freebsd-dev/share/doc/handbook/history.sgml

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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 1993,
partially as an outgrowth of the "Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit" by the
patchkit's last 3 coordinators: Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and myself.

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 was not 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 did not 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 for 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 quite
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 1993.  This was based on the 4.3BSD-Lite
("Net/2") tape from U.C. Berkeley, with many components also provided by
386BSD and the Free Software Foundation.  It was a fairly reasonable
success for a first offering, and we followed it with the highly successful
FreeBSD 1.1 release in May of 1994.

Around this time, some rather unexpected storm clouds formed on the
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
were "encumbered" code and the property of Novell, who had in turn acquired
it from AT&amp;T some time previously.  What Berkeley got in return was
Novell's "blessing" that the 4.4BSD-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 FreeBSD, and the
project was given until the end of July 1994 to stop shipping its own
Net/2 based product.  Under the terms of that agreement, the project
was allowed one last release before the deadline, that release being
FreeBSD 1.1.5.1.

FreeBSD then set about the arduous task of literally re-inventing itself
from a completely new and rather incomplete set of 4.4BSD-Lite bits.  The
"Lite" releases were light in part because Berkeley's CSRG had removed
large chunks of code required for actually constructing a bootable running
system (due to various legal requirements) and the fact that the Intel
port of 4.4 was highly incomplete.  It took the project until December of 1994
to make this transition, and in January of 1995 it 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 was followed by the more
robust and easier to install FreeBSD 2.0.5 release in June of 1995.

<em>Where to from here?</em>

We released FreeBSD 2.1.5 in August of 1996, and it appeared to be
popular enough among the ISP and commercial communities that one last
release along the 2.1-stable branch, was merited.  This was FreeBSD 2.1.6,
released in December 1996, and capping the end of mainstream development
on 2.1-stable.  Now in maintenance mode, only security enhancements and other
critical bug fixes will be done on this branch.

FreeBSD 2.2 is now on a release branch and heading for its first full
debut in January, 1997.  Long term development projects for everything
from SMP to DEC ALPHA support will continue to take place in the
3.0-current branch, which departed from 2.2 in October of 1996. 
SNAPshot releases of 3.0 are expected to resume in early 1997.