BSD/OS

BSD/OS (also known as BSDi and BSD/386) was a commercial version of the Berkeley Software Distribution operating system that had been developed by the University of California, Berkeley s Computer Science Research Group in the 1970s and 1980s.

In 1991, Berkeley Software Design Inc., began work on BSD/386, a port of 4.3BSD NET/2 (the University s adapted version of AT&T s Unix, but believed to be without any AT&T-owned code) to run on the Intel 80386. It was released in March 1993. The company sold licenses and support for it, taking advantage of terms in the BSD License which permitted use of the BSD software in proprietary systems, as long as credit was given to the University. The company in turn contributed code and resources to the development of non-commercial BSD operating systems.

As part of the settlement of the USL v. BSDi, BSDi substituted code that had been written for the University s 4.4 BSD Lite for disputed code in their OS, effective with version 2.0. The 386 designation was becoming less meaningful, and the system came to be known as as BSD/OS or BSDi .

The increasingly tight market for Unix-compatible operating systems in the late 1990s and early 2000s hurt sales of BSD/OS. On one end of the market, it lacked the certification of the Open Group to bear the UNIX® trademark, and the sales forces and hardware support of the larger Unix vendors. On the other end, it lacked the negligible acquisition cost of the freely-licensed BSDs. The OS was purchased by Wind River Systems in 2001. Wind River discontinued sales of BSD/OS at the end of 2003, with support terminated at the end of 2004.