“There’s big news in the BSD community today, as two important
mergers are occurring. First, Berkeley Systems Design, Inc., better
known as BSDI, and Walnut Creek CDROM, the primary backer of
FreeBSD, are merging. The combined company, BSD Inc., will have a
strategy of promoting BSD on all levels. This merger, combining the
two primary corporate supporters of BSD, will allow the new company
to really focus its efforts on the improvement and promotion of
BSD.”
“The other merger is that of the codebases of BSD/OS and
FreeBSD. This merger will occur over (hopefully) the next year
and result in a single operating system, still named FreeBSD.
FreeBSD will remain completely open source and primarily under the
BSD license, as it is today. Certain commercial drivers and
components of BSD/OS which remain under NDA will be administered by
BSD Inc. as add-on components. These components, along with the
commercial backing, will be the value-added features separating
FreeBSD from BSD/OS, which will continue as a commercial product
(with FreeBSD at the core)….”
“Although BSDI is merging its codebase with FreeBSD, the other
open source BSDs are not being left in the cold. Both NetBSD and
OpenBSD are welcome to either contribute code, suggestions, and
improvements to FreeBSD, or to take BSDI’s code contributions and
use them in their own projects. Once BSDI releases the code to
FreeBSD, it will fall under a very liberal license. Basically, if
the code is incorporated into an existing open source project, it
will fall under the licensing terms of that project. This means
that any open source project can incorporate BSDI’s code–quite a
gift, especially when compared to other commercial entities’
offerings.”