Editing BSD/OS (section)

==History==
BSDi was formed in 1991 by members of the [[Computer Systems Research Group]] (CSRG) at [[University of California, Berkeley|UC Berkeley]] to develop and sell a proprietary version of BSD Unix for [[PC compatible]] systems with [[Intel 386]] (or later) processors. This made use of work previously done by [[Bill Jolitz]] to port BSD to the PC platform. BSDi had distributed over 300 copies of the beta version of BSD/386 by August 1992.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Unix Labs' Berkeley Software Design Suit Finds Berkeley University in Disarray |url=https://www.tech-insider.org/usl-v-bsdi-ucb/research/1992/0806.html |access-date=2024-12-06 |website=www.tech-insider.org}}</ref>

BSD/386 1.0 was released in March 1993. The company sold licenses and support for it, taking advantage of terms in the [[BSD License]] which permit use of the BSD software in proprietary systems, as long the author is credited. The company in turn contributed code and resources to the development of non-proprietary BSD operating systems. In the meantime, Jolitz had left BSDi and independently released a [[free software]] BSD for PCs, called [[386BSD]]. The BSDi system features complete and thorough [[Man page|manpage]] documentation for the entire system, including complete syntax and argument explanations, examples, file usage, authors, and cross-references to other commands.

BSD/386 licenses (including [[source code]]) were priced at $995, lower than [[AT&T Corporation|AT&T]] [[UNIX System V]] source licenses, a fact highlighted in their advertisements.<ref name=McKusick>McKusick, M. K. (1999). Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix - From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable. Retrieved July 27, 2006, from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html</ref>  As part of the settlement of ''[[USL v. BSDi]]'', BSDI substituted code that had been written for the university's 4.4 BSD-Lite release for disputed code in their OS, effective with release 2.0. By the time of this release, the "386" designation had become dated, and BSD/386 was renamed "BSD/OS". Later releases of BSD/OS also support [[Sun Microsystems|Sun]] [[SPARC]]-based systems. BSD/OS 5.x versions are available for PowerPC too.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.windriver.com/news/press/news-386|title=Wind River Announces Product Rollout for Its BSD/OS UNIX-based Operating System}}</ref>

The marketing of BSD/OS became increasingly focused on [[Internet]] server applications. However, the increasingly tight market for [[Unix-like operating system|Unix-compatible software]] in the late 1990s and early 2000s hurt sales of BSD/OS. On one end of the market, it lacked the certification of [[the Open Group]] to bear the UNIX trademark, and the sales force and hardware support of the larger Unix vendors. Simultaneously, it lacked the negligible acquisition cost of the open source BSDs and [[Linux]]. BSD/OS was acquired by [[Wind River Systems]] in April 2001.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.windriver.com/news/press/pr.html?ID=436 |title=Press release: ''Wind River to Acquire BSDi Software Assets, Extending Development Platforms to Include Robust UNIX-based Operating Systems for Embedded Devices'' |access-date=2007-02-02 |archive-date=2020-09-19 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200919224218/https://www.windriver.com/news/press/pr.html?ID=436 |url-status=dead }}</ref> Wind River discontinued sales of BSD/OS at the end of 2003, with support terminated at the end of 2004.