30 years ago there was a free Unix-like OC… and it’s not Linux

When we talk about a free, open source, Unix-like operating system, we usually mean Linux. However, in the early 90s there was at least one other similar project, the release of the first fully functional version of which took place exactly 30 years ago, on July 14, 1992. We are talking about the operating system 386BSD, also known as Jolix. If you have forgotten about the existence of this curious platform, it’s time to refresh your memory a bit.

The history of the 386BSD project goes back to the 80s, and in general terms resembles the history of the emergence of Linux. Here, too, former students played a leading role, namely, the married couple William and Lynn and Jolitz (Lynne Jolitz, William Jolitz), who studied at the University of California at Berkeley. It was there that they got acquainted with the BSD operating system versions 2.8 and 2.9, in the development of which they took part, and it was there that they came up with the idea of ​​​​porting this OS for 32-bit Intel 80386 processors, the most powerful and modern at that time in history.

Work began in 1989. At the same time, Berkeley was working on porting its own code to the Intel platform – 4.3 BSD-Reno and 4.3 BSD Net / 2, and William Jolitz was directly involved in these projects. At the same time, under the influence of Richard Stallman, developers began to gradually remove non-free components from the BSD sources that fall under the proprietary AT&T UNIX license, but the presence of a significant amount of such code noticeably slowed down the process. All of his work, created while working on the BSD code at Berkeley, William Jolitz decided to use to create his own freely distributed operating system based on 4.3 BSD Net / 2, and supplemented by code that he and his wife wrote on their own.

The first version, 386BSD 0.0, which William and Lynn and Jolitz released on March 12, 1992, was still raw and unworkable—the OS included a number of non-free applications, and some components were completely missing. But version 0.1, which was born just on July 14, 1992, could already be called a full-fledged release. At the very least, this edition of 386BSD provided the user with all the necessary features for normal operation.

The entire operating system fit entirely on one boot floppy disk. Shortly after the release of version 0.1, a group of enthusiastic users began to create fixes and additions for 386BSD, released as a set of unofficial patches. Around the same time, another similar project called BSD/386, which is often confused with the development of the Jolits, arose and began to develop. This version of the OS was released by the Berkeley-based BSDi (Berkeley Software Design Inc.), run by Donn Seeley, and was also based on the 4.3 BSD Net/2 sources. Despite numerous rumors, there was no serious competition between 386BSD and BSD/386, quite the opposite: William Jolitz and Seely worked together on projects for UUNET, and William even gave Seeley some of his code for testing.

Although some sources indicate that the developers of 386BSD were involved in litigation by AT&T, the owner of a number of commercial licenses for the UNIX operating system, this is not entirely true. The claims of UNIX System Laboratories, Inc, a division of AT&T, were addressed to the BSD/386 developers, BSDi, and concerned part of the Net/2 source code that Seeley used for commercial purposes. Since the Jolitz family distributed their 386BSD for free, no one had any complaints about them. Neither the code they developed for 386BSD nor the code borrowed from Net/2 has ever been the subject of any lawsuits.

The main distinguishing features of 386BSD were a new security system with role-based access, P2P boot, as well as a simpler, more intuitive and streamlined OS configuration than other versions of BSD that existed at that time. All these features attracted users. However, between William and Lynn and Jolitz on the one hand, and the enthusiasts who developed unofficial patches and improvements for their offspring, a serious conflict broke out. The Jolits wanted to control the development of their project themselves, and therefore did not want to include third-party packages that extended the system’s capabilities in official 386BSD updates. They also refused to add some updates created by the community to the next releases. Enthusiasts, who spent a lot of time on finalizing the Jolits project, were seriously offended, made a fork of the system, included all the add-ons they created and called the resulting product FreeBSD – the release of this free OS took place on November 1, 1993. And even earlier, in April 1993, another fork of 386BSD, NetBSD, was released, which aimed to develop a free BSD-compatible system with an emphasis on cross-platform.

Despite the appearance of competing twins, at the end of 1994, the Jolitzes released release 1.0 386BSD – it contained a fundamentally new implementation of the kernel, many additional components, occupied almost 600 megabytes and was distributed on a CD. But the community-supported FreeBSD and NetBSD projects gained popularity so quickly that the authors gradually lost interest in their offspring, and by 1997 they stopped updating the system. Only on August 5, 2016, the son of the founders of the project, Ben Jolitz, posted on GitHub an updated version of 386BSD, which received the serial number 2.0. True, the changelog for this version for some reason was never published.

All rights to the source code of 386BSD and JOLIX are currently exclusively held by William Jolitz and Lynn Jolitz, but the system is still available for free download and non-commercial use. Lynn has had a successful career in Silicon Valley, founded several software startups, and is a regular contributor to BYTE magazine. She currently lives in Los Gatos, California. William Jolitz, who until recently was directly involved in his wife’s commercial projects, died of cancer on March 2, 2022. Their son, Bill, continues the legacy of his parents and is engaged in software development, with a particular focus on open source operating systems.