117 lines
6.6 KiB
Plaintext
117 lines
6.6 KiB
Plaintext
<!-- $Id: history.sgml,v 1.12 1995/12/29 01:27:38 jkh Exp $ -->
|
|
<!-- The FreeBSD Documentation Project -->
|
|
|
|
<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.
|
|
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 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 4.3 BSD 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 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
|
|
were "encumbered" code and the 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, we 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 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 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.
|
|
|
|
<em>Where to from here?</em>
|
|
|
|
We just released FreeBSD 2.1.0 on November 19th, 1995 and, by all
|
|
accounts, people are pretty happy with it. We'll therefore continue
|
|
with the 2.1-STABLE branch of FreeBSD (which actually began with 2.0.5)
|
|
well into Q1 of 1996 with at least one additional release:
|
|
FreeBSD 2.1.1.
|
|
|
|
A 2.1.2 release may follow 2.1.1, though this will depend heavily on the
|
|
status of FreeBSD 2.2 in Q2 of 1996. 2.2 is our development branch,
|
|
where long term projects for everything from NFS v3 to PCCARD support
|
|
are currently taking place. Preliminary timelines suggest that development
|
|
in 2.2 will begin slowing down and early release engineering simulations
|
|
(2.2 SNAPshots) started in Q1 of 1996. Given a favorable prognosis for 2.2's
|
|
general health, a migration to 2.2 will then begin in early Q2 of '96 and
|
|
a new 2.3 branch created for next-generation development. Around the
|
|
time that 2.2-RELEASE is produced (late Q2 1996), the 2.1.x lineage will
|
|
also be phased out.
|
|
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
Now might also be a good time to note that the development of FreeBSD is
|
|
<em>not</em> a closed process, despite some popular misconceptions to the
|
|
contrary, and anyone is free to contribute code or ideas. Once a contributor
|
|
has established a reasonable track record for reliability, we generally, in
|
|
fact, give them write access to the project's CVS repository, where their
|
|
changes can propagate automatically to other users of FreeBSD. Our
|
|
centralized development model is designed for the convenience of the
|
|
<em>users</em> of FreeBSD, who are thereby provided with an easy way of
|
|
tracking one central code base, not to keep potential contributors out!
|
|
Individuals who've shown a consistent and significant dedication to the project
|
|
are even often asked to join the FreeBSD core team to help in setting
|
|
the project's overall directions and goals, so truly no part of the project
|
|
is closed to additional members. All we ask of those wishing for closer
|
|
ties to this project is some of the same dedication its current members have
|
|
to its continued success!
|