[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Kirk McKusick]

> Date: Fri, 6 Jan 2017 20:09:18 -0700
> From: Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>
> To: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at lemis.com>
> Cc: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
>         <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] SunOS vs Linux
> 
>> On Friday,  6 January 2017 at  9:27:36 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
>>
>> I think that if SunOS 4 had been released to the world at the right
>> time, the free BSDs wouldn't have happened in the way they did either;
>> they would have evolved intimately coupled with SunOS.
> 
> 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

Since I was involved with the negotiations with Sun, I can speak
directly to this discussion. The 4.2BSD VM was based on the
implementation done by Ozalp Babaoglu that was incorporated into
the BSD kernel by Bill Joy. It was very VAX centric and was not
able to handle shared read-write mappings.

Before Bill Joy left Berkeley for Sun, he wrote up the API
specification for the mmap interface but did not finish an
implementation. At Sun, he was very involved in the implementation
though did not write much (if any) of the code for the SunOS VM.

The original plan was to ship 4.2BSD with an mmap implementation,
but with Bill's departure that did not happen. So, it fell to me
to sort out how to get it into 4.3BSD. CSRG did not have the
resources to do it from scratch (there were only three of us).
So, I researched existing implementations and it came down to
the SunOS and MACH implementations. The obvious choice was SunOS,
so I approached Sun about contributing their implementation to
Berkeley. We had had a lot of cooperation about exchanging bug
fixes, so this is not as crazy as it seems.

The Sun engineers were all for it, and convinced their managers
to push my request up the hierarchy. Skipping over lots of drama
it eventually got to Scott McNealy who was dubious, but eventually
bought into the idea and cleared it. At that point it went to the
Sun lawyers to draw up the paperwork. The lawyers came back and
said that "giving away SunOS technology could lead to a stockholder
lawsuit concerning the giving away of stockhoder assets." End of
discussion. We had to go with MACH.

	Kirk McKusick

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Ron Natalie]

> The lawyers came back and said that "giving away SunOS technology could
lead to a stockholder lawsuit concerning the giving away of stockholder
assets." End of discussion. We had to go with MACH.

Gosh, this strikes a nerve.    The engineers at our company all had access
to the license generator (which we wrote).   The thing had an easy way to
kick out a 30-day demo license, so we always used that.    When we got
bought by a publicly traded company, they determined that the license keys
were an essential stockholder asset and took the license generator away from
us.   We all just edited out the code that checked the license out of the
program.   In fact, I believe at least one major release went out with an
undocumented environment variable that disabled the licensing system which
probably was a much bigger risk to stockholder assets than letting the
engineers issue themselves demo licenses.

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com
<https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich at gmail.com>>
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
<https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linux-kernel-in-Rust-when-the-language-is-stable>
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.

Clem
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[ron minnich]

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On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 9:09 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:



​FWIW:  I disagree​.  For details look at my discussion of  rewriting Linux
in RUST
<https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linux-kernel-in-Rust-when-the-language-is-stable>
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.



Not disagreeing with you all, but: I guess it depends on where you were. In
1994-6 I worked with a friend at IBM Watson on getting netbsd going on
powerpc. Linux killed that effort. It turned out that the BSD license would
allow different parts of IBM to hold back code from other parts of IBM and
still ship product. The GPL made such behavior much, much harder. The
engineers inside IBM preferred sharing code, and the GPL made that
possible. At least that's how it was explained to me.

This also proved true for some Agencies in the US Gov't as early as 1993.
See this:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/LICENSE.SRC. I
was there for the internal discussion which began in 1992.

Weirdly enough, though, sometimes lawyers prefer the GPL. On our third
foray into getting a sane license for Plan 9 in 2013, it turned out Lucent
legal preferred GPL to BSD. Go figure. I don't understand lawyers most
times.
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Dan Cross]

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On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com
> <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich at gmail.com>>
> 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
> <https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linux-kernel-in-Rust-when-the-language-is-stable>
> 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?

Ah well.

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 10:56:08PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> 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?

Yeah, that was what I was trying to say, you said it better.

> Ah well.

Indeed.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Clem Cole]

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

> 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?


I agree.
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday,  6 January 2017 at  9:27:36 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
>> I agree.

I think that if SunOS 4 had been released to the world at the right
time, the free BSDs wouldn't have happened in the way they did either;
they would have evolved intimately coupled with SunOS.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger grog at 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
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> On Friday,  6 January 2017 at  9:27:36 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> 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?
>>
>>> I agree.
>
> I think that if SunOS 4 had been released to the world at the right
> time, the free BSDs wouldn't have happened in the way they did either;
> they would have evolved intimately coupled with SunOS.

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

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Jan 06, 2017 at 08:09:18PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2017 at 7:58 PM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> > On Friday,  6 January 2017 at  9:27:36 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> >> On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> 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?
> >>
> >>> I agree.
> >
> > I think that if SunOS 4 had been released to the world at the right
> > time, the free BSDs wouldn't have happened in the way they did either;
> > they would have evolved intimately coupled with SunOS.
> 
> 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.

So as much as I know, I was not privy to these talks.  I didn't even know
they were happening.

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Larry McVoy]

On Sat, Jan 07, 2017 at 01:58:29PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> On Friday,  6 January 2017 at  9:27:36 -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 5, 2017 at 10:56 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> 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?
> >
> >> I agree.
> 
> I think that if SunOS 4 had been released to the world at the right
> time, the free BSDs wouldn't have happened in the way they did either;
> they would have evolved intimately coupled with SunOS.

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.

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Angus Robinson]

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I think at one point Linus said that if he had known or if 386bsd was
available he would not have started Linux

(If I remember correctly)

On 6 Jan 2017 05:57, "Dan Cross" <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com
>> <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich at gmail.com>>
>> 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
>> <https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linux-kernel-in-Rust-when-the-language-is-stable>
>> 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?
>
> Ah well.
>
>         - Dan C.
>
>
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Kay Parker]

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:

> I think at one point Linus said that if he had known or if 386bsd was
> available he would not have started Linux
> 

> (If I remember correctly)

> 

> On 6 Jan 2017 05:57, "Dan Cross" <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

>> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>>> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at 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?
>> 

>> Ah well.

>> 

>>         - Dan C.

>> 



--

  Kay Parker

  kayparker at mailite.com






Links:

  1. https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich at gmail.com
  2. https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-Linux-kernel-in-Rust-when-the-language-is-stable

-- 
http://www.fastmail.com - IMAP accessible web-mail

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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Clem cole]

But It was (check the dates listed in the DDJ articles and the dates of Linus's first email).  He just did not know the FTP path to down load it.   Which is sort of funny because it was not particularly secret between most BSD users.  Jordan was pretty liberal at giving it to people if he believed they had access to a BSD license which just about anyone at a university (like Linus was at the time). 

Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Jan 8, 2017, at 1:02 PM, Kay Parker <kayparker at mailite.com> wrote:
> 
> 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:
>> I think at one point Linus said that if he had known or if 386bsd was available he would not have started Linux 
>> 
>> (If I remember correctly)
>> 
>> On 6 Jan 2017 05:57, "Dan Cross" <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> 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  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?
>> 
>> Ah well.
>> 
>>         - Dan C.
>> 
> 
> --
>   Kay Parker
>   kayparker at mailite.com
> 
> 
> -- 
> http://www.fastmail.com - IMAP accessible web-mail
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Sunday,  8 January 2017 at 15:51:06 -0500, Clem cole wrote:
>
> But It was (check the dates listed in the DDJ articles and the dates
> of Linus's first email).  He just did not know the FTP path to down
> 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.

Greg
--
Sent from my desktop computer.
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See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Arno Griffioen]

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.

[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.
>  



"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

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Joerg Schilling]

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Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen at ieee.org> wrote:

> Outside the USA such BSD (or other *IX) source-code access on universities 
> and technical schools was not common is my personal experience.

Regardless of where wou look, it was depending on whether the responsible 
people did the burocratic work. It has been available inside TU-Berlin.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Clem Cole]

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On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 1:32 AM, Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen at ieee.org>
wrote:

> Buying a BSD license was way outside a student's budget at that time
> and universities were not very forthcoming in giving them access.
>

​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
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[ron minnich]

At the same time, I think some sort of GPL'ed kernel was inevitable for any
number of reasons.

Also, I worked closely with one of the principals in Linux back then (i.e.
1991) and his experience was that the linux community was way more open to
his contributions than the bsd community. Not surprising, linux was pretty
much a clean sheet. I expect that was a factor as well.
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 11:08 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com> wrote:

> At the same time, I think some sort of GPL'ed kernel was inevitable for
> any number of reasons.
>
> Also, I worked closely with one of the principals in Linux back then (i.e.
> 1991) and his experience was that the linux community was way more open to
> his contributions than the bsd community. Not surprising, linux was pretty
> much a clean sheet. I expect that was a factor as well.
>

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.
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Rico Pajarola]

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On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 4:57 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 1:32 AM, Arno Griffioen <arno.griffioen at ieee.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Buying a BSD license was way outside a student's budget at that time
>> and universities were not very forthcoming in giving them access.
>>
>
> ​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").
>

Now stop picking on Joerg already. Not every university was invested in
Unix. In practice Unix source was pretty much unobtainable if you happened
to live outside of the "Unix bubble".

I grew up and went to school/university in Switzerland, and getting access
to UNIX source was nothing but a crazy pipe dream at the time. I don't even
know if my university had a source license (I can't imagine they didn't),
but in any case it wasn't something that they would let you use as a normal
student. None of my inquiries at the time resulted in anything that would
allow me to get access to Unix source. If the university had it, this
wasn't public information, and they didn't share. I couldn't prove that my
university had a license, and I had no way to get the actual bits. This was
the 90ies btw.

We had Sun workstations (Solaris, without source), Windows (blech, but
funnily enough there were source kits. No, you couldn't get access to that
either), and of course the locally developed Oberon machines (Lilith) and
later Bluebottle. I also saw some VAXen running VMS (on their way out).
Some departments had RS/6000s, Alphas and SGIs and other random stuff (do I
need to mention that they came without source?). I've never seen any trace
of Unix source or even BSD.

We all longed for some Unix that was available for personal use, and Linux
absolutely filled that gap. While 386BSD was theoretically available, it
came out almost a year after Linus announced his first version of Linux.
386BSD seemed to have a lot of strings attached, and it wasn't really
usable until FreeBSD/NetBSD. By that time, Linux had gained a lot of
momentum already.

Rico
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[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Joerg Schilling]

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Rico Pajarola <rp at servium.ch> wrote:

> Now stop picking on Joerg already. Not every university was invested in
> Unix. In practice Unix source was pretty much unobtainable if you happened
> to live outside of the "Unix bubble".
>
> I grew up and went to school/university in Switzerland, and getting access
> to UNIX source was nothing but a crazy pipe dream at the time. I don't even
> know if my university had a source license (I can't imagine they didn't),
> but in any case it wasn't something that they would let you use as a normal
> student. None of my inquiries at the time resulted in anything that would
> allow me to get access to Unix source. If the university had it, this
> wasn't public information, and they didn't share. I couldn't prove that my
> university had a license, and I had no way to get the actual bits. This was
> the 90ies btw.

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 at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling at fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
 URL:  http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Wesley Parish]

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I remember reading the same. I just can't remember where I read it. I'll try to track it down.

Wesley Parish 

Quoting Angus Robinson <angus at fairhaven.za.net>:

> I think at one point Linus said that if he had known or if 386bsd was
> available he would not have started Linux
> 
> (If I remember correctly)
> 
> On 6 Jan 2017 05:57, "Dan Cross" <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 11:17 AM, ron minnich <rminnich at gmail.com
> >>
> <https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=rminnich at gmail.com>>
> 
> >> 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
> >>
> <https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-possible-advantageous-to-rewrite-the-
> Linux-kernel-in-Rust-when-the-language-is-stable>
> >> 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?
> >
> > Ah well.
> >
> > - Dan C.
> >
> >
>  



"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

[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[Jacob Goense]

On 2017-01-05 22:56, Dan Cross wrote:
> 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?"

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.