BSD VPS

Thinking about BSD VPS ? Read more about history of BSD systems in this article taken from Michael Lucas' book.

What Is BSD?

AT&T employees created UNIX in the early 1970s. At the time, the monster telephone company was forbidden to in the computer industry. The telecommunications company used UNIX internally, but could not transform it a commercial product. As such, AT&T was willing to license the UNIX software and its source code to universities a nominal fee. This worked well for all parties: AT&T got a few pennies and a generation of computer scientists cut their teeth on AT&T technology, the universities avoided high operating system license fees, and the students able to dig around inside the source code and see how computers really worked.

Compared to some of the other operating systems of the time, the original UNIX wasn't very good. But all these had the source code for it and could improve the parts that they didn't like. If an instructor found a certain bug vexing, he could assign his students the job of fixing it. If a university network engineer, professor, or needed a feature, he could use the source code to quickly implement it. As the Internet grew in the early, these additions and features were exchanged between universities in the form of patches. The Computer Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, acted as a central clearinghouse for these. The CSRG distributed these patches to anyone with a valid AT&T source code license. The resulting of patches became known as the Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD.

Thiscontinued for a long, long time. If you look at the copyright for any BSD-derived code, you will see the following.

Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

Fifteen years of continuous development by the brightest students of the best computer science programs in the world, moderated by the faculty of one of the top technical schools in the country. That's more than a lifetime in software. As you might imagine, the result was pretty darn good . almost everyone who used UNIX was really BSD. The CSRG was quite surprised, near the end of these years, when it found that it had replaced almost all the original AT&T code!

In the early 1990s, the CSRG's funding started to run out. The University of California had to decide what to do with all this wonderful source code it owned. The simplest thing would have been to drop the original tapes down a well and< pretend that the CSRG had never happened. In keeping with the spirit of academic freedom, however, it released the entire BSD collection to the public under an extremely liberal license. The license can be summarized like this:
Don't claim you wrote this.
Don't sue us if it breaks.
Don't use our name to promote your product.
Compare this with the software license found on almost any commercial operating system. The BSD license is much easier to understand and unobjectionable to almost anyone. Anyone in the world can take the BSD code and use it for any purpose they like, from desktop computers to self-guided lawnmowers. Not surprisingly, many computer manufacturers jumped right on BSD. Not only was the code free, but also every computer science graduate for the last 15 years was familiar with it.

As the CSRG was merrily improving AT&T's product, AT&T was doing its own UNIX development work to meet its internal needs. As AT&T developers implemented features, they also evaluated patches that came from the CSRG. When they liked a chunk of BSD code, they incorporated it wholesale into AT&T UNIX, then turned around and relicensed the result back to the universities, who used it as the basis for their next round of work. This somewhat incestuous relationship kept going for many years, until the grand AT&T breakup. Suddenly, the telecommunications giant was no longer forbidden to dabble in commercial computing. Thanks to years of development, and that generation of computer scientists who knew it, UNIX abruptly looked like a solidly marketable product. Berkeley's release of the BSD code met with great displeasure from AT&T and instigated one of the most famous computer-related lawsuits of all time. After some legal wrangling, the case was settled out of court. The Berkeley lawyers proved that most of the code in dispute originated in BSD, not in original AT&T UNIX. Only a half-dozen files were original AT&T property, while the rest of the operating system belonged to the CSRG and its contributors. As if that wasn't bad enough, AT&T had even removed the original Berkeley copyright statement from the files it had appropriated from the CSRG! AT&T went away and sulked for a while, finally releasing System V UNIX. The CSRG removed disputed files and released BSD 4.4-Lite2, a complete collection of CSRG code utterly unencumbered by any AT&T copyrights. BSD 4.4-Lite2, also known just as "Lite 2," is the grandfather of all modern BSD software. This code was not usable out of the box, and it required some tweaks and additions to function. Various groups of programmers, such as BSDi, the NetBSD Project, and the FreeBSD Project, took it on themselves to make this code usable and to maintain it. Each project was independently managed.