Subject: BSD Community Welcomes Apple's New Open Source Operating System
To: None <netbsd-announce@netbsd.org>
From: Herb Peyerl <hpeyerl@netbsd.org>
List: netbsd-announce
Date: 06/07/1999 13:47:52
NEWS RELEASE 

BSD Community Welcomes Apple's New Open Source Operating System 

Concord, CA, June 7, 1999: Today, at the start of the UNIX development
community's annual Usenix convention, operating system influentials
embraced Apple Computer's Darwin (www.apple.com/darwin) as a new
member of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating system
family.

"We're very pleased to have Apple's participation in the BSD
community," said Jordan Hubbard, chairman of the USENIX convention's
Freenix track and co-founder of the FreeBSD Project. "As more smart
businesses discover the incredible free resource that is BSD
software, they'll realize that contributing to open source development
is in their best interest."

According to Herb Peyerl of the NetBSD Project, "Our interaction
with Apple on the Darwin project has been extremely rewarding for
NetBSD and is the kind of open cooperation of which we would like
to see more."

"Leveraging the twenty-year BSD heritage allows Apple developers
to concentrate on adding a unique user experience to the solid,
robust foundation of the BSD code," according to Avie Tevanian,
Apple Computer's senior vice president of Software Engineering.
"We believe that by embracing the open source movement with our
Darwin software, the result will be better products for millions
of Mac customers worldwide. The BSD code in Darwin is an essential
part of our operating system strategy."

This type of reciprocation is a return to the original software
development model that was universal in the early days of computing,
before PCs. Wilfredo Sanchez, technical lead for the Darwin Project,
will speak on Darwin at this week's Freenix track, a series of
programs at Usenix devoted exclusively to this sort of open source
software development.

About NetBSD and FreeBSD 

NetBSD and FreeBSD are open source operating systems based on the
last public release of BSD UNIX, 4.4BSDLite2. Each effort has kept
up with the latest technologies in processors and software
architectures.  While having different priorities, the BSD development
teams share a friendly competitive rivalry, spurring each other on
to produce better product for their worldwide users. Over the twenty
years of development, a huge base of software has been developed
around BSD -- including much of the Internet infrastructure --
enabling the OS to be used effectively in almost any computing
application. The open development model means there are no secrets,
creating a worldwide understanding of the code which enables BSD
developers to build on the efforts of prior developers without the
hassles endemic to proprietary operating systems and applications.



For More Information, Contact: 

                           The FreeBSD Project 
                           Concord, California 
                           925-682-7859 
                           freebsd-questions@freebsd.org 
                           http://www.freebsd.org 
                            
                           The NetBSD Project 
                           C/O Charles M. Hannum 
                           81 Bromfield Rd, #2 
                           Somerville, MA 02144 
                           mindshare@netbsd.org 
                           http://www.netbsd.org