BSD/OS (originally called BSD/386 and sometimes known as BSDi) is a discontinued proprietary version of the BSD
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...
developed by
Berkeley Software Design
Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI or, later, BSDi), was a corporation which developed, sold licenses for, and supported BSD/OS (originally known as BSD/386), a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the BSD Unix operating system for ...
, Inc. (BSDi).
BSD/OS had a reputation for reliability in
server
Server may refer to:
Computing
*Server (computing), a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called clients
Role
* Waiting staff, those who work at a restaurant or a bar attending customers and su ...
roles; the renowned Unix programmer and author
W. Richard Stevens
William Richard (Rich) Stevens (February 5, 1951September 1, 1999) was a Northern Rhodesia-born American author of computer science books, in particular books on UNIX and TCP/IP.
Biography
Richard Stevens was born in 1951 in Luanshya, Northern Rh ...
used it for his own personal
web server
A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initia ...
.
History
BSDi was formed in 1991 by members of the
Computer Systems Research Group
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.
History
Professor B ...
(CSRG) at
UC Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...
to develop and sell a proprietary version of BSD Unix for
PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. ...
systems with
Intel 386
The Intel 386, originally released as 80386 and later renamed i386, is a 32-bit microprocessor introduced in 1985. The first versions had 275,000 transistorsBill Jolitz to port BSD to the PC platform.
BSD/386 1.0 was released in March 1993. The company sold licenses and support for it, taking advantage of terms in the
BSD License
BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses, imposing minimal restrictions on the use and distribution of covered software. This is in contrast to copyleft licenses, which have share-alike requirements. The original BSD lice ...
which permit use of the BSD software in proprietary systems, as long the author is credited. The company in turn contributed code and resources to the development of non-proprietary BSD operating systems. In the meantime, Jolitz had left BSDi and independently released an
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...
BSD for PCs, called
386BSD
386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a discontinued Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was released in 1992 and ran on PC-compatible computer systems based on the 32-bit Intel 80386 microprocessor. 386BSD inn ...
. The BSDi system features complete and thorough
manpage
A man page (short for manual page) is a form of software documentation usually found on a Unix or Unix-like operating system. Topics covered include computer programs (including library and system calls), formal standards and conventions, and ...
documentation for the entire system, including complete syntax and argument explanations, examples, file usage, authors, and cross-references to other commands.
BSD/386 licenses (including
source code
In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...
) were priced at $995, lower than
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...
UNIX System V
Unix System V (pronounced: "System Five") 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, an ...
source licenses, a fact highlighted in their advertisements.McKusick, M. K. (1999). Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix - From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable. Retrieved July 27, 2006, from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html As part of the settlement of ''
USL v. BSDi
''USL v. BSDi'' was a lawsuit brought in the United States 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 ...
'', BSDI substituted code that had been written for the University's 4.4 BSD-Lite release for disputed code in their OS, effective with release 2.0. By the time of this release, the "386" designation had become dated, and BSD/386 was renamed "BSD/OS". Later releases of BSD/OS also support
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is a nearly perfect ball of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core. The Sun radiates this energy mainly as light, ultraviolet, and infrared radi ...
SPARC
SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...
-based systems. BSD/OS 5.x versions are available for PowerPC too.
The marketing of BSD/OS became increasingly focused on
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
server applications. However, the increasingly tight market for Unix-compatible software in the late 1990s and early 2000s hurt sales of BSD/OS. On one end of the market, it lacked the certification of
the Open Group
The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing "open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It has over 840 member organizations and provides a number of servi ...
to bear the UNIX trademark, and the sales force and hardware support of the larger Unix vendors. Simultaneously, it lacked the negligible acquisition cost of the open source BSDs and
Linux
Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...
. BSD/OS was acquired by
Wind River Systems
Wind River Systems, also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems software, ...
in April 2001. Wind River discontinued sales of BSD/OS at the end of 2003, with support terminated at the end of 2004.