Berkeley Software Design

» see bsdi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 1992 I was eight years old and six years away from my first modem. The lawsuit running through this grave settled before I had heard the word Unix, and its consequences were already load-bearing by the time I did. That is the honest place to write it from: downstream, holding the result, with no memory of the argument.

Berkeley Software Design was founded in 1991 by Rick Adams together with five people out of the University of California's Computer Systems Research Group, the group that had spent a decade turning AT&T's Unix into something that was no longer quite AT&T's. Keith Bostic, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Mike Karels and Donn Seeley came across. Bill Jolitz of 386BSD was involved too, though he later said he never signed an employment contract with the company. The plan was to sell what Berkeley had been handing out.

BSD/386 shipped in January 1992 at nine hundred and ninety five dollars with the source code in the box. What made that price land was AT&T's own: a System V source license had run past twenty thousand dollars in the late eighties. BSDi was offering a working Unix for roughly five percent of that, on commodity 386 hardware.

AT&T's Unix System Laboratories sued, arguing that BSD/386 carried proprietary Unix code. Novell bought USL partway through the case, and a settlement arrived in January 1994 under which BSDi would build future releases on 4.4BSD-Lite, the version Berkeley had scrubbed. The company survived it and kept shipping. What it did not get back was the two years.

~ the case file ~

~ the two years ~

Between the filing and the settlement, anyone picking a free Unix for a 386 had to weigh whether the BSD line was about to turn legally radioactive. Linux carried no such cloud, because Linus Torvalds had written a kernel from nothing instead of inheriting one from a university with a licensing history. He has said fairly directly that he would probably never have started if 386BSD had been available and clear at the time.

That is the expensive part of the story. The lawsuit did not destroy BSD, it delayed BSD through the exact window in which the free Unix question was being settled by whoever was easiest to adopt.

~ what the price meant ~

Nine hundred and ninety five dollars for a Unix with source represented a different theory of what the product was. AT&T priced Unix as capital equipment, sold to institutions that would send someone to negotiate. BSDi priced it for an engineer who wanted a serious operating system running on the machine in front of them.

Rick Adams had founded UUNET, one of the first commercial internet providers, so the company came out of the part of the industry that needed a Unix which stayed up rather than one that demoed well. BSD/OS, as it was renamed, spent the nineties running infrastructure at providers where the traffic actually landed.

~ how the name ended ~

BSDi merged with Walnut Creek CDROM in 2000, which pulled FreeBSD's commercial arm under the same roof. Under the debt that came with that, the company sold its software business to Wind River Systems in a deal announced on 4 April 2001, and renamed the remainder iXsystems with the focus moved to server hardware. Wind River divested the FreeBSD unit as FreeBSD Mall in 2002, then discontinued BSD/OS in December 2003 with support running out at the end of 2004.

iXsystems is still in business today building TrueNAS, so the corporate thread never really snapped. The name Berkeley Software Design stopped existing in 2001, and the commercial BSD it had been founded to sell outlived it by about thirty months under an owner who had bought the thing for embedded devices.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »