Industry | Computer software |
---|---|
Genre | Operating system software |
Founded | 1991 |
Founder | Rick Adams, Keith Bostic, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels, Bill Jolitz |
Defunct | 2001/2002 |
Fate | Acquired |
Successor | Wind River Systems, iXsystems |
Headquarters | |
Products | BSD/OS |
Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI or, later, BSDi), was a software company founded in 1991 by members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), known for developing and selling BSD/OS (originally known as BSD/386), a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PCs.
BSDI was founded by Rick Adams and members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, including Keith Bostic, Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels, Bill Jolitz and Donn Seeley. [1] Jolitz, Seeley and Trent Hein were working for Rick Adams' UUNET at the time and became BSDI's first employees when the company began operations in 1991. [1] In December 1991, USENIX Secretary and Former Head of Software at Convex Computer, Rob Kolstad from University of Illinois, was hired and would take over company operations just two years later. [2]
Jolitz, who worked on 386BSD, claimed that he was never officially hired or signed an employment contract with BSDI. [3]
BSD/386 was released in January 1992. The name was chosen for its similarity to BSD ("Berkeley Software Distribution"), the source of its primary product, specifically 4.3BSD Networking Release 2 (Net/2). The full system, including source code retailed at $995, which was more affordable than the equivalent source code license for the rival UNIX System V from AT&T (which cost more than $20,000 in the late 1980s.) [4]
In late 1991, AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) brought a lawsuit against BSDI, alleging that BSD/386 contained their proprietary trade secrets and source code. When USL were acquired by Novell, a settlement was reached in January 1994. BSDI agreed to base future releases of the product, now called BSD/OS, on the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release which was declared free of any USL intellectual property. [4] Rob Kolstad (of the University of Illinois and Convex Computer Corporation) was president of BSDI during this period and headed the company until the close of the decade.
Under Rob Kolstad's direction, the company decided to pursue internet infrastructure as their primary customer audience. In the mid 1990s the top-10 websites in the world were almost all using BSD/386 as their BSD source codebase. [5]
In the 1995 a survey of datacenter software platforms disclosed that BSDI was the #1 software used in data centers, by Internet servers. BSDI subsequently released an "Internet Server" version of their software, in contrast to the desktop version, which focused on providing the maximum number of open-source server products in the base distribution.[ citation needed ]
In 1999, the BSDI employees sought an initial public offering and installed a new president to reach this goal as soon as possible given the recent success of the Red Hat IPO in the Linux market. Unfortunately, this strategy was not successful and soon after Rob Kolstad had exited the company, it was facing bankruptcy.
In 2000 the company merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, a distributor of freeware and open source software on CD-ROM and shortly after that acquired Telenet System Solutions, Inc., an Internet infrastructure server supplier. [6]
In 2001, under severe financial pressure from excessive leverage, BSDI (known as BSDi by that time) sold its software business unit (comprising BSD/OS and the former Walnut Creek FreeBSD and Slackware Linux open source offerings) to Wind River Systems and renamed the remainder iXsystems with a renewed focus on server hardware. [7] Wind River dropped sponsorship of Slackware soon afterwards [8] and the FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity FreeBSD Mall, Inc. in 2002. [9] Faced with competition from open-source BSD- and Linux-based operating systems, Wind River discontinued BSD/OS in December 2003. Many of its technologies live on in community-led BSD derivatives like FreeBSD. [10] In 2002, OffMyServer acquired the iXsystems hardware business and reverted to the iXsystems name in 2005. [11]
vi is a screen-oriented text editor originally created for the Unix operating system. The portable subset of the behavior of vi and programs based on it, and the ex editor language supported within these programs, is described by the Single Unix Specification and POSIX.
386BSD is a Unix-like operating system that was developed by couple Lynne and William "Bill" Jolitz. Released as free and open source in 1992, it was the first fully operational Unix built to run on IBM PC-compatible systems based on the Intel 80386 ("i386") microprocessor, and the first Unix-like system on affordable home-class hardware to be freely distributed. Its innovations included role-based security, ring buffers, self-ordered configuration and modular kernel design.
USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in New Jersey federal court in 1992 by Unix System Laboratories against Berkeley Software Design, Inc and the Regents of the University of California over intellectual property related to the Unix operating system; a culmination of the Unix wars. The case was settled out of court in 1994 after the judge expressed doubt in the validity of USL's intellectual property, with Novell and the University agreeing not to litigate further over the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
Unix System V is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983. Four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1, 2, 3, and 4. System V Release 4 (SVR4) was commercially the most successful version, being the result of an effort, marketed as Unix System Unification, which solicited the collaboration of the major Unix vendors. It was the source of several common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated to SysV.
The Berkeley r-commands are a suite of computer programs designed to enable users of one Unix system to log in or issue commands to another Unix computer via TCP/IP computer network. The r-commands were developed in 1982 by the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, based on an early implementation of TCP/IP.
The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Keith Bostic is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix and open-source software.
Jordan K. Hubbard is an open source software developer, authoring software such as the Ardent Window Manager and various other open source tools and libraries before co-founding the FreeBSD project with Nate Williams and Rodney W. Grimes in 1993, for which he contributed the initial FreeBSD Ports collection, package management system and sysinstall. In July 2001 Hubbard joined Apple Computer in the role of manager of the BSD technology group, during which time he was one of the creators of MacPorts. In 2005, his title was "Director of UNIX Technology" and in October 2007, Hubbard was promoted to "Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies" at Apple where he remained until June 2013.
BSD/OS is a proprietary Unix-like operating system first released in 1993 as BSD/386. It was originally developed and sold by Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi) and designed to be a Unix for 386-based PCs. It was built off the Net/2 distribution of BSD, on which the developers had previously contributed to.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale.
Walnut Creek CDROM Inc. was an early provider of freeware, shareware, and free software on CD-ROMs. The company was founded by Bob Bruce in Walnut Creek, California, in August 1991. It was one of the first commercial distributors of free software on CD-ROMs. The company produced hundreds of titles on CD-ROMs, and ran the busiest FTP site on the Internet, ftp.cdrom.com, for many years.
The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a written debate over the Internet between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding the Linux kernel and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.minix, arguing that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels and therefore Linux was, even in 1992, obsolete. The debate has sometimes been considered a flame war.
Bob Fabry founded the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1979. The BSD software developed at CSRG helped spawn the Open Source movement and facilitated the explosion of the internet. The success of the BSD programming environment led to a number of Unix-like systems which replaced the portions of the BSD code that were subject to AT&T copyright. The Linux system is perhaps the most well-known of these and about half of the utilities that it comes packaged with are drawn from the BSD distribution.
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) which currently runs on IA-32, x86-64, ARM, PowerPC and RISC-V based computers. The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD—the first fully functional and free Unix clone—and has since continuously been the most commonly used BSD-derived operating system.
The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley beginning in 1978. It began as an improved derivative of AT&T's original Unix that was developed at Bell Labs, based on the source code but over time diverging into its own code. BSD would become a pioneer in the advancement of Unix and computing.
iXsystems, Inc. is a privately owned American computer technology company based in San Jose, California that develops, sells and supports computing and storage products and services. Its principal products are customized open source FreeBSD distributions, including the discontinued desktop operating system TrueOS, the FreeBSD based file servers and network attached storage systems TrueNAS Core and TrueNAS Enterprise, and the Linux based TrueNAS SCALE. It also markets hardware platforms for these products, and develops enterprise-scale storage architectures and converged infrastructures. As part of its activities, the company has strong ties to the FreeBSD community, has repeatedly donated hardware and support to fledgling projects within the BSD community, and sponsors and develops development within FreeBSD, as well as being a sponsor and attendee of open-source community events.
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like application is one that behaves like the corresponding Unix command or shell. Although there are general philosophies for Unix design, there is no technical standard defining the term, and opinions can differ about the degree to which a particular operating system or application is Unix-like. Some well-known examples of Unix-like operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. These systems are often used on servers as well as on personal computers and other devices. Many popular applications, such as the Apache web server and the Bash shell, are also designed to be used on Unix-like systems.
Unix is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley (BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems (SunOS/Solaris), HP/HPE (HP-UX), and IBM (AIX).
Michael J. Karels was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX.
The history of the Berkeley Software Distribution began in the 1970s when University of California, Berkeley received a copy of Unix. Professors and students at the university began adding software to the operating system and released it as BSD to select universities. Since it contained proprietary Unix code, it originally had to be distributed subject to AT&T licenses. The bundled software from AT&T was then rewritten and released as free software under the BSD license. However, this resulted in a lawsuit with Unix System Laboratories, the AT&T subsidiary responsible for Unix. Eventually, in the 1990s, the final versions of BSD were publicly released without any proprietary licenses, which led to many descendants of the operating system that are still maintained today.