96 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
96 lines
5.2 KiB
Plaintext
<!-- $Id: history.sgml,v 1.2 1995/06/30 17:37:38 jfieber Exp $ -->
|
|
<!-- The FreeBSD Documentation Project -->
|
|
|
|
<sect><heading>A brief history of FreeBSD, according to Jordan Hubbard<label id="history"></heading>
|
|
|
|
<p><em>Contributed by &a.jkh;</em>.
|
|
|
|
The FreeBSD project had its genesis in the early part of 1992,
|
|
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 (and it was, in fact,
|
|
to be another full year before he was even heard from in public
|
|
again!).
|
|
|
|
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 to 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 unprecidented degree of faith in
|
|
what was, at the time, a completely unknown project, it is in fact
|
|
very 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 '93. This was based on the 4.3 BSD Lite
|
|
("Net/2") tape from U.C. Berkeley with many components provided by
|
|
386BSD and the Free Software Foundation. It was a fairly reasonable
|
|
success for a first offering, and we followed this release with the
|
|
highly successful FreeBSD 1.1 version 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
|
|
was "encumbered" code and property of Novell, who had in turn aquired
|
|
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, were 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 removed
|
|
large chunks of code required for actually making a bootable running
|
|
system out of it 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.
|
|
|
|
Where to from here? Well, we intend to release FreeBSD 2.1 sometime
|
|
in September of 1995 and have reasonable expectations that it will
|
|
meet or exceed all of the standards for quality we set with FreeBSD
|
|
1.1.5.1 back in July of 1994. From there, we'll probably go to a
|
|
two-track scheme with a "stable" branch of FreeBSD and an
|
|
"experimental" branch, where development can continue at its usually
|
|
rapid pace without penalizing those who just want a stable, working
|
|
system without too much excitement. 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.
|
|
|
|
Jordan
|
|
|
|
|