Date: Tue, 8 Oct 2002 15:35:50 -0700 (PDT) From: "f.johan.beisser" <jan@caustic.org> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Congrats to Brett Glass for new BSD history article Message-ID: <20021008145226.K30424-100000@pogo.caustic.org> In-Reply-To: <ksk7ks65i7.7ks@localhost.localdomain>
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On 8 Oct 2002, Gary W. Swearingen wrote: > Yes I am, following the lead of copyright law and common English. If > only part of something is free, then that something is non-free. You > (and DES) said "BSD was always free" which is very different than "the > Berkeley portion of BSD was always free". BSD was always free. the AT&T code for UNIX was not. remember, BSD started as a set of extentions and improvements to AT&Ts UNIX, and it eventually evolved in to it's own OS. when AT&T realised it could make cash off of UNIX, it changed the licensing terms, and sued the University of California for distributing UNIX. > I suspect that there were many portions of BSD for which one couldn't > possibly separate into Berkeley and AT&T portions, so that there were > portions which the two simply had joint ownership of. Such portions > were licensed by AT&T and Berkeley under different licenses, and some > licensees had to pay license fees to use it, making BSD non-free for > most of it's existence and by no means "always free". yes, kind of. yes, there were portions of AT&T code, once those were purged, the BSD code no longer fell under the AT&T license, and could be distributed freely again. in the meanwhile, the plucky Linux kernel jumped out of the woodwork. > I see no need to spin the fact, sordid as it might seem to gnus. what spin? the facts are just that AT&T gave away UNIX, people took the code, made extentions to it, gave those away as BSD, then AT&T stopped giving away UNIX, but BSD was still being given away. seems simple enough. -------/ f. johan beisser /--------------------------------------+ http://caustic.org/~jan jan@caustic.org "John Ashcroft is really just the reanimated corpse of J. Edgar Hoover." -- Tim Triche To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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