Date: Wed, 8 Mar 95 11:18:11 MST From: terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert) To: hsu@cs.hut.fi (Heikki Suonsivu) Cc: freebsd-hackers@freefall.cdrom.com, terry@cs.weber.edu (Terry Lambert), witr@rwwa.com Subject: BSD Consortium? Message-ID: <9503081818.AA01327@cs.weber.edu> In-Reply-To: <199503081338.PAA04840@shadows.cs.hut.fi> from "Heikki Suonsivu" at Mar 8, 95 03:38:58 pm
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> I'll promise to donate $100 of my own, and, say $400 of my company money to
> BSD (or Free operating system) Consortium if one will ever be set up to get
> rid of this mess.
Actually, this was first considered some time ago, and was discussed
at length by Robert Withrow, myself, and others.
At the time it was initially discussed (during the CSRG breakup), it
was decided to wait for CSRG to actually break up ("Tut, tut, looks
like rain").
Then it was brought up again, but it was considered too large a legal
target for USL and/or BSDI (although BSDI and DEC and Sun should really
be members).
Now that the legal stuff is closer to being buried, maybe it *is* time
to bring it up again.
The Consortium wouldn't necessarily have to have as a goal unification
of the BSD's, however, so it might not help where you wanted. 8-(.
I've wanted a legally seperate entity out there for some time; there
needs to be some common purse strings somewhere.
One of my main motivations in pursuing something like this is what I
have called previously a "hardware scholarship" to get device drivers
written. This would take a BSD Consortium or Consortium-like-object
to implement, but here's the basic idea plus several other ideas:
1) Money is donated to a Consortium and/or membership is
purchased.
a) Excellent opportunity for companies to pay for
research here.
b) Excellent opportunity for a "with membership, you
get a one year subscription to BSD Journal".
c) Comarketing (resale of discounted Daemon things
good for the Consortium, good for Keith).
2) Consortium establishes a buget item "hardware scholarship
fund".
a) Apply for a "scholarship" for a particular device
driver, etc.
b) Get accepted.
c) Buy your hardware.
d) Write the driver.
e) Allow the driver to be licensed under UCB style
copyright by Consortium.
f) Present purchase receipt and Consortium rebates
50% to 100% of what you paid for the hardware
(part of the initial agreement, dependent on
the value placed on the driver).
g) If someone else writes the driver before you, that's
a risk you take; on the other hand, a prolific coder
could get a lot of free/discounted hardware. This
is potentially a big risk, so maybe a minimum
payout? Or the Consortium owns the hardware? TBD.
3) Consortium works for ABI standards between BSD variants to
ensure binary interoperability (88Open).
4) Potentially, the consortium could enter into non-disclosure
agreements (being a legal entity) and have binary only
drivers made available (loadable modules?) for things like:
a) Computone boards
b) Adaptec licensed microcode
c) Intel math coprocessor emulator.
d) Device/bus information for PowerMAC's
Or perhaps they could just buy the information?
5) Consortium establishes BSD presence:
a) Trade show booths
b) Usenix
c) X consortium (?)
d) PCMCIA consortium
e) PCI consortium
f) Press releases
g) Sponsored articles in trade journals
h) "Branding" -- prevent further splits
i) Approaching commercial software houses to solicit
ports of commercial software.
j) Overall evangelical efforts.
k) Get common-to-all-BSD drivers included on disks
shipped with various hardware.
6) Consortium funds "large projects"
a) Purchase of POSIX validation suite
b) Purchase of XPG3/4 validation suite
c) Purchase of Spec 1170 validation suite
7) Consortium seeks code for UCB style licensing
a) From University projects -- ie: UCLA ficus, UofU OMOS
b) From commercial sources
c) Buys off shareware? ;-).
8) Consortium works for favorable cross-licensing. For instance,
if Linux drivers were LGPL'ed instead of GPL'ed, they could
be loaded as kernel modules as part of the base system (loading
is linking) without violating the spirit of the license and
without making the driver unavailable except as a "user compiles
in but can't use in default configuration" option.
9) Consortium could establish a "hardware bank":
a) How many times could David or Bruce have used an
ICE for debugging?
b) Get SMP hardware into more hands.
c) Solicit loans of porting machines from hardware
vendors like DEC, Motorolla, Sun, SGI(MIPS), etc.
Well, those are some ideas off the top of my head. I'm sure other will
jump in with more (and jump on me). 8-).
Now that Robert Withrow is no longer running for congress-critter,
maybe he'd be up for more discussion?
To keep the ball rolling, I could probably come up with $500 as well
(but I'd want a T-shirt or a cloisoine Daemon pin and a nice "charter
member" certificate or something). 8-).
Terry Lambert
terry@cs.weber.edu
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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