From LQWiki
BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution, and describes a family of free operating systems, much as Linux today can describe any one of its distributions. BSD started out as a family of Unix versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at Berkeley starting around 1977, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networking enhancements, and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the Unix world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986; descendants including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, BSD/OS and Macintosh's OS X are still widely popular. Note that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version numbers alone, without the BSD prefix.
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History
In the early days of Unix, all flavors of unix derrived from AT&T's version of Unix, the most common being System V. The Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) at Berkeley modified AT&T's Unix and then made their modified version available to other AT&T licensees. Berkeley's BSD unix versions were the basis for many commercial unix offerings including SunOS.
Eventually CSRG noticed that they had changed so much of the original AT&T source that with a bit of work they could remove the rest of the AT&T code and make a distribution that did not also require an AT&T license. After making their release, AT&T sued them. This suit distracted the Berkeley unix effort for several years just as Linux was first becoming popular.
Eventually the suit was settled but the damage had been done - many saw this lawsuit as only aiding the momentum to Linux.
Today
Two of the most popular BSD flavors in existence today are direct descendants of the un-encumbered Berkeley releases, namely: FreeBSD and NetBSD. Other versions are for the most part derived from these two systems, with varying levels of modification. OpenBSD was founded by Theo de Raadt in late 1995 from heavily retooled code from the NetBSD project, and is geared towards offering strong security through high quality code and proactive protection (e.g. the numerous techniques which mitigate the effects of stack smashing attacks). DragonFly BSD was founded in the middle of 2003 from the FreeBSD codebase by Matthew Dillon to offer an alternative approach to concurrency and scalability. Much of what is in most Linux distributions is also available on the BSDs and some software has been ported from Linux to run on *BSD. However, due to the differences between the BSD license and the GPL, some software (notably software that is part of the base system, as opposed to third-party software available through Ports or pkgsrc) is duplicated and released under the BSD license.
Desktop BSD
If you're looking for a user-friendly desktop-orientated BSD operating system, you might want to try:
See also
External links
- FreeBSD.org (www.freebsd.org)
- OpenBSD.org (www.openbsd.org)
- NetBSD.org (www.netbsd.org)
- DesktopBSD homepage (desktopbsd.sourceforge.net)
- PC-BSD homepage (www.pcbsd.org)
- BSD section at slashdot.org (bsd.slashdot.org)
This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File.
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