“Author of the significantly praised Mason Firewall Building
Package, William Stearns is currently senior research engineer for
the Institute for Security Technology Studies (ISTS) at Dartmouth
College in Hanover, N.H. Though he dedicates many of his waking
hours to the benefit of Linux, he is determinedly not a
preacher.”
“Dartmouth may handle the logistics of Stearns’s job, but
basically he works for the government. Explicitly assigned the task
of anticipating the moves of licentious hackers he is implicitly
charged, both personally and professionally, to participate in the
Linux community. Conscientious and sincere, one day Stearns went
away from a talk given by Linus Torvalds struggling to think of a
way he could contribute.”
“People in the audience asked about what they should
contribute, and Torvalds suggested they choose something that
interested them. That way he wouldn’t have to pick up the slack
when they walked away bored. That was the seed for Stearn’s
firewall building package which he named Mason after his
nephew.”