[TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

[Clem Cole]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 10:52 PM George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote:

> It does me no credit, that I initially reacted very badly to 386BSD,
> and the initial {Net,Free,Open} situation.
>
First, be careful.   What we sometimes call 386BSD as a 'release' started
just as a port of NET2 to the 386 based 'commodity' hardware platform.  The
history is that in the late 1970s/early 80s Bill Jolitz was working for Nat
Semi and ported BSD 4.1, to a multibus based NS16032 board that NS had
built, which was similar to the Stanford University Network (SUN) terminal
what had a 68000.  He eventually built a 'luggable' using that and updated
to the port to 4.2++.   He (and Lynn I believe) started a company to sell
that hardware/software solution and for whatever reason, it did not really
take off.

At some point, he got his hands on a 386based PC (Compaq I think) and
started to move his port over to that system.   A number of people helped
him (for instance I did a bunch of the AT/disk controller work as I had
access to the WD design documents for another consulting gig I had at the
time - Bill mentioned this in the articles BTW).

Bill and Lynn's NS16032 and 386 code went back to the CSRG 'masters' -
although how and that happened was never completely clear to me. The SCCS
deltas tell at least part of the story.     Bill managed to make a bootable
image that mostly installed on a PC/386 as the minicomputer versions did
from the formal release.   The ftp area of ucbvax had all of these bootable
images available for download such as one for an HP 68K system and I think
the DEC VAX and PMAX, the CCG system and a few others IIRC.  As I have said
in other messages if you were a UCB licensee you had the passwords to
look/download from that area.    Bill placed that version in the same ftp
area.  The 386 based port went viral at least with the UCB licensees.  (In
fact, if Linus had known about it, theoretically he could have used it
also.   His university was licensee, but as Larry McVoy likes to point, not
all the schools were as free with the IP, so I will not go down that
rathole).

The bottom line is that many people (like me on a Wyse386) started with
Bill's original port; including the BSDi founders.

When Jolitz and BSDi went separate ways, Jolitiz continued to update the
CSRG 386 based tarball (to an extent).  One of the issues was there
originally was attempt to keep the different architectural versions of BSD
in sync ( to a point and NetBSD does yet exist).    A number of people were
unhappy and the speed, depth *etc*. of the 386 version, most notably Jordan
Hubbard and FreeBSD was born.  The two biggest issues Jordan wanted to fix,
was easier install and a bit wider support for more hardware (again I sent
Jordan the changes to FreeBSN 1x for the Wyse and a couple of NCR boxes).
The NetBSD project would birth from the original ideals of CSRG and trying
to keep everything the same but that's still in the future.




>
> I found all this "fragmentation" pretty hard to understand. -BSDI felt
> like it had occupied the space, and I couldn't entirely understand
> what was going on, or why any of it mattered.
>
See below....




> What I think I missed (didn't understand) was how draining support was
> for Berkeley, and in the absence of a sugar daddy
>
Herein is the issue that many people on the sidelines missed.

CRSG was a large project and funded a lot of work at UCB in EECS. It never
funded me (I was funded by Tektronix, HP, DEC *et al*), but that project
did a fund a number of students.  However, at some point CSRG stopped being
a research project and started being a support project for DARPA.  There
was also a good deal of resentment by some groups in EECS that were not
getting DARPA funding.
I'll not say if that was good or bad but I will say that it did cause great
deal consternation at UCB within the department and many people doing more
formal research were not happy.    In the end, the EECS Department mothers
and fathers along with the Dean *et al*, decided to stop/end the CSRG
project.  Many people who were directly or indirectly working on BSD, like
Mary Ann and myself, had graduated and had since left.  Bob Kridle had
formed Mt. Xinu, Asa Romberger has formed Unisoft, Joy had left/was leaving
for Sun, *etc*.    So the question remained what to do with CSRG.   As to
what everyone would do, became every person for her/himself and as we know
some of the folks, along with a few folks from the USENIX community formed
BSDi.

As was noted elsewhere, NetBSD would eventually be formed by volunteers to
keep the different ports alive (in fact much of the efforts was from folks
not at UCB), but that was still in the offing.   Remember, while CSRG
itself was not a research project, a lot of people around the world were
using the BSD code base for their own research.  The whole idea of NetBSD
was to create a uniform platform that people could compare things.  So, the
question of how that was to come about or do any work on BSD if DARPA was
not paying the bills, was still an open one.  But, the idea that would
eventually create FreeBSD, was supporting a pure commodity *solution for
day-to-day use, not as a research platform*. [I'll leave off the later
OpenBSD/NetBSD fork by Theo here as it has little to do with the question].

BSDi had a similar/same goal of producing something like SunOS/VMS *etc* but
supported on commodity hardware.  That solution was to sell it and using
the revenues from the support contract, be able to pay people to do that
work.  As I said and in some other messages, it is noted that Bill Jolitz
wanted something more FOSS.   Truth is BSDi code was 'open source' but it
took a $1K license to *get the source from them*.

In the end, the real problem was not the infighting between the different
BSD camps, but AT&T, who wanted the entire pie.  Clearly, their executives
saw anything other than their complete control of the UNIX IP as a threat.
Hence the court case, the eventually AT&T/Sun relationship *etc*...

Your lack of 'sugar daddy,' really comes back to that.   There were few
people at the time that could pay the bills.  Until then DARPA had been
it.  I do not know if DARPA wanted out or if another group could have been
formed that could take over CSRG.  I did have discussions with Rob over a
beer that at least the thought had crossed the BSDi folks mind, that once
started; they would apply for a DARPA contract.

At the time had blow up, I was a consultant and I personally was
considering what I was going to do next and if they had had a real future,
the talks with Rob might have gotten more serious.   My wife wanted me to
stop being independent if we were to start a family (I would join Locus
instead).

BTW: I was in an interesting position as I was friends with all of the
different sides in the war/original fight.  Like Jolitz, I wanted to see
what we now call a 'FOSS' release of BSD.   But like Rob, I knew it was
going to take some revenue stream to make it happen/continue the support.
  In the end, the AT&T legal mess blew it all up.   BSDi ended up failing
and Jordan's work stayed around.

BTW: what pays for Linux development these days by number of 'committers
salary' is Intel (#1), IBM (#2), then a load of other firms including the
different distros.  But for *any* platform to be successful and actually
continue to be used in the market, someone has to pay the salaries of some
set of professional programmers to do the work.

That said when AT&T injoined BSDi and UCB a lot of people (myself included)
started to hack on Linux.  But just think if AT&T had actually won the case
and courts decided UNIX was allowed to be a trade secret, then Linux and
all of the UNIX 'clones' would have been in violation.

No matter what flavor of UNIX you like, we are all in debt to UCB and BSDi
for settling the IP argument.  The court was clear, the >>ideas<< behind
UNIX (*a.k.a.* the intellectual property) came from Ken, Dennis and friends
at AT&T and *they did own it.*   But because of the 1956 consent decree
that published the ideas and the moment the ideas were published, we all
can now >>use<< them.  The provenance of the source code does not relate to
the provenance of the idea, so* the source code itself does not define what
UNIX is or is not.  *

I bring this all up in hopes to try to close this rat hole of Linux, *vs*.
*BSD.   Like editors, we all have our own favorites.  That's cool, we don't
want one thing to be forced down our throat.  Having a choice is what is
good.   And what I value, Larry or Jon may not necessarily like.   Most of
us if not all on this list probably want something that approximates Ken
and Dennis's original ideas not what IBM, DEC, CDC were trying to make us
use in the old days or what Microsoft calls a system today.

The discussion of how we got there and what people valued at the time is
useful so we can try to remember the history and learn from it; but getting
into right/wrong, good/bad, or you could have had this is a tad tiresome;
IMO.
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