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Concept
Comparison of BSD operating systems
Summary
There are a number of Unix-like operating systems based on or descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) series of Unix variant options. The three most notable descendants in current use are FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD, which are all derived from 386BSD and 4.4BSD-Lite, by various routes. Both NetBSD and FreeBSD started life in 1993, initially derived from 386BSD, but in 1994 migrating to a 4.4BSD-Lite code base. OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD in 1995. Other notable derivatives include DragonFly BSD, which was forked from FreeBSD 4.8, and Apple Inc.'s iOS and macOS, with its Darwin base including a large amount of code derived from FreeBSD.
Most of the current BSD operating systems are open source and available for download, free of charge, under the BSD License, the most notable exceptions being macOS and iOS. They also generally use a monolithic kernel architecture, apart from macOS, iOS, and DragonFly BSD which feature hybrid kernels. The various open source BSD projects generally develop the kernel and userland programs and libraries together, the source code being managed using a single central source repository.
In the past, BSD was also used as a basis for several proprietary versions of UNIX, such as Sun's SunOS, Sequent's Dynix, NeXT's NeXTSTEP, DEC's Ultrix and OSF/1 AXP (which became the now discontinued Tru64 UNIX). Parts of NeXT's software became the foundation for macOS which, together with iOS, is among the most commercially successful BSD variants in the general market.
FreeBSD aims to make an operating system usable for any purpose. It is intended to run a wide variety of applications, be easy to use, contain cutting edge features, and be highly scalable on very high load network servers. FreeBSD is free software, and the project prefers the FreeBSD license. However, they sometimes accept non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and include a limited number of nonfree hardware abstraction layer (HAL) modules for specific device drivers in their source tree, to support the hardware of companies who do not provide purely libre drivers (such as HALs to program software-defined radios so that vendors do not share their nonfree algorithms).
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