Meanwhile Berkeley’s Computer Science Research Group has announced that it is to end its work on BSD 4.4 following the final releases this year. The move, announced at a birds of a feather session at the recent Usenix conference in San Antonio, Texas, marks the end of one of the most influential strands in the development of Unix technology over the years. The reasons why the Group cannot continue in its present form include lack of funding, changes in the marketplace and a decline in support from the University of California itself. With the departure of key team member Mike Karels last year, the team was reduced to only four, headed by Keith Bostic and Kirk McKusick, to architect and maintain an increasingly large and complex system. BSD Unix releases formed the basis of Sun Microsystems Inc’ SunOs operating system, along with large portions of the Open Software Foundation’s developments. Unix extensions from Berkeley quickly found their way into mainstream Unix. Dr Douglas Greer, formerly with Berkeley and now at the European Computer Research Centre in Munich, said that in the early days of Unix, the Computer Science Research Group did a lot to make the system more modern and usable. The Bourne shell was a good start, but Berkeley added the C shell and Berkeley extensions, such as vi, refining the ideas coming out of Bell Labs. Later the Berkeley file system and some of the networking socket interface work became important. Meanwhile, the 4.4 release goes into alpha test this month. It will be available in a full version, requiring a Unix licence, and in Unix lite form with just the freely distributable code included. This will be more complete than earlier free releases, but will still need some work on the kernel. The final version is to be out in the autumn, the final release date depending on when current funding runs out, after which the Group will close down.
