BSD/OS

BSD/OS (originally called BSD/386 and sometimes known as BSDi) was a proprietary version of the BSD operating system developed by Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi).

BSD/OS had a reputation for reliability in server roles; the renowned Unix programmer and author W. Richard Stevens used it for his own personal web server for this reason.

History

BSDi was formed in 1991 by members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at UC Berkeley to develop and sell a proprietary version of BSD Unix for PC compatible systems with Intel 386 (or later) processors. This made use of work previously done by Bill 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 which permitted use of the BSD software in proprietary systems, as long as credit was given to the University. 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 BSD for PCs, called 386BSD.

BSD/386 licenses (including source code) were priced at $995, much less than AT&T UNIX System V 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...
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