What is BSD? It's where the Internet comes from!
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is a family of computer operating systems derived from the software developed at the University of California at Berkeley from the late 1970s through the early 1990s.
You may or may not be aware that the BSD code still powers a lot of things, and we meet up regularly for conferences. More about conferences later, first a little history to set the context.
A short history of the BSD operating systems
The history of the BSD family of operating systems is to a large extent the history of the Internet itself. You may have heard of the time back in the 1980s when the likes of IBM and Digital were slugging it out in the corporate IT sphere and the US department of defence paid for experiments in distributed, device independent networking.
That's when a loosely organized group of hackers somewhat coordinated by researchers at University of California's Berkeley campus rose to prominence with "BSD Unix", which by a sequence of happy accidents became the home of the reference implementation of the TCP/IP internet protocols.
By the early 1990s, commercialization of the Internet had started, and the Berkeley Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) that had coordinated the efforts was set to be disbanded. In addition to the net itself, the main tangible product out of Berkeley was the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), often distributed on tapes in the mail but also available on the net itself, which had started as a collection of software for AT & T's Unix but had over the years been extended become a full featured Unix operating system.
Several different groups wanted BSD to go on even if the CSRG did not, and several things happened in fairly rapid succession:
- Lynne and Bill Jolitz ported BSD to Intel x86 (actually 80386sx), creating 386BSD. This was chronicled in a series of articles in Dr Dobbs' Journal (also see a more condensed summary over at salon.com)
- Next up, hackers started sharing improvements to the 386BSD code as "patchkits", eventually forming two separate groups that took the work further to form their projects: The FreeBSD group would be working on bringing the best possible BSD to PC-style hardware, while the NetBSD group's ambition was to make BSD run on any hardware they could get their hands on.
- A group of former CSRG employees formed BSDi Inc. and marketed their product BSD/386 with among other things a contact phone number "1-800-ITS-UNIX". The activities of an actual corporation in turn triggered a lawsuit from the owners of the UNIX trademark over code copyrights.
The lawsuit was eventually settled -- only six files of several thousand in the tree were 'potentially encumbered' and had to be replaced, leaving both NetBSD and FreeBSD with a rush to replace the code which was at least in part fairly central to the virtual memory subsystem.
That episode was however just a temporary setback, and by 1996 we also had OpenBSD, which forked off the NetBSD code base and formed the third main member of the BSD family, with a stated purpose to focus on security and correct code. Finally in 2003, the DragonFly BSD project forked off the FreeBSD code and became the fourth member of the family of open source BSD operating systems.
Code from the BSDs is widely used in Internet infrastructure and in numerous not too obvious contexts. In fact, all devices with TCP/IP Internet capability ran some derivative of the BSD code until alternative implementations started appearing during the early 2000s.
The likely most popular BSD variant is Apple's macOS, which shares a huge amount of code with the FreeBSD project. Modern BSD systems include DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and, by some counts, Apple's macOS.
BSD code continues to be the base, however largely unsung, of significant technology development wherever the Internet is relevant. And you can even meet developers and practitioners at regional conferences every year!
The annual, regional BSD conferences
Most of the time, the development of the BSD systems is done by developers working by themselves or in small groups, in locations all over all inhabited time zones. However, by the early 2000s, a number of individuals in the various BSD communities started seeing the need for in-person meetups.
In addition to some projects calling up developers for hackathons, pioneered by the OpenBSD project, or developer summits, groups of interested parties including individual users and organizations started meeting up for conferences. The main regularly arranged BSD conferences are,
- AsiaBSDCon, March timeframe, alternates between Tokyo (JP) and Taipei (TW). AsiaBSDCon 2026 will be March 19-22, 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan.
- BSDCan, Mid May to mid June, Ottawa (CA). BSDCan 2026 will be June 17-20 in Ottawa, Canada.
- EuroBSDcon, September timeframe, each year in a new European city. EuroBSDCon 2026 will be September 10-13 in Brussels, Belgium.
All three conferences will welcome submissions for talks, tutorials and other types of sessions as well as general participation by people regardless of geographic or other origin.
For further information, browse the conference websites.
We hope to see you there at future events!
Further reading
Explaining BSD on the FreeBSD documentation site
What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (part 1) at the APNIC blog site, continued in part 2 and part 3
DragonFly BSD project website
FreeBSD project website
NetBSD project website
OpenBSD project website
Historic project art follows: Left to right: OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD
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