I would like to thank Jordan Hubbard for giving me the opportunity to take on some of the release engineering responsibilities for FreeBSD 4.4 and also for all of his work throughout the years making FreeBSD what it is today. Of course the release would not have been possible without all of the release-related work done by Satoshi Asami <[email protected]>, Steve Price <[email protected]>, Bruce A. Mah <[email protected]>, Nik Clayton <[email protected]>, David O'Brien <[email protected]>, Kris Kennaway <[email protected]>, John Baldwin <[email protected]> and the rest of the FreeBSD development community. I would also like to thank Rodney Grimes <[email protected]>, Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]>, and others who worked on the release engineering tools in the very early days of FreeBSD. This article was influenced by release engineering documents from the CSRG ^[7] , the NetBSD Project , ^[8] , and John Baldwin's proposed release engineering process notes. ^[9]