Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. Shareware is often offered as a download from a website. Shareware differs from freeware, which is fully-featured software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available; and free and open-source software, in which the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect and alter.
Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System (SLS), Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distributions, and is the oldest distribution that is still maintained.
386BSD is a discontinued operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) that was developed by couple Lynne and William Jolitz. Released on March 17, 1992, it was the first fully operational Unix operating system to be completely free and open source.
Slax is a LiveCD Linux distribution developed by Tomáš Matějíček and based on upstream customizable Linux distributions. Packages can be added by apt package manager or can be prepared as modules. The tagline for Slax refers to itself as "your pocket operating system".
Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, or LGX, is an early Linux distribution developed by Yggdrasil Computing, Incorporated, a company founded by Adam J. Richter in Berkeley, California.
Patrick Volkerding is the founder and maintainer of the Slackware Linux distribution. Volkerding is Slackware's "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL), and is also known informally as "The Man".
MkLinux is an open-source software computer operating system begun by the Open Software Foundation Research Institute and Apple Computer in February 1996, to port Linux to the PowerPC platform, and Macintosh computers. The name refers to the Linux kernel being adapted to run as a server hosted on the Mach microkernel, version 3.0.
The BSD Daemon, nicknamed Beastie, is the generic mascot of BSD operating systems. The BSD Daemon is named after software daemons, a class of long-running computer programs in Unix-like operating systems—which, through a play on words, takes the cartoon shape of a demon. The BSD Daemon's nickname Beastie is a slurred phonetic pronunciation of BSD. Beastie customarily carries a trident to symbolize a software daemon's forking of processes. The FreeBSD web site has noted Evi Nemeth's 1988 remarks about cultural-historical daemons in the Unix System Administration Handbook: "The ancient Greeks' concept of a 'personal daemon' was similar to the modern concept of a 'guardian angel' ... As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons."
BSD/OS is a discontinued proprietary version of the BSD operating system developed by Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi).
Berkeley Software Design, Inc., was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS, a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for PC compatible computer systems. The name was chosen for its similarity to "Berkeley Software Distribution" the source of its primary product.
VectorLinux, abbreviated VL, is a Linux distribution for the x86 platform based on the Slackware Linux distribution, originally developed by Canadian developers Robert S. Lange and Darell Stavem. Since version 7 the Standard Edition is also available for the x86-64 platform, known as VLocity64 7.
Simtel was an important long-running archive of freeware and shareware for various operating systems.
TrueNAS is the branding for a family of network-attached storage (NAS) products produced by iXsystems. They include both free and open-source and commercial offerings, based on the OpenZFS file system and either FreeBSD or Linux. It is licensed under the terms of the BSD License and runs on both commodity x86-64 hardware and turnkey appliances offered by iXsystems.
FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD and the current version runs on x86, ARM, PowerPC and RISC-V processors. The project is supported and promoted by the FreeBSD Foundation.
TeX Live is a cross-platform, free software distribution for the TeX typesetting system that includes major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts. It is the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart teTeX. It is now the default TeX distribution for several Linux distributions such as openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Slackware, Ubuntu, Termux and Gentoo. Other Unix operating systems like OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD have also converted from teTeX to TeX Live.
Info-Mac is an online community, news aggregator and shareware file hosting service covering Apple Inc. products, including the iPhone, iPod and especially the Macintosh. Established in 1984 as an electronic mailing list, Info-Mac is notable as being the first online community for Apple's then-new Macintosh computer. Info-Mac was the dominant Internet resource for Mac OS software and community-based support throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
SCO Skunkware, often referred to as simply "Skunkware", is a collection of open-source software projects ported, compiled, and packaged for free redistribution on SCO operating environments. SCO Skunkware packaged components exist for SCO Xenix, SCO UNIX, SCO OpenServer 5, SCO OpenServer 6, UnixWare 2, Caldera OpenLinux, Open UNIX 8, and UnixWare 7. SCO Skunkware was an early pioneering effort to bring open source software into the realm of business computing and, as such, provided an important initial impetus to the acceptance and adoption of open source software in the small and medium business market. An extensive SCO Skunkware download area has been maintained since 1993 and SCO Skunkware components were shipped with operating system distributions as far back as 1983 when Xenix for the IBM XT was released by The Santa Cruz Operation. The annual SCO Forum conference was a venue for the makers and users of SCO Skunkware to meet and discuss its contents and ideas for future additions.
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.
The JIBIN Server is or was a combined "HTTP, HTTPS, XMPP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, DNS, DHCP, Java Servlet, JSP, and proxy server" developed by Tod Sambar. The Proxy Server provided also a dial-on-demand service to an Internet service provider.
