[TUHS] Re: Fwd: [simh] Announcing the Open SIMH project

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 11:20:58PM +0200, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS wrote:
> Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> writes:
> 
> > Some of us on this list remember the original BDSi fight, the 386BSD
> > to FreeBSD, then NetBSD and OpenBSD (I was friends with both sides of
> > many of these wars).
> 
> Irrelevant to the topic, I know, but I'd just like to point out, since
> you call these things "wars", that NetBSD grew out of 386bsd in a quiet,
> friendly fashion, and then FreeBSD out of NetBSD just as quietly.  (BSDi
> growing out of 386bsd was a completely separate affair that I know very
> little about, and the OpenBSD fork from NetBSD was mostly just a
> personal animosity thing, Theo de Raadt having made enemies in both the
> NetBSD and FreeBSD camps -- but it has left no bad blood behind it.)
> 
> In other words, no wars that I know of.

Umm, were you there?  I was a BSD guy before I turned to Linux and I
turned to Linux because of those wars.  There is no good reason to have
{386,Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}bsd other than, as Linus stated, "Nobody
could decide who would drive the big red fire truck so now they each
have their own toy fire truck that they drive around".

BSD would have won if there was a Linus for BSD.  There was not so you
got all this replicated effort, the BSD community effectively divided
and conquered themselves.

It was, and is, a train wreck.  It's the poster child for how not to
manage a project.

I did BitKeeper for Linus because he refused to use any crappy source
management solution and people like Dave Miller were threatening to
fork just so they had some solution.  I did that because a forked Linux
would turn into the same mess of {386,Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}bsd which
is obviously not remotely close to ideal.  Far from it.

I lived through all of that, I was an active kernel developer at Sun, 
SGI and elsewhere.  I would have loved to have seen the SunOS VM system
ported to 4.x BSD and that been the default answer for a kernel.  Instead
we got Linux, which has it's positive points for sure, but it also has
decided to let every feature imaginable into the kernel.