Berkeley's 1992 release of the BSD code met with great displeasure from AT&T's subsidiary USL (UNIX System Laboratories). Almost immediately they took some of the software users, and the university, to court. USL claimed that Berkeley had given away their intellectual property. The University of California said that it was their intellectual property. In the meantime, various people picked up on the code released by Berkeley and began building commercial and free products out of it. One of these products was 386BSD, which would eventually be used as the core of FreeBSD 1.0.

In 1994, after two years of legal wrangling, the case was settled out of court once it was proved that a great deal of the code in AT&T UNIX was actually taken in its entirety from BSD, rather than the other way around! A half−dozen files were the only sources of contention, and to resolve these outstanding issues some of the files were donated and others were kept proprietary. Unfortunately, FreeBSD 1.X contained some of these files, so various BSD users worked frantically to rebuild these missing components.

Once the dust settled, this new version of UNIX was released to the world as BSD4.4−Lite. A subsequent update, BSD4.4−Lite2, is the grandfather of the current FreeBSD source, as well as the ancestor of many other operating systems, such as NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X.

Today FreeBSD is used throughout the Internet by some of the most vital and visible Internet−oriented companies. For example, at this writing, Yahoo! is run almost entirely on FreeBSD. The "baby Bell" US West uses FreeBSD to power its Internet operations. IBM, Nokia, and many other hardware companies use FreeBSD in embedded systems where you'd never even know it's there.

The fact is, if a company needs to pump some serious Internet bandwidth, it's probably running FreeBSD. FreeBSD is all around you; you just may not see it because it rarely crashes.

FreeBSD Development

There's an old saying that managing programmers is like herding cats. However, despite what you might think, for the most part these FreeBSD developers work well together as members of the FreeBSD team. And, unlike some other projects, all FreeBSD development happens openly. Two groups of people develop FreeBSD: contributors and committers.

Committers

Today, FreeBSD has almost 300 developers, or committers. Committers have read− and−write access to the FreeBSD master source−code repository and can develop, debug, or enhance any piece they deem necessary.

To plug yourself in to the beehive of FreeBSD development, consider subscribing to the mailing list FreeBSD−[e-mail], which contains most of the technical discussion. Some of the technical talk is broken out into more specific mailing lists—for example, the networking development is discussed on FreeBSD−[e-mail]. There are also a few IRC channels where the FreeBSD crew hangs out and discusses things. Visitors and eavesdroppers are welcome, so long as they don't interfere. (Yes, Internet chat can be used for a variety of useful technical purposes!) The committers are responsible for keeping FreeBSD working, adding new features, and evaluating patches from contributors. Most of these developers are volunteers; only a handful are actually paid to do this painstaking work.

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