Berkeley Software Distribution

OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Research Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995. As well as the operating system, the OpenBSD Project has produced portable versions of numerous subsystems, most notably PF, OpenSSH and OpenNTPD, which are very widely available as packages in other operating systems.

William Nelson Joy (born November 8, 1954) is an American computer engineer and venture capitalist. He co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla, and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as CTO at the company until 2003. He played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while being a graduate student at Berkeley, and he is the original author of the vi text editor. He also wrote the 2000 essay Why The Future Doesn't Need Us, in which he expressed deep concerns over the development of modern technologies.

Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 to 2004, and still serves on the board. He is on the editorial board of ACM Queue Magazine. He is known to friends and colleagues as "Kirk".

Keith Bostic is an American software engineer and one of the key people in the history of Berkeley Software Distribution UNIX and open-source software.

The BSD Daemon, nicknamed Beastie, is the generic mascot of BSD operating systems. The BSD Daemon is named after software daemons, a class of long-running computer programs in Unix-like operating systems—which, through a play on words, takes the cartoon shape of a demon. The BSD Daemon's nickname Beastie is a slurred phonetic (in American English) pronunciation of BSD. Beastie customarily carries a trident to symbolize a software daemon's forking of processes. The FreeBSD web site has noted Evi Nemeth's 1988 remarks about cultural-historical daemons in the Unix System Administration Handbook: "The ancient Greeks' concept of a 'personal daemon' was similar to the modern concept of a 'guardian angel' ... As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons."

Michael J. (Mike) Karels (August 2, 1956 – June 2, 2024) was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX.

FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD—the first fully functional and free Unix clone—and has since continuously been the most commonly used BSD-derived operating system.

The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as Berkeley Unix or BSD Unix, is a discontinued Unix operating system developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning in 1978. It began as an improved derivative of AT&T's original Unix that was developed at Bell Labs, based on the source code but over time diverging into its own code. BSD would become a pioneer in the advancement of Unix and computing.

iXsystems, Inc. is a privately owned American computer technology company based in San Jose, California that develops, sells and supports computing and storage products and services. Its principal products are customized open source FreeBSD distributions, including the discontinued desktop operating system TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD), the FreeBSD based file servers and network attached storage systems TrueNAS Core (previously FreeNAS) and TrueNAS Enterprise, and the Linux based TrueNAS SCALE. It also markets hardware platforms for these products, and develops enterprise-scale storage architectures and converged infrastructures. As part of its activities, the company has strong ties to the FreeBSD community, has repeatedly donated hardware and support to fledgling projects within the BSD community, and sponsors and develops development within FreeBSD, as well as being a sponsor and attendee of open-source community events.

Walnut Creek CDROM Inc. was an early provider of freeware, shareware, and free software on CD-ROMs. The company was founded by Bob Bruce in Walnut Creek, California, in August 1991. It was one of the first commercial distributors of free software on CD-ROMs. The company produced hundreds of titles on CD-ROMs, and ran the busiest FTP site on the Internet, ftp.cdrom.com, for many years.