Date: 19 Apr 1997 19:44:08 +0100 From: Paul Richards <paul@originat.demon.co.uk> To: mike allison <mallison@konnections.com> Cc: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy@hub.org>, Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu>, jack@diamond.xtalwind.net, mark@quickweb.com, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On Holy Wars, and a Plea for Peace [sorry Danny, wherever you are, but the title fits]... Message-ID: <87ohbaont3.fsf@originat.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: mike allison's message of Sun, 20 Apr 1997 12:12:13 -0700 References: <Pine.NEB.3.96.970419143222.4592I-100000@thelab.hub.org> <87iv1isxpd.fsf@originat.demon.co.uk> <335A6A8D.11FDA5F1@konnections.com>
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mike allison <mallison@konnections.com> writes: > Paul: > > I wrote and remember that NET/2 BSD was attached by USL/NOVELL at this > very time when they sued BSDI. I think this REALLY prompted the Linux > movement because NET/2 had been released for a short period and there > was a taste for free unix. Torvalds fed this market with his idea for a > free independent Unix (and some help with his homework, no doubt). > > But I think BSD COULDN'T take off, not Didn't... That's certainly a significant factor but I don't think it's as critical as it appeared. No-one in the BSD community really believed BSD was going to be killed by the court case and FreeBSD and NetBSD both had well established camps before the lawsuit hit us. It held up a release for some 6 months since we had to throw away the 1.x lineage and do a 2.0 from scratch from 4.4lite but in the meantime there was a growing following of FreeBSD based on the 1.x lineage which we were still hacking on right up to the switch to 4.4. I think where the court case did make a difference is that Linus and the Linux crowd made a big deal about the fact that BSD was not really "free" because of encumbered code and a lot of people who just wanted to try an i386 unix for the first time weren't aware of what was really going on and opted for Linux because of all the hype they were throwing out. I think the main reason that Linux is now so huge is because it caught on amongst DOS users who wanted to try unix and the BSD* crowd never really made any effort to promote BSD in the DOS community because frankly the BSD community was never interested in winning them over. There were a lot of disgruntled Windows users who had advanced to the point of being hackers and wanted something that worked better and Linux filled that vacuum. If Microsoft had got NT out sooner that might not have happened and if BSD users had made the effort we could probably have won them over to BSD but a lot of what was said at the time was true, BSD was a bit of a privileged club of unix wizards and Linus offered a much more appealing community to people who didn't really understand unix but wanted to see what it was all about. I remember the early days of 386BSD and Free|NetBSD and we were more intersted in talking about new VM systems than teaching unix newbies why `dir` didn't work. -- Dr Paul Richards, Originative Solutions Ltd. Internet: paul@originat.demon.co.uk Phone: 0370 462071 (UK Mobile)
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