Browse Amazon Books: Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) - FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin

When the Regents of the University of California got out of the *NIX business, they did a remarkable thing. They released the source code for BSD 4.2 to the public domain. (Considering the public investment in BSD through ARPA/DARPA, it was a reasonable decision -- but reasonableness seldom has much of a role in the assignment of intellectual property rights.)

Their benevolence resulted in FreeBSD, which in turn begat NetBSD, which in turn begat OpenBSD. Darwin came later, and I suppose it would be an outgrowth of NetBSD. Apple's OS X is their proprietary GUI running on Darwin for the Power PC. OpenDarwin is the open-source component of the whole OS X package.

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Expert Advice: Annelise Anderson

Useful Links

  • The FreeBSD Project

    The largest and oldest of the "free" BSDs - FreeBSD is the source from which the other more specialized BSDs are derived, and also the most tolerant of "newbies"

  • The NetBSD Project

    Some of the BSD crowd thought it would be nice if the OS ran on something besides IBM-compatible PCs. Net BSD has been ported to just about any platform you can think of.

  • OpenBSD

    OpenBSD emphasizes stability and security. Derived from Net BSD, OpenBSD lags a bit in features, but its code is exhaustively audited for bugs that could become vulnerabilities. It is the most secure OS available, period. Ideal for internet servers and firewalls.

  • OpenDarwin

    Open Darwin is the Open soure version of the Apple OS X internals. The i386 version is something of a curiosity at present. You cannot simply run OS X on a IBM-compatible PC, the Apple GUI is a separate application.