87 lines
4.8 KiB
Text
87 lines
4.8 KiB
Text
<!-- $Id: history.sgml,v 1.21 1997-02-22 12:58:35 peter Exp $ -->
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<!-- The FreeBSD Documentation Project -->
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<sect><heading>A brief history of FreeBSD<label id="history"></heading>
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<p><em>Contributed by &a.jkh;</em>.
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The FreeBSD project had its genesis in the early part of 1993,
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partially as an outgrowth of the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit" by the
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patchkit's last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and myself.
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Our original goal was to produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSD in
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order to fix a number of problems with it that the patchkit mechanism
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just was not capable of solving. Some of you may remember the early
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working title for the project being "386BSD 0.5" or "386BSD Interim"
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in reference to that fact.
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386BSD was Bill Jolitz's operating system, which had been up to that
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point suffering rather severely from almost a year's worth of neglect.
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As the patchkit swelled ever more uncomfortably with each passing day,
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we were in unanimous agreement that something had to be done and
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decided to try and assist Bill by providing this interim "cleanup"
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snapshot. Those plans came to a rude halt when Bill Jolitz suddenly
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decided to withdraw his sanction from the project and without any
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clear indication of what would be done instead.
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It did not take us long to decide that the goal remained worthwhile
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even without Bill's support, and so we adopted the name "FreeBSD",
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which was coined by David Greenman. Our initial objectives were set
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after consulting with the system's current users, and once it became
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clear that the project was on the road to perhaps even becoming a
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reality, I contacted Walnut Creek CDROM with an eye towards improving
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FreeBSD's distribution channels for those many unfortunates without
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easy access to the Internet. Walnut Creek CDROM not only supported
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the idea of distributing FreeBSD on CD but went so far as to provide
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the project with a machine to work on and a fast Internet connection.
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Without Walnut Creek CDROM's almost unprecedented degree of faith in
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what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is quite
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unlikely that FreeBSD would have gotten as far, as fast, as it
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has today.
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The first CDROM (and general net-wide) distribution was FreeBSD 1.0,
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released in December of 1993. This was based on the 4.3BSD-Lite
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("Net/2") tape from U.C. Berkeley, with many components also provided by
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386BSD and the Free Software Foundation. It was a fairly reasonable
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success for a first offering, and we followed it with the highly successful
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FreeBSD 1.1 release in May of 1994.
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Around this time, some rather unexpected storm clouds formed on the
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horizon as Novell and U.C. Berkeley settled their long-running lawsuit
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over the legal status of the Berkeley Net/2 tape. A condition of that
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settlement was U.C. Berkeley's concession that large parts of Net/2
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were "encumbered" code and the property of Novell, who had in turn acquired
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it from AT&T some time previously. What Berkeley got in return was
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Novell's "blessing" that the 4.4BSD-Lite release, when it was finally
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released, would be declared unencumbered and all existing Net/2 users
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would be strongly encouraged to switch. This included FreeBSD, and the
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project was given until the end of July 1994 to stop shipping its own
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Net/2 based product. Under the terms of that agreement, the project
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was allowed one last release before the deadline, that release being
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FreeBSD 1.1.5.1.
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FreeBSD then set about the arduous task of literally re-inventing itself
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from a completely new and rather incomplete set of 4.4BSD-Lite bits. The
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"Lite" releases were light in part because Berkeley's CSRG had removed
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large chunks of code required for actually constructing a bootable running
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system (due to various legal requirements) and the fact that the Intel
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port of 4.4 was highly incomplete. It took the project until December of 1994
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to make this transition, and in January of 1995 it released FreeBSD 2.0 to
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the net and on CDROM. Despite being still more than a little rough around
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the edges, the release was a significant success and was followed by the more
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robust and easier to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 release in June of 1995.
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<em>Where to from here?</em>
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We released FreeBSD 2.1.5 in August of 1996, and it appeared to be
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popular enough among the ISP and commercial communities that one last
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release along the 2.1-stable branch, was merited. This was FreeBSD 2.1.6,
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released in December 1996, and capping the end of mainstream development
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on 2.1-stable. Now in maintenance mode, only security enhancements and other
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critical bug fixes will be done on this branch.
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FreeBSD 2.2 is now on a release branch and heading for its first full
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debut in January, 1997. Long term development projects for everything
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from SMP to DEC ALPHA support will continue to take place in the
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3.0-current branch, which departed from 2.2 in October of 1996.
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SNAPshot releases of 3.0 are expected to resume in early 1997.
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