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<sect><heading>A brief history of FreeBSD<label id="history"></heading>
<p><em>Contributed by &a.jkh;</em>.
The FreeBSD project had its genesis in the early part of 1992,
partially as an outgrowth of the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit" by the
patchkit's last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and myself.
David Greenman and Julian Elischer were also lurking in the background
around this time, though they didn't come fully into the project until
a month or two after it was more or less officially launched. Our
original goal was to produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSD in
order to fix a number of problems with it that the patchkit mechanism
just wasn't capable of solving. Some of you may remember the early
working title for the project being "386BSD 0.5" or "386BSD Interim"
in reference to that fact.
386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to that
point suffering rather severely from almost a year's worth of neglect.
As the patchkit swelled ever more uncomfortably with each passing day,
we were in unanimous agreement that something had to be done and
decided to try and assist Bill by providing this interim "cleanup"
snapshot. Those plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly
decided to withdraw his sanction from the project and without any
clear indication of what would be done instead.
It didn't take us long to decide that the goal remained worthwhile
even without Bill's support, and so we adopted the name "FreeBSD",
which was coined by David Greenman. Our initial objectives were set
after consulting with the system's current users and once it became
clear that the project was on the road to perhaps even becoming a
reality, I contacted Walnut Creek CDROM with an eye towards improving
FreeBSD's distribution channels to those many unfortunates without
easy access to the Internet. Walnut Creek CDROM not only supported
the idea of distributing FreeBSD on CD but went so far as to provide
the project with a machine to work on and a fast Internet connection.
Without Walnut Creek CDROM's almost unprecedented degree of faith in
what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is in fact
very unlikely that FreeBSD would have gotten as far, as fast, as it
has today.
The first CDROM (and general net-wide) distribution was FreeBSD 1.0,
released in December of '93. This was based on the 4.3 BSD Lite
("Net/2") tape from U.C. Berkeley with many components provided by
386BSD and the Free Software Foundation. It was a fairly reasonable
success for a first offering, and we followed this release with the
highly successful FreeBSD 1.1 version in May of 1994.
Around this time, some rather unexpected storm clouds formed on our
horizon as Novell and U.C. Berkeley settled their long-running lawsuit
over the legal status of the Berkeley Net/2 tape. A condition of that
settlement was U.C. Berkeley's concession that large parts of Net/2
was "encumbered" code and property of Novell, who had in turn acquired
it from AT&T some time previously. What Berkeley got in return was
Novell's "blessing" that the 4.4 Lite release, when it was finally
released, would be declared unencumbered and all existing Net/2 users
would be strongly encouraged to switch. This included us, and we were
given until the end of July 1994 to stop shipping our own Net/2 based
product. Under the terms of that agreement, were were allowed one
last release before the deadline and that became FreeBSD 1.1.5.1, the
culmination of our year's work with Net/2 and generally considered by
many to be a significant project milestone for stability and general
performance..
We then set about the arduous task of literally re-inventing ourselves
with a completely new and rather incomplete set of 4.4 Lite bits. The
"Lite" releases were light in part because Berkeley's CSRG removed
large chunks of code required for actually making a bootable running
system out of it due to various legal requirements and the fact that
the Intel port of 4.4 was highly incomplete. It took us until
December of 1994 to make this transition, and in January of 1995 we
released FreeBSD 2.0 to the net and on CDROM. Despite being still
more than a little rough around the edges, the release was a
significant success and has since been followed by the more robust and
easier to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 release in June of 1995.
Where to from here? Well, we intend to release FreeBSD 2.1 sometime
in October of 1995 and have reasonable expectations that it will
meet or exceed all of the standards for quality we set with FreeBSD
1.1.5.1 back in July of 1994. From there, we'll probably continue our now
two-track scheme of a "stable" branch of FreeBSD and an "experimental"
branch, where development can continue at its usually rapid pace without
penalizing those who just want a working system without too much excitement.
We also intend to focus on any remaining areas of weakness, like documentation
or missing drivers, and steadily increase the overall quality and feature set
of the system well into 1996 and beyond.
Jordan
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