Introduction
Licensing conditions
As the name suggests, FreeBSD is free. You don't have to pay for the code, you can use it on as many computers as you want, and you can give away copies to your friends. There are some restrictions, however. Here's the BSD license as used for all new FreeBSD code:
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
This software is provided by the FreeBSD project "as is’ and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the FreeBSD project or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in anyway out of the use of this software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.
The last paragraph is traditionally written in ALL CAPS, for reasons which don’t seem to have anything to do with the meaning. Older versions of the license also contained additional clauses relating to advertising.
A little history
FreeBSD is a labour of love: big commercial companies produce operating systems and charge lots of money for them; the FreeBSD project produces a professional-quality operating system and gives it away. That's not the only difference.
In 1981, when IBM introduced their Personal Computer, the microprocessor industry was still in its infancy. They entrusted Microsoft to supply the operating system. Microsoft already had their own version of UNIX, called XENIX, but the PC had a minimum of 16 kB and no disk. UNIX was not an appropriate match for this hardware. Microsoft went looking for something simpler. The "operating system "theychose was correspondingly primitive: 86/DOS, a clone of Digital Research’s successful CP/M operating system, written by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products and originally called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System). At the time, it seemed just the thing: it ran fine without a hard disk (in fact, the original PC didn't have a hard disk, not even as an option), and it didn't use up too much memory. The only thing that they really had to do was to change the name. IBM called its version PC-DOS, while Microsoft marketed its version under the name MS-DOS.
By this time, a little further down the US West Coast, the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) of the University of California at Berkeley had just modified AT&T's UNIX operating system to run on the new DEC VAX 11/780 machine, which sported virtual memory, and had turned their attention to implementing some new protocols for the ARPANET: the so-called Internet Protocols.The version of UNIX that they had developed was now sufficiently different from AT&T's system that it had been dubbed Berkeley UNIX.
As time went on, both MS-DOS and UNIX evolved. Before long, MS-DOS was modified to handle hard disks - not well, but it handled them, and for the PC users, it was so much better than what they had before that they ignored the inefficiencies. After all, the PC gave you your own hard disk on your desk, and you didn’t have to share it with all the other people in the department. Microsoft even tried to emulate the UNIX directory structure, but succeeded only in implementing the concept of nested directories. At Berkeley, they were developing a higher performance disk subsystem, the Fast File System, now known as the UNIX File System.
By the late 80s, it was evident that Microsoft no longer intended to substantially enhance MS-DOS. New processors with support for multitasking and virtual memory had replaced the old Intel 8088 processor of the IBM PC, but they still ran MS-DOS by emulating the 8088 processor, which was now completely obsolete. The 640 kB memory limit of the original PC, which once appeared bigger than anybody would ever need, became a serious problem. In addition, people wanted to do more than one thing at a time with their computers.
A solution to both problems was obvious: move to the 32 bit address mode of the new Intel 80386 processor and introduce real multitasking, which operating systems on larger machines had had for decades. Of course, these larger machines were only physically larger. The average PC of 1990 had more memory, more disk and more processing power than just about any of the large computers of the 70s. Nevertheless, Microsoft didn't solve these problems for its "Windows" platform until much later, and the solutions still leave a lot to be desired.
UNIX, on the other hand, was a relatively mature operating system at the time when the PC was introduced. As a result, Microsoft-based environments have had little influence on the development of UNIX. UNIX development was determined by other factors: changes in legal regulations in the USA between 1977 and 1984 enabled AT&T first to license UNIX to other vendors, noticeably Microsoft, who announced XENIX in 1981, and then to market its own version of UNIX. AT&T developed System III in 1982, and System V in 1983. The differences between XENIX and System V were initially small, but they grew: by the mid-80s, there were four different versions of UNIX: the Research Version, used almost only inside AT&T, which from the eighth edition on derived from 4.1cBSD, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) from Berkeley, the commercial System V from AT&T, and XENIX, which no longer interested Microsoft, and was marketed by the company that had developed it, the Santa Cruz Operation, or SCO.
One casualty of UNIX’s maturity was the CSRG in Berkeley. UNIX was too mature to be considered an object of research, and the writing was on the wall: the CSRG would close down. Some people decided to port Berkeley UNIX to the PC—after all, SCO had ported its version of UNIX to the PC years earlier. In the Berkeley tradition, however, they wanted to give it away. The industry’s reaction was not friendly. In 1992, AT&T's subsidiary USL (UNIX Systems Laboratories)!! led a lawsuit against Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI), the manufacturer of the BSD/386 operating system, later called BSD/OS, a system very similar to FreeBSD. They alleged distribution of AT&T source code in violation of licence agreements. They subsequently extended the case to the University of California at Berkeley. The suit was settled out of court, and the exact conditions were not all disclosed. The only one that became public was that BSDI would migrate their source base to the newer 4.4BSD-Lite sources, a thing that they were preparing to do in any case. Although not involved in the litigation, it was suggested to FreeBSD that they should also move to 4.4 BSD-Lite, which was done with the release of FreeBSD release 2.0 in late 1994.
Now, in the early 21st century, FreeBSD is the best known of the BSD operating systems, one that many consider to follow in the tradition of the CSRG. I can think of no greater honour for the development team. It was developed on a shoestring budget, yet it manages to outperform commercial operating systems by an order of magnitude.
The end of the UNIX wars
In the course of the FreeBSD project, a number of things have changed about UNIX. Sun Microsystems moved from a BSD base to a System V base in the late 80s, a move that convinced many people that BSD was dead and that System V was the future. Things turned out differently: in 1992, AT&T sold USL to Novell, Inc., who had introduced a product based on System V.4 called UnixWare. Although UnixWare has much better specifications than SCO's old System V3 UNIX, it was never success, and Novell finally sold their UNIX operation to SCO. SCO itself was then bought out by Caldera (which recently changed its name back to SCO), while the ownership of the UNIX trade mark has passed to the Open Group. System V UNIX is essentially dead: current commercial versions of UNIX have evolved so far since System V that they can't be considered the same system. By contrast, BSD is alive and healthy, and lives on in FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Apple's Mac OS X.
The importance of the AT&T code in the earlier versions of FreeBSD was certainly overemphasized in the lawsuit. All of the disputed code was over 10 years old at the time, and none of it was of great importance. In January 2002, Caldera released all "ancient" versions of UNIX under a BSD license. These specifically included all versions of UNIX from which BSD was derived: the first to seventh editions of Research UNIX and 32V, the predecessor to 3BSD. As a result, all versions of BSD, including those over which the lawsuit was conducted, are now freely available.
Other free UNIX-like operating systems
FreeBSD isn't the only free UNIX-like operating system available—it's not even the best-known one. The best-known free UNIX-like operating system is undoubtedly Linux, but there are also a number of other BSD-derived operating systems. We'll look at them first:
- 386/BSD was the original free BSD operating system, introduced by William F. Jolitz in 1992. It never progressed beyond a test stage: instead, two derivative operating systems arose, FreeBSD and NetBSD. 386/BSD has been obsolete for years.
- NetBSD is an operating system which, to the casual observer, is almost identical to FreeBSD. The main differences are that NetBSD concentrates on hardware independence, whereas FreeBSD concentrates on performance. FreeBSD also tries harder to be easy to understand for a beginner. You can find more information about NetBSD at http://www.NetBSD.org.
- Open BSD is a spin-off of NetBSD that focuses on security. It's also very similar to FreeBSD. You can find more information at http://www. OpenBSD.org.
- Apple computer introduced Version 10 (X) of its Mac OS in early 2001. It is a big deviation from previous versions of Mac OS: it is based on a Mach microkernel with a BSD environment. The base system (Darwin) is also free. FreeBSD and Darwin are compatible at the user source code level.
You could get the impression that there are lots of different, incompatible BSD versions. In fact, from a user viewpoint they're all very similar to each other, much more than the individual distributions of Linux, which we'll look at next.