Re: *BSD (another question, again)

[Simon Cozens <simon@example.com>]

On Mon, Nov 13, 2000 at 02:29:23AM +0100, Fredric Fredricson wrote:
> What is the difference between `echo *BSD`?
> Are there more than Free, Open and Net?

I hope someone can correct me on this, because it's part of an article I'm
in the middle of:

   A lot of people get the wrong idea about the BSDs. In fact, the
   history of the various BSD systems goes back to 1992, when Bill Jolitz
   published his efforts at creating a free version of the Berkeley
   Software Distribution on the 386.

   The original Berkeley Software Distribution began life as a series of
   modifications to AT&T's original Unix software, before growing into an
   independent project. Unfortunately, AT&T still held the license for
   Unix, and filed suit against Berkeley Software Design Inc., (BSDI)
   claiming that the Berkeley Software Distribution included AT&T source
   code. The case was settled out of court, and Bill Jolitz attempted to
   pick up the completely non-AT&T pieces of the software and turn it
   into a complete free Unix.

   His project, 386/BSD, was never completed, but it did spawn two
   projects we now know well: FreeBSD and NetBSD. NetBSD seems to have
   happened slightly earlier, with NetBSD 0.8 hitting the world in April
   1993. FreeBSD 1.0 was announced in November of that year.

   Even at that early stage, the aims of the two projects were somewhat
   different: FreeBSD was content to develop a BSD for use on Intel x86
   hardware based on the 386/BSD sources, whereas NetBSD wanted to
   diversify in terms of hardware support. (Wry jokes about NetBSD
   running on your digital watch abounded until earlier this year, when
   IBM booted Linux on one.)

   ...

   Now let's look at OpenBSD, which is a rather different kettle of fish.
   In December 1994, a NetBSD developer, Theo De Raadt, the maintainer of
   the Sparc port and member of the "core" team was asked to resign his
   position for alleged abusive behaviour. His CVS access was revoked,
   but he carried on improving the code.

   Eventually, it became clear that the core team were not going to
   reinstate his access, and he had accumulated over 10,000 lines of
   improvements between NetBSD and the code he was working on while fully
   intending to merge the changes back into the main distribution. Rather
   than abandon the changes and get on with something else, Theo turned
   them into his own distribution, which he called OpenBSD. The full
   story can be found on Theo's web page at
   http://www.theos.com/deraadt/coremail.html , and the original release
   happened in October 1998.

   OpenBSD later developed a specialisation for rigorous security and
   auditing the source code of its distribution. So now we have three
   separate free BSD operating systems, with three different goals:
   FreeBSD which specialises in ease of use and x86 support; NetBSD,
   which values broad hardware support, and OpenBSD, which prides itself
   on its security.

   ...

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