From owner-freebsd-chat Thu Jan 18 14:48:36 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from sydney.worldwide.lemis.com (unknown [129.94.172.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0838237B401 for ; Thu, 18 Jan 2001 14:48:17 -0800 (PST) Received: (from grog@localhost) by sydney.worldwide.lemis.com (8.11.1/8.9.3) id f0HEMkW11803; Thu, 18 Jan 2001 01:22:46 +1100 (EST) (envelope-from grog) Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2001 01:22:45 +1100 From: Greg Lehey To: James Howard Cc: opentrax@email.com, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Why did NetBSD and FreeBSD diverge? Message-ID: <20010118012245.D10950@sydney.worldwide.lemis.com> References: <200101171842.KAA04000@spammie.svbug.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: ; from howardjp@well.com on Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 11:40:57AM -0800 Organization: LEMIS, PO Box 460, Echunga SA 5153, Australia Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.lemis.com/~grog X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Wednesday, 17 January 2001 at 11:40:57 -0800, James Howard wrote: > > Why did Jolitz pull support from 386BSD? And what was BSDi doing at > the time? OK, let's look at some time lines. I'm currently travelling, so I don't have hard facts to back up all these statements, which are from my recollection. Feel free to counter them with facts. pre-1990: Some people at the Computer Sciences Research Group in Berkeley realized that the days of the CSRG were numbered, and work on releasing the Berkeley code in unencumbered form, primarily for people who wanted TCP/IP stacks. The result was the Berkeley Networking Tape, later called Net/1. It didn't pretend to be an operating system, but it was a complete TCP/IP stack. Still at Berkeley, Bill Jolitz and some others work towards porting 4.3BSD Reno to the 386, and making the result unencumbered. They failed, but Bill described the work in a very detailed series of articles in Dr. Dobbs Journal, starting (I think) in early 1991. mid-1991: The CSRG released Net/2, the unfinished attempt at a 4.3BSD port to the 80386. A large proportion of the CSRG members, including Mike Karels, Kirk McKusick, Chris Torek and Bill Jolitz, join up with some others, notably (at a later date; I think 1 December 1991) Rob Kolstad, to create a company called Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI) to market this software. Quite early on people started writing the abbreviation as "BSDi", but they didn't in fact lower-case the i until April 2000. It's not clear what Bill Jolitz thought the goals of BSDI were. Rob Kolstad told me that he got very upset towards the end of the year because BSDI wanted to charge money for the system. It's not clear how he thought they were going to be viable without doing so, but he left BSDI on 1 December 1991, not before he had destroyed all his work. Feb 1992: BSDI releases the first Beta versions of their commercial operating system, BSD/386. Mar 1992: Bill Jolitz releases the first alpha version (0.0) of his free operating system, 386BSD. 14 July: Bill Jolitz releases version 0.1 of 386BSD. At this point, BSD/386 was quite a usable system. I was running both Interactive UNIX/386, a System V.3.2 derivative, and BSD/386 0.3.3, and the BSD/386 was already much more polished than Interactive. By all accounts 386BSD was still a disaster. I once started trying to install it, but didn't get very far. Apr 1993: NetBSD 0.8 came out. Dec 1993: FreeBSD 1.0 came out. End 1995: Dr. Dobbs markets "386BSD 1.0" on CD-ROM for $99, promising support. It was a disaster, no support was forthcoming, and the documentation was in a proprietary Microsoft format. I don't know that anybody ever got it running: by that time FreeBSD and NetBSD were just too far ahead, and the CDs were a lot cheaper. So why did Bill "pull support"? I don't think he did. He never offered any support, and much of the ill-feeling came from people who thought that he should put their patches back into the base. That would have been a sensible thing to do, of course, but he obviously didn't want to do it. I suspect that he found the whole thing had grown over his head. In hindsight, it's surprising that it took so long for the NetBSD and FreeBSD people to get started. If it had happened earlier, it's possible that people might have got over their differences and formed a united BSD project. I don't know if that would have brought better results. Greg -- Finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message