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List:       openbsd-advocacy
Subject:    What *should* the B in BSD stand for?
From:       "Alex Libman" <alibman () ssl-mail ! com>
Date:       2011-02-12 11:06:18
Message-ID: 1297508778.29710.1420297409 () webmail ! messagingengine ! com
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All,

Does anyone else ever wish the B in BSD stood for something else?

The individuals at Berkeley should obviously get all of the credit they
deserve in a proper readme file, but do we really want to keep that name
for all eternity?

Countless rivers flow into the ocean that is OpenBSD, and only a small
and shrinking fraction of them had anything to do with that one silly
university near San Fransisco, which was once infamous for its military
R&D, and then for the political insanity taking place on its campus...
But even if you like Berkeley, wouldn't it be nice to recognize how far
OpenBSD and other BSD's have come in the decades since, with hundreds of
contributors from all over the world?

If you want to stick with the theme of ancient history, we could as well
reference Bell (Labs), or even (Charles) Babbage, but why?  Many other
words begin with the letter B!  Beautiful, better, best, brainy, beer,
bologna, bacon, breasts...  Wait, what was I talking about?  Oh, someone
inevitably will say "backdoor", which isn't funny, so I'll defuse that
idea right off the bat.  Hmmm, "bat"..."man"?  Batman!  If you had a
batcave full of computers that all sorts of jokers were trying to hack
into, what else would you run!

Or...  It could just be one of them self-referential acronyms that some
guy at MIT thinks are funny...  (B)SD (S)oftware (D)istribution....
Works for me!  (Except with 802.11n, but that's a whole nother rant.)


-- Alex Libman, http://AlexLibman.com

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