[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo]

Theodore Ts'o <tytso at 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.

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!  ;)

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay