Early 2005, Kris Moore, the founder of PC-BSD was willing to take the Unix market on the desktop a step further. He felt that the Linux market could have advanced more over the last few years. Additionally, he liked the FreeBSD system, due to the way the system is designed, its speed, and its robustness. With the arrival on the market of "easy-to-use" versions of Linux, and their immediate success, it became obvious that a large niche market had needs that remained unmet. The BSD community had very good server operating systems such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD, but none for the desktop market. Creating a polished, full-featured, free-of-charge, open-source operating system with a BSD license, based on FreeBSD, that anybody could use, from the beginner to the advanced user alike would be a dream come true.
In April 2005, the first beta versions of PC-BSD were presented to the community. What some FreeBSD advocates had been waiting for years finally arrived: An easy-to-use FreeBSD-based operating system for the desktop, with very little configuration necessary. Backed with a strong support from the community, Moore decided to take the project further and enlarged its team to develop and realize a myriad of sub-projects: software development, desktop enhancements, applications porting, web site, forum, knowledge management, community management, graphic design, market research, documentation, translation, and sponsors.
PC-BSD is free software, and is a community-driven project made by a team of volunteers. Any help is useful, be it time or donations. Everybody has skills, if you'd like to take some time to help us doing some research, writing an article or translating for instance, you're most welcome, and we value this kind of help greatly. You can always get in touch with us from our web site http://www.pcbsd.org - Thanks in advance!
PC-BSD is an operating system such as Microsoft Windows XP or the Apple Macintosh OS X. It is based on one of the most powerful operating systems for servers, FreeBSD, which in its turn is based on the BSD and Unix operating systems, arguably the best of breed systems nowadays. However, what does it mean to you?
* PC-BSD's underlying system was built with speed and performance in mind
* PC-BSD's level of security is excellent, and you don't need any anti-virus to feel safe on the Internet
* PC-BSD can run FreeBSD applications
* PC-BSD can run Linux applications
* A number of MS Windows applications are available for PC-BSD such as Firefox, OpenOffice.org, Opera, and Skype to name a few
* The underlying FreeBSD system was kept intact, in other words, you have a fully functional FreeBSD system under the hood
