BSD Opinions

Name BSD Official site Download from License BSD FAQ Description BSD is a direct descendant of the Unix operating system. BSD stands for Berkeley Software design and dates back to work done by Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy to create the first free version of Unix when he was at Berkeley in the late 1970s. Later a group of Berkeley computer scientists added to his work, eventually beginning a project called 386BSD designed to rewrite Unix so it could be used on a PC with Intel chips. After Berkeley stopped funding the effort, BSD split off in several directions. AT&T also caused a lot of problems for BSD in 1993 when they hit BSD with a copyright lawsuit. BSD recovered and runs most of the high traffic sites on the Internet. Unlike Linux, BSD is targeted more towards the server. FreeBSD is an advanced BSD UNIX operating system for the Intel compatible (x86), DEC Alpha, and PC-98 architectures. FreeBSD's claim to fame is robust networking which makes it ideal Internet or Intranet server. The NetBSD project has been to make the base OS extremely portable. This has resulted in NetBSD being ported to a large number of hardware platforms. Another derivative, OpenBSD, is supposed to be the most secure operating system in the world. Development Status See OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD for development status.