The history of BSD Unix is described elsewhere in this site.
Here we talk about the current BSD-derived operating systems currently under active development and use.
- NetBSD
Of course it runs NetBSD! The NetBSD project motto is best understood by taking a look at their site's "Ports" section,
which lists the supported platforms and architectures. Currently there are 8 ports in Tier I (Focus - part of NetBSD's
strategy) and an incredible 49 in Tier II status (Organic - evolving at its own pace). Portability has always been one
of NetBSD's main focus. For some obscure or old pieces of hardware NetBSD is basically the only currently-maintained operating system
you'll be able to run.
NetBSD started in 1993, based on 386BSD, Net/2 and 4.3BSD. During the last years its development has been perceived as
slower than his cousin FreeBSD and his fork OpenBSD, nevertheless is still popular for appliances and embedded applications.
Link: NetBSD Home Page
- FreeBSD
FreeBSD origin can be traced to an unofficial set of patches for the 4.3BSD port to the Intel X86 architecture, 386BSD. The first
official release was in November 1993, almost at the same time as NetBSD. FreeBSD was traditionally targeted at the Intel X86
processors, which together with the AMD64/EMT series remains the main architecture where it is used today. The first port to a
non-Intel platform was to the DEC Alpha processor family, now (sadly) discontinued following the termination of the Alpha hardware
line itself. FreeBSD has been ported to other architectures such as PowerPC and SPARC, but these are not yet fully finished or supported.
FreeBSD has always been famous for its stability, performance and general reliability. A good portion of today's Internet web traffic is handled
by servers running FreeBSD.
Link: FreeBSD Home Page
- OpenBSD
Theo de Raadt left NetBSD and started his own project, OpenBSD, in 1995. OpenBSD was at first announced as "NetBSD plus more stuff",
and even today, fifteen years later, the daily Changelog page in the OpenBSD site is called "plus.html".
OpenBSD quickly geared towards security, in many ways: massive code audits and bug fixes, new and more secure library functions,
extensive use of cryptography, privilege separation, stack protection methods and others.
The OpenBSD Project also develops OpenSSH, a free implementation of the SSH protocol that has become by far the most widely used
in the internet. Sadly, most of these users, including very large and profitable corporations, had not made any contribution to the
project.
Links: OpenBSD Home Page - OpenSSH
- Others: PC-BSD, DragonFly BSD