Reply 15 of 19
    rcfarcfa Posts: 1,124member
    Great, FreeNAS uses ZFS that Apple once said to be going to support and which would have been the perfect basis for Time Machine.

    So maybe we'll hopefully see a better FreeNAS Mac integration, even better would be FreeNAS moving to Darwin, and Darwin/OS X gaining proper ZFS support through the back door...
  • Reply 16 of 19
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    drblank wrote: »
    But members of the Board of Directors don't typically make much money, they typically just get a decent amount of money, but nothing too outrageous and then they get stock options and maybe some stock, but generally it's very much a part time job.

    Seriously? What is outrageous money to you? Those people make outrageous amounts of money as far as I'm concerned. They're also already very wealthy to begin with, and sitting in positions of power allows them to compound that wealth while doing pretty much nothing but politicking and generally telling a company what they think it should do in order to improve share value, regardless of their actual comprehension of the company's products, customers, or market. It's a rich person's playground.

    Nice "part time job."

    Who was it that said Apple was run by older white males? Boards of directors are the ultimate example of that statistic, except the descriptor "outrageoudly wealthy" was left out that time.

    And if your bothered by my apparent "us vs them" "anti-wealthy people rant", you need to wake up and see that the conflict is generated by those who are hoarding all the wealth and have the power, not the powerless poor. It's not a fad. It's a fact of American civilization.
  • Reply 17 of 19
    dysamoriadysamoria Posts: 3,430member
    rcfa wrote: »
    Great, FreeNAS uses ZFS that Apple once said to be going to support and which would have been the perfect basis for Time Machine.

    So maybe we'll hopefully see a better FreeNAS Mac integration, even better would be FreeNAS moving to Darwin, and Darwin/OS X gaining proper ZFS support through the back door...

    Did anyone ever explain why the Apple ZFS plan was abandoned?
  • Reply 18 of 19
    bwikbwik Posts: 565member
    Should they be asking poor people how to direct the company's strategy?
  • Reply 19 of 19
    rcfarcfa Posts: 1,124member
    dysamoria wrote: »
    rcfa wrote: »
    Great, FreeNAS uses ZFS that Apple once said to be going to support and which would have been the perfect basis for Time Machine.

    So maybe we'll hopefully see a better FreeNAS Mac integration, even better would be FreeNAS moving to Darwin, and Darwin/OS X gaining proper ZFS support through the back door...

    Did anyone ever explain why the Apple ZFS plan was abandoned?

    There are a few potential reasons, although no official statements. The dropping was somewhat correlated in time with some company filing a lawsuit for patent infringement or something like that against SUN/Oracle, so there were speculations that Apple might have feared opening itself up to legal issues.

    On a technical side, ZFS is a bit resource hungry, particularly if some advanced features like e.g. data deduplication at the file system level, are enabled, so Apple would have had to exert some effort to put ZFS on a resource diet, just like was done with the ZEVO implementation of ZFS for the Mac (which by the way was led by former Apple file system software engineers). So for ZFS to replace HFS+ on all Macs, it would have raised the demands on the hardware. On the other hand, phasing in of ZFS over time as hardware gets more powerful and having it initially as an optional file system type for non-boot drives, OS X Server installations' time-machine server drives, etc. would have been possible.

    ZFS on the Mac would not be a simple compile and switch to it effort, but it would have put the OS X file system on an advanced, future proof footing.

    As for the legal issues: the suit was settled on confidential terms between Oracle and NetApp, and free, open source implementations of ZFS remain widely available, including from Oracle itself.

    So while there are technical reasons to use ZFS in the short term on boot drives particularly on low-end hardware, there's very little reason to have ZFS support for non-boot file systems on higher end systems like servers and professional workstations, where e.g. the data integrity of the /Users/ file system tree is crucial, or where a more efficient implementation of TimeMachine backups would benefit from having ZFS.

    So the short answer: No, Apple never gave any public reason, any mention of ZFS just disappeared in a cloak and dagger action from Apple's web site, and that was about it.
Sign In or Register to comment.