So about the history of BSD, I have to say that the BSD projects have successfully covered up a lot of the History of their OS which is full of scandals and replaced it with one that causes a lot of people to look at BSD as being innocent.
It all started in 1974 when Bob Fabry, worker at the University of California purchased a copy of UNIX from bell labs to run their PDP-11. The Fabry and his colleges started modifying their copy and adding more software to it (that time, AT&T had not made the code proprietary). In 1977, Fabry’s grad student the infamous Bill Joy also started contributing to Berkeley’s copied of UNIX. Most of the people contributing believed that code should be free for others to modify and redistribute (effectively making it free software which is what the FSF foundation is pushing today). Bill Joy however believed software should be proprietary and that companies should be allowed to abuse their users and costumers. Joy went one step further by supporting the idea that companies should be able to take code from people who produce free software and make them proprietary to enslave users. Any true supporter of free software should recognize this as a hideous and disgusting though on the part of Bill Joy which a lot of people considered the most evil second only to Steve Jobs.
To make his idea come through, took the pieces of software contributed to Berkeley’s UNIX and removed their copyright and placed his own on it and a license he created to allow companies to free taken code and close it. The license would later be known as the BSD license. He then decided to release these software as a bundle add-on for UNIX called BDSM as he hopes that the bundle would become a complete set of software to be used as raw materials for proprietary software to enslave and mistreat users. However, Joy was forced to change the name of the bundle to BSD as Joy’s proposed name was to inappropriate. Joy would eventually be kicked out of Berkeley after his superiors released what he had done but not before Joy release his second version of BSD and brain washed others to his idea.
Bill Joy would eventually created his own evil corporation, Sun Microsystems which subjugated millions of innocent people before being destroyed by Linux and the remains acquired by Oracle (A GNU/Linux company).
Back at Berkeley, supporters of Bill Joy’s idea continued to work on BSD mainly by taking code from the GNU project lead by Richard Stallman, removing the GPL and replacing it with their BSD license. By that time, the GNU was almost a complete OS (it still lacked a kernel). This actually gave BSD the ability to developed a full OS with minimum effort (yes that’s right BSD owes GNU a lot. Without GNU, BSD would not have existed which is really sad as GNU was made to free people while BSD or more correctly BDSM was made to enslave pean ople).
In the late 1980s, Microsoft, Apple and other proprietary software companies noticed BSD as a source of free code to make proprietary software out of and wanted to gain more control over the project. So they initiated a plan to achieve that which culminated in the lawsuit between USL and UC Berkeley over BSD (The details of the plan are still as of this time not fully known yet). The lawsuit ended with USL the winner and UC Berkeley had to halt development of BSD and was forced to remove important pieces of code which resulted in an unmaintained OS which could not boot and required rare and obsolete hardware to run. This piece of junk was called 4.4BSD-lite. With BSD snatched from the hands of the owners at Berkeley, Apple took the code and assigned some of it’s developers to work on the it renaming it FreeBSD developed by an entity calling itself the FreeBSD project which is in really a subsidiary of Apple. Netapp and Microsoft were able to bribe a number of FreeBSD developers to split off and form NetBSD from which Netapp and Microsoft could take code from. OpenBSD was formed after one of the NetBSD developers (Theo de Raadt) had an affair with a FreeBSD developer and thus are kicked out.
As BSD progressed, it’s code became more and more fragmented as more proprietary companies control BSD. Each of these fragments to started to fighting with each other and within the projects themselves, various power struggles began making headlines once in a while.
And so that is the true history of BSD which goes to show how BSD is screwed up and controlled and owned by proprietary companies and no one should use them. Linux should be used instead, it is made for freedom and it is well designed and not politically motivated like the BSDs are.