Date: 25 Sep 2002 21:37:25 -0700 From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The FSF makes up tales about BSD Message-ID: <q5n0q58iyi.0q5@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <200209260154.TAA25245@lariat.org> References: <200209260154.TAA25245@lariat.org>
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Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> writes:
> "The BSD system was developed by UC Berkeley as non-free software in the 80s,
> and became free in the early 90s."
So what, exactly, do you propose we protest?
1) There is no "the BSD system"; there are several?
2) It was developed not *BY* UCB, but by people *AT* UCB and many other
locales?
3) It was developed from 1975-now?
4) It didn't become free, as it's still owned by a cast of thousands?
> "The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the
> example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped
> convince them to start...."
5) Only *SOME* BSD developers were so inspired? (There must be SOME.)
6) That their appeals fell on nothing but deaf ears and didn't help?
7) That the BSD developers started to make their code GNU-speak-free
before there were any GNU activists but it took the GNU activists to
help convince them to *finish* the job after nearly 20 years?
A more important question is: where should this travesty be protested?
Maybe "gnu.misc.discuss"? That's little better than doing it here.
And I'm afraid it would sound like quibbling anyway, when you get down
to the details, while it contains enough grains of truth to make a
reasonable-sounding protest at a high level.
> It seems to me that those who know the true history of BSD should protest
> this attempt to rewrite history vigorously.
And they could point to some better histories:
Books:
A History of UNIX before Berkeley: UNIX(R) Evolution, 1975-1984
A Quarter Century of Unix, Peter H. Salus, Addison-Wesley 1994
Internet:
http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/
http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/Unix_History/
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/index.html">;
http://www.daemonnews.org/199903/history.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doug97.html
http://www.kearneys.ca/~brent/FreeBSD/unixhistory.ps
http://www.multicians.org
http://comp-hist.sourceforge.net
I'll bet that last one has some GNU influences to be rooted out.
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