BSD and its descendants

In a previous post, we looked at FreeBSD, one of the descendants of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was a Unix-like operating system developed at the University of California at Berkeley. There are other descendants of BSD that have developed as well. Here is a quick overview of them:

FreeBSD, which is the most popular, includes its own descendants, such as DragonFlyBSD, PC-BSD (designed specifically for the desktop), and Apple’s Darwin, which is the core of Mac OS X.

NetBSD focuses on portability, stability, and clean design.

OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD and is very popular for its security features. Many derivative security projects, such as OpenSSH, are sub-projects of it.

There are many others, but these are the major ones. All distributions of BSD can potentially be used on servers, although some lend themselves to easy dedicated server setup more than others. All are released under a version of the BSD license, making them free and open source software.