Wall Street Journal artical regarding BSDi and FreeBSD Merger

[Roger Hardiman]

Hi all,

Here is the artical which will appear in the Wall Street Jornal.
(forwared to the committers by Jordan himself)


  Berkeley Software Purchase of Firm
  May Speed Acceptance of FreeBSD

  By LEE GOMES 
  Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  Berkeley Software Design Inc. announced a definitive agreement to
  acquire Walnut Creek CDROM, a move that could accelerate the
  acceptance of FreeBSD, a free operating system that is a rival to
  Linux.
 
  Berkeley Software of Berkeley, Calif. (www.bsdi.com), which sells
  operating-system software, is providing an undisclosed amount of
  stock for Walnut Creek CDROM of Walnut Creek, Calif.
  (www.cdrom.com), the main distributor of FreeBSD.
 
  Both companies are closely held, but once combined, they are
  expected to try to take advantage of the current investor interest
  in Linux and free software by moving toward issuing stock as a
  public company. That would give the FreeBSD movement, which now
  relies on a global army of volunteers, the backing of a public
  company with money to spend on development work. Jordan Hubbard, who
  will be chief technical officer of Berkeley Software, said that
  could give FreeBSD a leg up as it competes with Linux, the free
  operating system that has spawned a number of popular and highly
  valued companies, including Red Hat Inc. and VA Linux Systems Inc.
 
  The acquisition joins two of the scattered offspring of the
  pioneering work on the Unix operating system that occurred at the
  University of California, Berkeley during the 1970s and 1980s.
  Berkeley Software sells a commercial version of Unix called BSD.
  Walnut Creek CDROM is a distributor of FreeBSD, which though not as
  well known as Linux is well-regarded technically. FreeBSD is used to
  power a number of major Internet sites, including Yahoo Inc.'s
  Internet portal and the Hotmail free e-mail service of Microsoft
  Corp.

  Besides FreeBSD, there are two other free Unix-like operating
  systems that are considered rivals to Linux: NetBSD and OpenBSD. All
  three are older than Linux, and all are maintained by a global army
  of volunteers. Collectively, they operate an estimated 15% of all
  Internet sites. While FreeBSD is the most popular of the trio, all
  three risk losing developers and users to the Linux bandwagon, not
  to mention to the commercial versions of Unix, including Solaris
  from Sun Microsystems Inc.

  While FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are very close to each other
  technically, the three communities of programmers developing them
  are somewhat balkanized and competitive. Mr. Hubbard said that once
  the Berkeley Software-Walnut Creek CDROM acquisition is completed,
  he hopes to begin working on collaborative projects with members of
  the NetBSD and OpenBSD communities.



Roger