Date: 31 Oct 2002 19:34:46 -0800 From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: More history of the freeness of BSD Message-ID: <3ivg3iq7xl.g3i@localhost.localdomain>
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I've blundered across some more clues as to the "freeness" of early BSD at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html (which I found quoted at http://members.lycos.co.uk/earnoth/viewtopic.php?t=4&sid=1344d45a56387aa4506af241bf63fe7f ) It is a chapter by McKusick from the "Open Sources" book of 1999. Up through the release of 4.3BSD-Tahoe, all recipients of BSD had to first get an AT&T source license. ... With the increasing cost of the AT&T source licenses, vendors that wanted to build standalone TCP/IP-based networking products for the PC market using the BSD code found the per-binary costs prohibitive. ... The BSD originated networking code and supporting utilities were released in June 1989 as Networking Release 1, the first freely-redistributable code from Berkeley. ... Although we did not yet have the complete feature set of 4.4BSD ready to ship, the CSRG decided to do an interim release to get additional feedback and experiences on the two major new additions to the system. This [AT&T source-] licensed interim release was called 4.3BSD-Reno and occurred in early 1990. [my insertion] ... Closing the gap from the Networking Release 2 distribution to a fully functioning system did not take long. Within six months of the release, Bill Jolitz had written replacements for the six missing files. He promptly released a fully compiled and bootable system for the 386-based PC architecture which he called 386/BSD. (Networking Release 1 & 2 were not fee-licensed, but were not complete OSes, either. I don't understand their exact use. Did users just add a files from their AT&T distributions, apply patches, or what?) A summary of late Berkeley BSD history: The OS (the kernel) required obviously-AT&T-contaminated code (or the OS was left incomplete) until late 1991 when 386/BSD was released (from which NetBSD and FreeBSD were derived in 1992). The "Unix" lawsuit was settled in Jan'1994 and 4.4BSD was released in -lite ("free") and -encumbered ("USL source license" which I suppose means "fee-licensed") versions. Three more files had been removed and about 70 files got USL/Novell copyrights but BSD-type licenses. All BSD OSes restarted development from that version. Berkeley's CSRG stopped work on their versions after 4.4BSD-lite, Release 2 of June 1995. My conclusion, for now, is that the non-Berkeley parts of BSD was fee-licensed from soon (?) after the 1984 AT&T ruling until 1994, despite the fact (as I understand Terry) that the non-Berkeley parts were licensed to Berkeley under a Western Electric license which would have permitted no-fee redistribution, if someone would have been willing to push the issue. (I wonder if it didn't get some more restrictively AT&T-licensed code before and during that time, too.) If Network Release 1 is considered a BSD OS (a stretch, since it isn't even an OS, strictly speaking), then the period of fee licensing is reduced from soon (?) after 1984 to 1989. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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