BSD/OS

From the late 1970's through the mid 1980's, the Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley improved and extended the Unix operating system with their Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) releases. By 1990 some members of CSRG decided to release the BSD code, which was Open Source without the AT&T proprietary code. Knows as Net/2, the Networking Tape 2 was not a complete, missing about 20% of the kernel code. One of the CSRG members, Bill Jolitz wrote the remaining code and with the help of Lynne Jolitz, released it early in 1992 as 386BSD under a BSD license. This work was continued as BSD/386 later renamed BSD/OS at Berkeley System Design Inc. (BSDI). 386BSD was the initial code base the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects.

BSDI is not a Linux distribution nor does the operating system kernel share any common code with Linux, but we mention it here as it was a notable Open Source Software/Free Software (OSS/FS) operating system, licensed under the more permissive BSD license. BSD/OS was the first *nix OS I installed outside the corporate environment on a Dell XPS H266. It provided a comprehensive BSD/Unix operating system that even today would still provide an excellent server operating system. We share the opinion with many other, both inside and outside the Linux development world, that if BSDI and other BSD's, hadn't been hit with the AT&T lawsuit in 1992, the BSD's would have occupied a much more predominate role in the OSS/FS movement than they currently enjoy.