[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 09:03:09AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 4, 2018 at 6:53 AM, Harald Arnesen <harald at skogtun.org> wrote:
> > Didn't Linus say that if there had been an affordable BSD available at
> > the time, he wouldn't have started the Linux project?
> 
> ???You need to add >>and that he knew about and had access<<.
> 
> The truth is there was and it had networking and X windows already.  Bill
> Jolitz had completed the original 386 BSD port (and actually started to
> publish about it in DDJ).  The 386BSD sources were available to all BSD
> licensees 

But that's not what Linus (or anyone) wanted.  They wanted it under some
sort of clearly open source license.  None of us knew what the penalty
was for violating the license, we just knew that at one end was us, with
no means to fight a court battle, and at the other end were big entities
that viewed court battles as a cost of doing business.

I didn't know at the time that Bell Labs had to license their stuff as
part of the monopoly deal, that was something I learned here.  So I, and
I suspect lots of other people, most people, the best people :) all 
thought that our access to the source was at the whim of AT&T, it could
be taken away at any time.

That wasn't the rosy "everybody who wanted it could get it" world that
Clem lived in.  Clem was in a special club, heck, he was president of
Usenix at one point, that's sort of the epitome of being in the club.
Not being in the club was a far less rosy place and it made perfect
sense for Linus to start Linux.  I'd argue that if he hadn't, someone
else would have.

Stupid lawsuit means we're mostly running a Unix-clone, not actual Unix.

--lm