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Comment by voytec | Hacker News Reader

Nevertheless, it shows an interesting crossroads moment in the BSD history and uncertainty of it's future.

> There are still options to secure BSD code, with one company, Berkeley Software Design (Falls Church, Va.), a company employing former Berkeley programmer Mike Karels, planning to offer a commercial version of Unix for SPARC systems based on the 4.4BSD code but free of AT&T source licensing requirements. It currently offers BSD/386, a version of Unix for 386 machines based on the Berkeley NET2 release.

(commented from a laptop running FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT;)

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BSDi actually helped FreeBSD develop SMP support. FreeBSD's "SMPng", the basis for the SMP facilities in the kernel today, was started roughly 23 years ago, with the help of BSDi engineers, as well as donations of code.

References: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?smp

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix01/freenix01/full_...

https://people.freebsd.org/~peter/smp.html

https://www.krsaborio.net/unix-scalability/research/2000/09....

Ah, I was looking at the history of BSDi (nee Berkeley Software Design). Turns out BSD/OS was killed off by Wind River in 2003? I didn't realize it had lasted so long. Nor did I realize BSD/OS had such strong market share in '95.

(commented from a laptop building an osx -> dragonfly cross compiler)

First shop I worked at in 1998 was hosting dozens of websites using all BSDi —-it was the first thing I really managed as a sysadmin. Such a pleasure to run! Everything very sanely laid out, it was easy to compile the extra tools we needed, the serial consoles were trivial to set up without extra boards, and provided the hardware was good it was stable as hell. The only downside was the lack of certain tools: we had a single Sun box for running Oracle and ColdFusion, for instance. I was sad when we were bought and the new owners converted everything to other platforms.

Seems like today, given the proclivity of open-source/non-platform-locked tooling, someone would be looking at making that a viable solution for boutique design-plus-hosting. But maybe those days are gone.

Does it still have that classic Berkeley smell?

"It was a matter of their taking it in and peeing on it until it smelled like Berkeley."

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