[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Wesley Parish]

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 at ieee.org>:

> On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 02:00:22PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > > load it. Which is sort of funny because it was not particularly
> > > secret between most BSD users.
> > 
> > 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.
> 
> Have to keep in mind that Linus was at the time of course a student in 
> Finland, so outside the USA.
> 
> Outside the USA such BSD (or other *IX) source-code access on
> universities 
> and technical schools was not common is my personal experience.
> 
> At that time I was a student too and apart from MINIX there really was
> little to no *IX source access available to anyone (BSD or otherwise)
> unless 
> for very specific research applications and needing to sign all sorts of
> NDA 
> stuff.
> 
> Buying a BSD license was way outside a student's budget at that time 
> and universities were not very forthcoming in giving them access.
> 
> As a result MINIX was actually making quite a few strides to get more 
> complex, but Andrew Tanenbaum always actively resisted turning it into a
> 
> 'production' system as he wanted to retain it as an educational tool 
> (and the license agreement was quite limited to this purpose) pushing a
> 
> lot of european hackers towards this initially very rudimentary minix 
> userland-compatible new little kernel made by some finnish dude ;)
> 
> Quite a few strong discussions between Linus and Andrew at the time 
> on Usenet in comp.os.minix about the monolithic vs. microkernel
> ideas.
> 
> 							Bye, Arno.
>  



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