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 Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

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 ...

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. ...

(and later, other) computer systems. The name was chosen for its similarity to "Berkeley Software Distribution" the source of its primary product (specifically

4.3BSD The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s. 1BSD (PDP-11) The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify an ...

Networking Release 2). BSDI was founded by Rick Adams and members of the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the

University of California, 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 u ...

, including Keith Bostic,

Kirk McKusick Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to ...

Mike Karels Michael J. (Mike) Karels is an American Software Engineer and one of the key people in history of BSD UNIX. A graduate of University of Notre Dame with a Bachelor of Science in Microbiology. Mike went on to University of California, Berkeley fo ...

Bill Jolitz William Frederick Jolitz (February 22, 1957 – March 2, 2022), commonly known as Bill Jolitz, was an American software engineer best known for developing the 386BSD operating system from 1989 to 1994 along with his wife Lynne Jolitz. Before 38 ...

and

Donn Seeley In Irish mythology, Donn ("the dark one", from cel-x-proto, Dhuosnos) is an ancestor of the Gaels and is believed to have been a god of the dead. Donn is said to dwell in Tech Duinn (the "house of Donn" or "house of the dark one"), where the ...

. Jolitz, Seeley and Trent Hein were working for Rick Adam's

UUNET UUNET, founded in 1987, was one of the largest Internet service providers and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in Northern Virginia and was one of the first commercial Internet service providers. Today, UUNET is an internal brand ...

at the time and became BSDI's first employees when the company began operations in 1991. In December 1991, USENIX Secretary and Former Head of Software at Convex Computer, Rob Kolstad from

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Unive ...

, was hired and would take over company operations just two years later. BSD/386 was released in January 1992. The full system, including

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comment (computer programming), comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a Computer program, p ...

retailed at $995, which was more affordable than the equivalent source code license for the rival

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 ...

from

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 tel ...

(which cost more than $20,000 in the late 1980s.) Under Rob Kolstad's direction, the company decided to pursue internet infrastructure as their primary customer audience. In the mid 1990s the top-10 websites in the world were almost all using BSD/386 as their BSD source codebase.

''USL v. BSDi'' lawsuit

In late 1991, AT&T's

Unix System Laboratories Unix System Laboratories (USL), sometimes written UNIX System Laboratories to follow relevant trademark guidelines of the time, was an American software laboratory and product development company that existed from 1989 through 1993. At first wh ...

(USL) brought a lawsuit against BSDI, alleging that BSD/386 contained their proprietary trade secrets and source code. When USL were acquired by

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

, a settlement was reached in January 1994. BSDI agreed to base future releases of the product, now called BSD/OS, on the CSRG's

4.4BSD-Lite The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

release which was declared free of any USL intellectual property. Rob Kolstad (of the University of Illinois and Convex Computer Corporation) was president of BSDI during this period and headed the company until the close of the decade.

Mergers and sale

In 1999, the BSDI employees sought an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

and installed a new president to reach this goal as soon as possible given the recent success of the Red Hat IPO in the

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, which i ...

market. Unfortunately, this strategy was not successful and soon after Rob Kolstad had exited the company, it was facing bankruptcy. In 2000 the company merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, a distributor of

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

on CD-ROM and shortly after that acquired Telenet System Solutions, Inc., an

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 ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

infrastructure server supplier. In 2001, under severe financial pressure from excessive leverage, BSDI (known as BSDi by that time) sold its software business unit (comprising BSD/OS and the former Walnut Creek

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

and Slackware Linux open source offerings) to

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 ...

and renamed the remainder iXsystems with a renewed focus on server hardware. Wind River dropped sponsorship of Slackware soon afterwards. and the FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity FreeBSD Mall, Inc. in 2002. Faced with competition from open-source BSD- and Linux-based operating systems, Wind River discontinued BSD/OS in December 2003. Many of its technologies live on in community-led BSD derivatives like

iXsystems

In 2002, OffMyServer acquired the iXsystems hardware business and reverted to the iXsystems name in 2005.

''USL v. BSDi'' lawsuit

Mergers and sale

iXsystems

References

See also