[8] Eventually, GNU/Linux would take off as the most popular complete free Unix clone for PCs,[9] partly due to the slow progress of 386BSD and the ongoing lawsuit surrounding BSD.

4.3BSD Net/2 was an incomplete non-operational release, with portions withheld by the University of California as encumbered (i.e. subject to an AT&T UNIX source code license).

The port was made possible as Keith Bostic, partly influenced by Richard Stallman,[12] had started to remove proprietary AT&T out of BSD in 1988.

[15] It was helped partly by the porting process with code being extensively documented in a 17-part series written by Lynne and William in Dr. Dobb's Journal beginning in January 1991.

[citation needed] On August 5, 2016, an update was pushed to the 386BSD GitHub repository by developer Ben Jolitz, named version 2.0.

[21] Around the same time, the NetBSD project was founded by a different group of 386BSD users, with the aim of unifying 386BSD with other strands of BSD development into one multi-platform system.

However, the 386BSD site claimed that this is not true:[11] This whole "FreeBSD roots" is completely fictitious, and invented to cover the wholesale theft of the 386BSD user base.Due to a lawsuit (UNIX System Laboratories, Inc. v. Berkeley Software Design, Inc.), some potentially so-called encumbered source was agreed to have been distributed within the Berkeley Software Distribution Net/2 from the University of California, and a subsequent release (1993, 4.4BSD-Lite) was made by the university to correct this issue.

[dubious – discuss] 386BSD public releases ended in 1997 since code is now available from the many 386BSD-derived operating systems today, along with several derivatives thereof (such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD).