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Why OpenBSD's Release Process Works
An anonymous reader writes "Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule — 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function.
Theo de Raadt explains in this presentation how the OpenBSD release process is managed (video) and why it has been such a success."
The slides are here: http://www.openbsd.org/papers/asiabsdcon2009-release_engineering/
The original BSD code base was maintained by UC Berkeley and a bare bones system that was used as the basis for many industrial operating systems (e.g. SunOS). It was never meant to be a full fledged operating system for all usages, so different groups forked in order to target special niches. Similarly System-V would be considered forked (e.g. Solaris). Generally one considers both a base design, as neither were mature enough or managed in way to solve all of the purposes that were spawned.
386BSD was a port of 4.3BSD to x86 and when development ceased then NetBSD and FreeBSD were created simultaniously to continue development.
It was only the NetBSD/OpenBSD clash that was a political/cultural difference. All others were natural progressions given the maturity of the industry, communication technology, and specializations required. The primary reasons that Linux became successful was (a) the BSD lawsuit, (b) IBM. The SVLUG was one of the earliest user groups and its archives site members stating that they switched communities due to concerns at the time. Still, both were equally popular until IBM became involved in the late 90s promoting it with their illegal spray painting all over San Francisco. As IBM was a hardware company, the GPL was more attractive than the BSD license due to restricting competitors (Sun) from leveraging IBM's contributions. Before IBM's commitment and promotion of Linux, which was followed by other big vendors like SGI for similar reasons, FreeBSD was arguably more popular (e.g. it was adopted by EBay, Yahoo!, and other startups).