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

[Warner Losh]

Thanks Clem.

One minor clarification.  Jordan and the patchkit work did predate NetBSD.
However, the NetBSD project formed a little before the FreeBSD project that
grew out of the patchkit days. Jordan didn't get that moving until NetBSD
made rumblings... it was still a time that you heard a lot of what was
going on by word of mouth, not so much by postings and email...

The OpenBSD split was years later... and a complicated mix of personality
conflicts and technical differences. But in many ways it was a smaller
split since for a long time they were almost 100% compatible at the driver
level (something you could never really say about net and free).

Warner

On Mon, Jan 20, 2020, 10:21 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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