GNU Make

An original implementation initially released in 19881.

NetBSD Make

pmake – Written in 1988 or earlier.2 Included in BSD.3 Inherited by 386BSD and then NetBSD.

NetBSD has maintained it ever since. A few times, they imported changes from FreeBSD’s version.

FreeBSD Make

For many years they maintained their own derivative of pmake. In FreeBSD 10.0 (2014), they switched to bmake, a portable version of NetBSD make.4

OpenBSD Make

OpenBSD maintains its own derivative of pmake. They imported changes from NetBSD many times from 1995 to 19975, but in OpenBSD 4.3 (2008), “make(1) was heavily modified”6. After that, concepts7 were occasionally taken from NetBSD, but no code.

  1. http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/make.git/commit/?id=d5998dcec13c4d3f5efe9584008b8dbfabc28f09 ↩︎

  2. The earliest copyright year I can find is 1988: http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/usr.bin/make/make.c ↩︎

  3. https://docs.freebsd.org/doc/6.2-RELEASE/usr/share/doc/en/books/pmake/book.html ↩︎

  4. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/relnotes.html ↩︎

  5. https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/1dca369142f58197e6750b062c0280dd708de934 ↩︎

  6. https://www.openbsd.org/43.html ↩︎

  7. https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/d3eb559ff7305e4daa99263ce63274c3c2fdee2b#diff-649679a3a15ea9559de2dfdd2eb04936 ↩︎