20 significant FreeBSD events?

[Julian H. Stacey]

"Jeremy C. Reed" wrote:
> I'd like to write an article (a lot later this year) celebrating 
> FreeBSD's upcoming great milestone by briefly summarizing the 20 most 
> significant events in FreeBSD's life.  It doesn't have to be one event 
> per each year, but that would be an interesting thing to do also.
> 
> Please share your thoughts and opinions for this. (I already have a list 
> in progress.) You may email me directly off-list if you'd like.
> 
> (I may also use this list for further research toward my book on BSD 
> history. See a brief status report here: 
> http://www.reedmedia.net/books/bsd-history/ )

Ideas, Not all in cron. order:

Precursors:
  - SUID bit patent donated from Bell/Unix Dennis Ritchie to PD (when?)
  - 386BSD < Bill Jollitz
Early Life 
  - 386BSD Patchkits 
	{
	http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/history.html

	http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gendalia/FAQ/FAQ_01
		"For our European users, I have included these notes from Julian 
		Stacey (stacey at guug.de) and Christian Seyb (cs at gold.muc.de) 
		concerning locations and methods for getting 386bsd in Europe"
		... 
		"from Jordan Hubbard:

		On the morning of 30 December, 1993, and after many many delays, 
		the first official release of FreeBSD 1.0 began shipping on CDROM"
	}
	
  - The 386BSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD split
	(was it or wasn't it a split from 386BSD via Net to Free or 386BSD
	direct to both FreeBSD & NetBSD ? )
	{
		{
		A friend (bcc'd) active then & still now has
		recollected to me a split from NetBSD to form
		FreeBSD, yet I mostly recall a progression from
		386BSD via patchkits to FreeBSD, I'm tempted to
		trust his memory more than mine, but not sure :-)
	
		The URL below suggests parallel evolution:
		http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD
			"After the release of 386BSD 0.1, a group
			of users began collecting bug fixes and
			enhancements, releasing them as an unofficial
			patchkit. Due to differences of opinion
			between the Jolitzes and the patchkit
			maintainers over the future direction and
			release schedule of 386BSD, the maintainers
			of the patchkit founded the FreeBSD project
			in 1993... Around the same time, the NetBSD
			project was founded by ...
	
		http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-archive/NetBSD-1.0/CHANGES
		"NetBSD 0.8 to NetBSD 0.9:" ... "add patch00144"
			(I dont know where #144 came from, but it
			was my tweak to compress that Jordan rolled
			back into patchkit 36 or so after he'd given
			me 18 or so. 

		Somewhere Ive seen individual patchkit lists, but
		here's just a list of all contributors:
		http://docs.freebsd.org/doc/3.3-RELEASE/usr/share/doc/handbook/x19406.html
		}
  	- 1.0 Release Dec. 93
		http://web.archive.org/web/19961221043141/http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html
  	- 1.1
		http://web.archive.org/web/19961222050828/http://www.freebsd.org/releases/1.1/RELNOTES.FreeBSD
			"It is based heavily on Bill Jolitz's 386BSD
			0.1, with additions from "the patchkit",
			NetBSD, CSRG, and the Free Software Foundation.
	}
"

  - The USL v UCB etc settlement (secret content, signatories 
    could not disclose, but lawsuits stopped & a files discarded & rewritten).
  - An estimated date of when Linux end user numbers pulled ahead of BSD ?
	(The skeleton in our closet: BSD was there before Linux,
	but Linux pulled ahead with cheap floppy sets (& later
	CDROMs) sold by students via magazine adverts, while we
	BSD'ers did not bother with cloning floppies etc for little or
	no reward, except for persistent friends)
  - When FreeBSD ${arch} went [well] beyond 386 ?
  - BSD licence reduction - 1 UCB naming clause less.
  - The Dragonfly divergence.  
  - The OpenBSD overlay (different sort of split)
  - 1st live (run from CD) .iso shipped by .org
  - Democracy arrives: election of core by commiters etc
  - FreeBSD Foundation created, & when it exceeded 5x10^5 $/annum
  - 1st FreeBSD conference, 1st in Can, 1st in EU
  - Security intrusions (2 to my memory, the recent & 
    years back after which there was a call to re-read all src/ code.)
  - The move from majordomo@ to web based http://mailman
  - The move from sccs (or was that pre FreeBSD?) to cvs & cvs to svn
  - When Ports exceeded 1,000, 10,100, 20,000
  - When Shared libs came in
  - When linkable kernel modules came in (one of the rare cases
    where MS was ahead of BSD for a while with their config.sys,
    though of course they didnt Also offers src/ :-)
  - When Commiters exceeded 100 & 400 & src/ ports commit split 
	(now ~ 414 < http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/contributors/staff-committers.html
  - When Phone & TV support became realistic (ask on multimedia@ )
  - When Linux & MS emulation became `easy &/or full feature'
  - When full disk encryption became available (gbde & geli)
  - When Raid & ZFS & NTFS (non Write.!) support arrived
  - When ipf & ipfw became available to embed into products etc.

	find older numbers &facts etc for various things via
	http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://freebsd.org

Almost enough above for a multiple answer pub quiz ;-)

Cheers,
Julian
-- 
Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultant, Munich http://berklix.com
 Reply below not above, like a play script.  Indent old text with "> ".
 Send plain text. Not: HTML, multipart/alternative, base64, quoted-printable.