In 2023 the FreeBSD Project celebrated its thirtieth year of providing a complete system distribution. This talk tries to understand what it is that has made FreeBSD one of the few long-term viable open source projects. Most of the projects with long-term successes are sponsored by companies that base their products around the open-source software that they actively nurture. While FreeBSD has companies actively using and supporting it, they have come and gone over the years; none has been the primary long-term proponent of it. Thus the FreeBSD community has been the biggest factor in sustaining the project. Often the community depends on long-term leadership of key individuals, for example Linus Torvolds with Linux. FreeBSD has managed to successfully bring in several new leaders over its lifetime which has been key to its ability to continue to adapt to the new challenges that it faces. This talk is based on the article of the same title that I wrote in the May/June 2023 FreeBSD Journal that had a 30-year retrospective of FreeBSD.

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