On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: I agree.

On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: With the right license (BSD), I'd go so far as to saying there'd be no BSD 4.4, or if there was, it would have been rebased from the SunOS base... There were discussions between CSRG and Sun about Sun donating it's reworked VM and VFS to Berkeley to replace the Mach VM that was in there... Don't know the scope of these talks, or if they included any of the dozens of other areas that Sun improved from its BSD 4.3 base... The talks fell apart over the value of the code, if the rumors I've heard are correct. Warner

On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 01:58:29PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: Yup. Instead of the splintering we have had with *BSD, I think it would have drawn everyone in to work on that OS. I have regrets in my life. Not getting SunOS out there as open source is one of the big ones. I fought for it, perhaps harder than anyone else. Which perhaps makes me the bigger loser since I didn't win. The world would be a better place if that had happened. Linux is fine but it lacks what SunOS had.

You remember correctly: 'If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.' http://gondwanaland.com/meta/history/interview.html On Sun, Jan 8, 2017, at 08:28 AM, Angus Robinson wrote: >>> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com[1]> >>> wrote: >>>> Larry, had Sun open sourced SunOS, as you fought so hard to make >>>> happen, Linux might not have happened as it did. SunOS was really >>>> good. Chalk up another win for ATT! >>> >> >>> FWIW: I disagree. For details look at my discussion of rewriting >>> Linux in RUST[2] on quora. But a quick point is this .... Linux >>> original took off (and was successful) not because of GPL, but in >>> spite of it and later the GPL would help it. But it was not the GPL >>> per say that made Linux vs BSD vs SunOS et al. >> >>> What made Linux happen was the BSDi/UCB vs AT&T case. At the >>> time, a lot of hackers (myself included) thought the case was about >>> *copyright*. It was not, it was about *trade secret* and the ideas >>> around UNIX. * i.e.* folks like, we "mentally contaminated" with >>> the AT&T Intellectual Property. >> >>> When the case came, folks like me that were running 386BSD which >>> would later begat FreeBSD et al, got scared. At that time, *BSD >>> (and SunOS) were much farther along in the development and >>> stability. But .... may of us hought Linux would insulate us from >>> losing UNIX on cheap HW because their was not AT&T copyrighted code >>> in it. Sadly, the truth is that if AT&T had won the case, _*all >>> UNIX-like systems*_ would have had to be removed from the market in >>> the USA and EU [NATO-allies for sure]. >> >>> That said, the fact the *BSD and Linux were in the wild, would have >>> made it hard to enforce and at a "Free" (as in beer) price it may >>> have been hard to make it stick. But that it was a >>> misunderstanding of legal thing that made Linux "valuable" to us, >>> not the implementation. >> >>> If SunOS has been available, it would not have been any different. >>> It would have been thought of based on the AT&T IP, but trade secret >>> and original copyright. > >> Yes, it seems in retrospect that USL v BSDi basically killed Unix >> (in the sense that Linux is not a blood-relative of Unix). I >> remember someone quipping towards the late 90s, "the Unix wars are >> over. Linux won." > >> Perhaps an interesting area of speculation is, "what would the world >> have looked like if USL v BSDi hadn't happened *and* SunOS was opened >> to the world?" I think in that parallel universe, Linux wouldn't have >> made it particularly far: absent the legal angle, what would the >> incentive had been to work on something that was striving to >> basically be Unix, when really good Unix was already available? > > > -- Kay Parker kayparker(a)mailite.com Links: 1. https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich@gma… 2. https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linu… -- http://www.fastmail.com - IMAP accessible web-mail

On Sunday, 8 January 2017 at 15:51:06 -0500, Clem cole wrote: Given that the first person he mentions in the article is Bruce Evans, it's difficult to understand how he hadn't heard of it. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog(a)FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA

I can second that. At the time I was asking about an OS suitable for my brand-new 486 while I was at the U of Canterbury NZ, I was told I'd need to get an AT&T license for BSD, and those cost a king's ransom. Does anybody have copies of the kind of legal guff AT&T put these universities through? It would make interesting reading. Wesley Parish Quoting Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen(a)ieee.org>rg>: "I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand Sor, Method for Guitar "A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel Goldwyn

On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 1:32 AM, Arno Griffioen &lt;arno.griffioen(a)ieee.org&gt; wrote: ​A little strange statement... student did not have to buy it and Universities got it for $100 tape copying fee ( and were free to do with it at they wanted - i.e. "dead-fish license"). FYI: CMU made us sign a document of some type stating it was AT&T's IP to take the undergrad OS course in 1976, but they certainly did not try to keep the code under lock and key with a guard on the door. Also, the whole idea of the 1956 AT&T consent decree was that AT&T >>had<< to make the IP available -- by law (so they did - which is why they later lost the BSDi/UCB case). They were given a monopoly if the world access to their patents. Also by the late 1980s, early 1990's - i.e. Linus' time for early Linux, most Universities world wide were using Vaxen and Sun systems. On the Vaxen, then tended to have BSD which is what the 386 code was based. To get a copy of it you needed a BSD license and almost all Universities had them by that point in the USA and the EU. Hey were were having USENIX conferences hosted in the the EU pretty regularly, and lots of development. Your comment about not being "forthcoming" I get, as people that power often take a conservative approach if they are not sure. But the US Gov's deal with AT&T was certainly not supposed to have been that way. I just don't buy it that the code was not available to Linus. Linus' school had access to the code base. He has gone on record as saying he had used Sun systems there before he started hacking and they had BSD based Vaxen. I think it was purely and situation of "not knowing" who or how to ask. Not the it matters now. But it certainly made for a large fork, confusion and much unnecessary churn. Clem

On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 11:08 AM, ron minnich &lt;rminnich(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I'll second this. Larry mentioned earlier the USENIX "in-crowd" and I think that was a real thing (USENET cabal, anyone?). I was near a major American university at the time, kind of a student, and I couldn't easily get access to Unix source code (nor could any of the undergrad or grad students I knew). As I recall, no one had copies of the old stuff anymore (32/V and prior) and access to BSD source code was tightly controlled; we had an academic site license for SunOS source, but it was strictly on a "need-to-know" basis. You had to be part of the local "in-crowd" to get access to that code, and students weren't members of the "in-crowd." It wasn't particularly easy to build up the sufficient credibility to get into the club without access to source either, and they certainly weren't handing it out to everyone who asked. Further, my sense was that system administrators in big institutions were often hawks about things like that. There could be real academic consequences for trying to buck the system in this area, particularly for undergrads (or in my case, high school students taking courses). The ever-accurate Wikipedia says that 386BSD wasn't available until 1992 (and then not really usable until July of that year). But Torvalds had already announced his Linux project (by which point he had a running kernel and had ported a significant number of programs over) in August of 1991 and put it on an FTP server by September; nearly a full year before a usable version of 386BSD was available. The thing I wonder is why Linux didn't die off due to lack of networking once 386BSD came onto the scene: Linux didn't get TCP/IP until September of 1992 and then it was under heavy development until December, by which time 386BSD 0.1 was generally available (and would of course already have had networking). I suspect by that point two factors were at play: a) Linux had gathered significant momentum and b) USL v BSDi cause people to shy away from the BSD source base and embrace Linux as an unencumbered alternative. By '93ish, when NetBSD and FreeBSD were both real, there wouldn't have been a need for Linux, but by that time, it had had two years of exciting activity for a number of people: it's unlikely anyone just walked away from it because a technically better alternative came along. - Dan C.

Rico Pajarola &lt;rp(a)servium.ch&gt; wrote: Well, I did not say that it was easy and that every university did have source access, but universities that had people who have been interested in UNIX did usually try to get source access. It did take time to get it and I remember that TU-Berlin received the Svr2 sources when AT&T launched Svr3. In order to get SunOS source code, you needed to have a AT&T source license and another from Sun. This was close to impossible for a smaller company...... On the other side, Sun did give away parts of the SunOS source that was not based on AT&T code. If you have been a big OEM (and H.Berthold AG was a big OEM) you received what Sun believed was helpful for business. I e.g. received the keyboard driver in spring 1986 and I wrote the enhancements to support 155 keys from the Berthold keyboard and to switch layouts for different languages. In January 1986, I received a one sheet of paper description for a SCSI VME board that was made of a DMA chip and a few PALs. I wrote a SCSI driver and we demonstrated a SCSI interface to our high resolution scanner at the "Drupa" fair in April 1986 in Düsseldorf. The demo used a diskless client machine as I could either bind the Sun SCSI framework into the kernel or mine and then we could no longer access disks. Sun mamagers attended that fair and a few weeks later, I had access to the Sun SCSI driver framework and to Matthew Jacobs - the architect of that code. This resulted in my "scg" driver, the first SCSI pass through driver that I used to e.g. format disks while the kernel was running. Sun at that time had to boot a standalone program for disk formatting, but Sun did take my idea after I explained it to Matthew Jacobs. Even with these connections, I was not able to get a AT&T source license for a complete SunOS kernel source. This was because IIRC the AT&T license did cost 200000 $ for non-university entities and H.Berthold AG would not spend that much money for a source license. Here Horst Winterhoff helped and asked Bill Joy whether he could give me the sources for my dimploma thesis. So you are right, you had to be somehow connected to the right people to get source access. But people who have been interested usually have been connected...even though the world was harder to explore these days. Jörg -- EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/ URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

On 2017-01-05 22:56, Dan Cross wrote: Drawing a bit of a blank here, but I just can't shake this image of a raving Richard Stallman demanding it should be called GNU/SunOS. Then again, it might have freed up enough resources for an x86 as/cc with a BSD licence in the early 90s.