Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI or, later, BSDi), was a

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

company founded in 1991 by members of the

Computer Systems Research Group The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. History Profes ...

(CSRG), known for developing and selling BSD/OS (originally known as BSD/386), a commercial and partially proprietary variant of the

BSD Unix The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginni ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

for PCs.

Creation and BSD/386

BSDI was founded by Rick Adams and members of the

(CSRG) at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, including Keith Bostic, Kirk McKusick,

Mike Karels Michael J. Karels (August 2, 1956 – June 2, 2024) was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX. Biography Karels graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a degree in microbiology and from the Un ...

, Bill Jolitz and Donn Seeley. Jolitz, Seeley and Trent Hein were working for Rick Adams's

UUNET UUNET Technologies, Inc., formerly UUNET Communications Services, was an American commercial Internet service provider. Founded in 1987, it was one of the first and largest commercial ISPs and one of the early Tier 1 networks. It was based in ...

at the time and became BSDI's first employees when the company began operations in 1991. In December 1991,

USENIX USENIX is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization based in Berkeley, California and founded in 1975 that supports advanced computing systems, operating system (OS), and computer networking research. It organizes several confe ...

Secretary and Former Head of Software at Convex Computer, Rob Kolstad from

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...

, was hired and would take over company operations just two years later. Jolitz, who worked on

386BSD 386BSD (also known as "Jolix") is a Unix-like operating system that was developed by couple Lynne and William "Bill" Jolitz. Released as free and open source in 1992, it was the first fully operational Unix built to run on IBM PC-compatible s ...

, claimed that he was never officially hired or signed an employment contract with BSDI. BSD/386 was released in January 1992. The name was chosen for its similarity to BSD ("Berkeley Software Distribution"), the source of its primary product, specifically 4.3BSD Networking Release 2 (Net/2). The full system, including

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

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., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

(which cost more than $20,000 in the late 1980s.)

''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 NetWare. Novell technolog ...

, 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 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.

Usage in infrastructure

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. In the 1995 a survey of datacenter software platforms disclosed that BSDI was the #1 software used in data centers, by Internet servers. BSDI subsequently released an "Internet Server" version of their software, in contrast to the desktop version, which focused on providing the maximum number of open-source server products in the base distribution.

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 investm ...

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

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

IPO in the

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

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, 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 the free ...

and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

CD-ROM A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains computer data storage, data computers can read, but not write or erase. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold b ...

and shortly after that acquired Telenet System Solutions, Inc., an

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, 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 ...

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-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

and

Slackware Linux Slackware is a Linux distribution created by Patrick Volkerding in 1993. Originally based on Softlanding Linux System (SLS), Slackware has been the basis for many other Linux distributions, most notably the first versions of SUSE Linux distribu ...

open source offerings) to

Wind River Systems Wind River Systems, Inc., 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 sof ...

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

References

External links