MicroBSD is a fork of the UNIX-like BSD operating system descendant OpenBSD 3.0, begun in July 2002. The project's objective to produce a fully secure, complete system, but with a small footprint. The first phase of its development was aborted, but it has been resumed by a new group of developers.

The first MicroBSD project

The original development of MicroBSD produced conflicts with the developers of OpenBSD, especially regarding copyright statements and attribution, and how the fork was handled. For example, an e-mail message sent to the installer after a successful installation, claimed to come from "Theo de Raadt, founder of the MicroBSD project", although Theo de Raadt is the founder of the OpenBSD project; evidently a simple search and replace was made, leading to such false attributions. Similarly the documentation claimed that the MicroBSD project members were the developers of OpenSSH, also developed by the OpenBSD project. These were violations of the BSD License under which OpenBSD is released.

The old MicroBSD project (hosted at microbsd.com) does not exist anymore, but code from it has been incorporated into the MirOS BSD project. The last release of the old MicroBSD project was version 0.6 in October 2002.

The renewed MicroBSD project

The new MicroBSD project tries to continue what the original MicroBSD project began. A new edition of version 0.6 - with cleaned up source code and corrected copyright statements - was released in October 2003. The 0.7 beta version is derived from OpenBSD 3.4.

MicroBSD is currently developed by individuals from Bulgaria. This new distribution will have a focus on security, user interface and easy setup and also add specific Bulgarian localization.

The new MicroBSD project has its website at http://www.microbsd.net/