On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 10:20 AM, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:

Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

> The biggest problem with Jolitz's work seems to have been more social
> than anything else. The writeups from that era seem to indicate that
> the Jolitz's wanted to keep a much tighter control over things, and
> this discouraged collaboration and contributions, which led to the
> first of *BSD fragmentation/spin-offs, starting with FreeBSD and
> NetBSD.

Indeed. I've used NetBSD since it was called 386bsd 0.0, and the way I
remember it, we grabbed that when Jolitz made it available, and had an
Internet community playing with it and improving it. Patches were
accumulated, and sent back to Jolitz. Then he released 0.1, with none
of the patches from the 'net. Some of the more active people ported our
existing patches to that, and we kept on going. Again, patches were
sent back. When Jolitz released 0.2, again with no patches from the
Internet community included, it was decided to part ways, and start a
forked project on the 'net. This became NetBSD. After a short time, it
was obvious that there were two camps: one wanted to keep the OS
multi-platform, while the other felt it was smarter to ditch that in
favor of maximizing performance and utility on the Intel platform. The
latter group became the FreeBSD project.

Both NetBSD and FreeBSD emerged from the 'patchkit' efforts that would take the good accumulated patches from the net to 386BSD and apply them to try to cobble together some kind of distribution. It was after Jolitz refused to play ball with other people at all. It's unfortunate he was the one to bring 386BSD to market from the net2 distribution in many ways, since it spawned a Diaspora that's been a mixed blessing: A diversity of platforms has has lead to more experimentation. It's also lead to a bunch of duplicated effort when that experimentation lead to a system that made it hard to share.

Of course, Jolitz wasn't the only strong personality in the early days that had issues working with others, which also contributed to the Net/Free split, the later Open/Net split and the even later Free/Dragonfly split...

Then again, Linux is no paragon of people working together either... There's numerous examples where stupid technical things were done because of personality disputes (exhibit A: systemd, even Linus can't stop it).

And yes, the stupid lawsuit came at just the right time for the world to
adopt Linux instead of BSD, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. The
BSD community is doing just fine, thank you, and we still have the
better product, so there! ;)

I'm with you there, even if we have some denominational differences :)

Warner