BSD/OS

Developer	Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (1991–2001) Wind River Systems (2001–2003)
Written in	C
OS family	Unix-like (Net/2)
Working state	Discontinued
Source model	Source-available
Initial release	BSD/386 1.0, March 1993; 32 years ago (1993-03)
Latest release	BSD/OS 5.1 / 2003; 22 years ago (2003)
Marketing target	Internet server applications
Available in	English
Platforms	x86,SPARC,PowerPC
Kernel type	Monolithic
Default user interface	Command-line interface
License	Proprietary

BSD/OS is aproprietaryUnix-likeoperating system first released in 1993 asBSD/386. It was originally developed and sold byBerkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi) and designed to be aUnix for386-basedPCs. It was built off the Net/2 distribution ofBSD, on which the developers had previously contributed to.^[1]

Eventually the operating system was also ported to supportPowerPC andSPARC architectures, and consequently was retitled to BSD/OS as of version 2.0 (1995). In 2001, BSDi sold the rights of the OS toWind River Systems who developed and released version 5.0 in 2003 before discontinuing the product.

BSDi was formed in 1991 by members of theComputer Systems Research Group (CSRG) atUC Berkeley to develop and sell a proprietary version of BSD Unix forPC compatible systems withIntel 386 (or later) processors. This made use of work previously done byBill Jolitz to port BSD to the PC platform. BSDi had distributed over 300 copies of the beta version of BSD/386 by August 1992.^[2]

BSD/386 1.0 was released in March 1993. The company sold licenses and support for it, taking advantage of terms in theBSD 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 afree software BSD for PCs, called386BSD. The BSDi system features complete and thoroughmanpage documentation for the entire system, including complete syntax and argument explanations, examples, file usage, authors, and cross-references to other commands.

BSD/386 licenses (includingsource code) were priced at $995, lower thanAT&TUNIX System V source licenses, a fact highlighted in their advertisements.^[3] As part of the settlement ofUSL 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 supportSunSPARC-based systems. BSD/OS 5.x versions are available for PowerPC too.^[4]

The marketing of BSD/OS became increasingly focused onInternet server applications. However, the increasingly tight market forUnix-compatible software in the late 1990s and early 2000s hurt sales of BSD/OS. On one end of the market, it lacked the certification ofthe 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 andLinux. BSD/OS was acquired byWind River Systems in April 2001.^[5] Wind River discontinued sales of BSD/OS at the end of 2003, with support terminated at the end of 2004.

• "BSD/OS 2.0".Internet Archive.

• Berkeley Software Distribution
• Discontinued operating systems

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from November 2023