It was developed as a school project at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague,[3] and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.

Its design differs significantly from GNU Zebra, Quagga and FRRouting.

Currently BIRD is included in many Linux distributions, such as Debian,[6] Ubuntu[7] and Fedora.

[9] According to the 2012 Euro-IX survey,[13] BIRD is the most used route server amongst European Internet exchanges.

[14] BIRD implements an internal routing table to which the supported protocols connect.