Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 08:17:16 -0800 (PST) From: David Wolfskill <dhw@whistle.com> To: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD Utopia? Message-ID: <199804031617.IAA12115@pau-amma.whistle.com>
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Please note that altough I'm still a "newbie" to FreeBSD, I've been in
the UNIX community for a while....
>Date: Thu, 02 Apr 1998 22:54:00 -0800
>From: Joey Garcia <bear@pacificnet.net>
>Well, I've been thinking....sometimes that can be a bad thing. *grin* But
>anyways, I was wondering why you guys have chosen FreeBSD over the other
>*BSD's (OpenBSD and NetBSD). Is it because of the support? Or do you just
>think it's better than the others? I was just curious.
'cause that's what they run here at work. :-) (At home, I use Suns.)
>Anyways, I was wondering why there is such a choice in *BSD's....
Well, a lot of this is historical. From my recollection.... CSRG
("Computer Science Research Group") at Berkeley is the group that
coordinated the BSD releases up to 4.4BSD. (How UC Berkeley got
involved in the first place is another story, and has to do with Ken
Thompson taking a sabbatical year from AT&T Bell Labs & teaching an
Operating Systems course at his alma mater -- UC Berkeley....)
Reason it stopped at that point is basically lack of funding: by the
time 4.4BSD was released, CSRG had dropped down to 5 folks, then (I
think) down to 2.5 or so -- Mike Karels joined Rob Kolstad & Co. at BSDI
(though I believe this was done in a way that allowed/encouraged his
continued contribution to CSRG, as long as it lasted).
This was all rather complicated by the AT&T lawsuit filed against UC
Berkeley, the UC Regents, & BSDI -- and followed by UC counter-suing,
and AT&T selling UNIX to (..Novell? I fail to recall).
Adding to all this was Bill & Lynne(sp?) Jolitz' publishing of the bulk
of the work necessary to get (most of?) BSD to run on a 386 (I think
that was in Dr. Dobbs' Journal -- but I had dropped my subscription by
then, since I perceived it as much too PC-oriented, and thus irrelevant
to me).
There was a great deal more going on, but my memory isn't sufficient to
do it justice. I expect there are write-ups from various perspectives
on the Web -- and I do recall that there was much passionate
disagreement.
As for GPL: my perspective is that the Berkeley license is far less
restrictive than the the GPL. With the Berkeley license, folks are free
to take the code & incorporate it into a commercial product, as long as
there's a "boilerplate" copyright notice that gives credit to the UC
Regents.
With the GPL, the company would also need to make provision for
supplying the source. This tends to give the lawyers at companies like
IBM indigestion: what happens if someone uses the source to compile a
new version of something that the company has supplied, and there's a
malfunction of some sort? The legal costs of defending against such a
thing could be mind-boggling....
Note that with the Berkeley copyright, it's possible to start with BSD
sources, customize them with various proprietary bits & pieces (that you
might want to keep as a trade secret, for example, if this is part of a
product), and there's no problem at all. This is much more difficult
with GPL.
>I was considering what would happen if FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD would
>conjoin to one BSD project....
Indeed. However, the different projects have different perspectives &
different goals. For example, one group is focusing more on portability
(so you can have your favorite BSD environment no matter how weird the
hardware is); another focuses on IBM-compatible PCs.... And I expect
that there's some interplay with different personalities in there....
david
--
David Wolfskill dhw@whistle.com (650) 577-7158 pager: (650) 401-0168
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