[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Dan Stromberg]

IMO:
1) It kinda did catch on, in the form of macOS, but there was a time
when it was nearly dead as the major vendors moved to System V.  For
some reason, Sun was the last major vendor to make the move, but they
caught most of the flack.
2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit.  At
the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally.
3) Linux got a reputation as an OS you had to be an expert to install,
so lots of people started it to install it to "prove themselves".
This was sort of true back when Linux came as 2 floppy images, but
didn't remain true for very long.
4) I believe the SCO lawsuit "against Linux" was too little, too late
to kill Linux's first mover advantage in the opensource *ix
department.
5) I think FreeBSD's ports and similar huge-source-tree approaches
didn't work out as well Linux developers contributing their changes
upstream.

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 5:13 PM, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:

> IMO:
> 1) It kinda did catch on, in the form of macOS,

​agreed...​



> but there was a time
> when it was nearly dead as the major vendors moved to System V.  For
> some reason, Sun was the last major vendor to make the move, but they
> caught most of the flack.
>
​This I disagree - Sun was the last.  HP-UX to this day is a BSD based
kernel with System V interfaces.   Tru64 was OSF/1 - ney Mach 2.5 ney BSD +
CMU and IBM, was it's own thing which was a combination of BSD, System III
and System V salted.    You're right that folks >>shipped<< using a SVR3
>>license<< but don't confuse the license with the kernel technology.​



> 2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit.  At
> the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally.
>
​Yes, I explore this in depth in my latest paper.    Al biet we thought it
was safer for an incorrect reason and if AT&T had won, Linux would have
technically had to be removed from the market.   Although, in practice, I'm
not really sure how that would have worked out. But if AT&T had won, all
>>UNIX based<< technology (the IP) - which Linux was just one example​ -
would have had to go away.   The suit was about >> trade secrets<< not
copyright.

I really believe this is/was the key item.   It's certainly why I started
using Linux and I know a number of others that did the same.




> 3) Linux got a reputation as an OS you had to be an expert to install,
> so lots of people started it to install it to "prove themselves".
> This was sort of true back when Linux came as 2 floppy images, but
> didn't remain true for very long.
>
​Hmmm... possibly.  I never saw or thought about it that way, but I was
never trying to prove myself.   But I take your word for it.  ​




> 4) I believe the SCO lawsuit "against Linux" was too little, too late
> to kill Linux's first mover advantage in the opensource *ix
> department.
>
By that time - the damage was done.​  I really don't think this has any
effect on BSD one way or the other.




> 5) I think FreeBSD's ports and similar huge-source-tree approaches
> didn't work out as well Linux developers contributing their changes
> upstream.
>
​Hmmm.. BSD has a similar scheme and in fact, Linux took a lot from
FreeBSD​ in the ideas of install, ports *etc*.  In time, I think they
surpassed it.

So I come back, if the original BSDi/UCB vs. AT&T suit had not occurred, it
would have been a BSD world.   But people like me got scared and even
though BSD/386 vs Linux 0.99 was not even a fair comparison (BSD had
networking, a window manager, did not crash - basically was a complete
system).   Linux was good enough with enough solid UNIX hacker making it
complete it quickly took over.   As I say in the paper, it is a
classic Christensen style disruption.

ᐧ
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 3:13 PM, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:

> 5) I think FreeBSD's ports and similar huge-source-tree approaches
> didn't work out as well Linux developers contributing their changes
> upstream.
>

I think you confuse what ports was supposed to do. It was supposed to be
"make these patches NOW to make the software available to users" paired
with "submit the patches upstream to ease future support burdens". But the
latter didn't happen often enough at times, especially as people moved on
from the FreeBSD project and complex software became unsupported. It's
really no different than what all the distributions have to do on Linux,
but had a different bias for forcing the question than FreeBSD did in the
early days. That's largely changed, and has mostly worked out....

The bigger issue with 'large trees' is that there was no convenient, binary
packaged way to subset. Having everything in one tree avoids much of the
version chasing that you have with Linux packages that the package set
maintainers have to grapple with...

Warner
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Pete Wright]

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On 02/06/2018 14:44, Warner Losh wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 3:13 PM, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com 
> <mailto:drsalists at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     5) I think FreeBSD's ports and similar huge-source-tree approaches
>     didn't work out as well Linux developers contributing their changes
>     upstream.
>
>
> I think you confuse what ports was supposed to do. It was supposed to 
> be "make these patches NOW to make the software available to users" 
> paired with "submit the patches upstream to ease future support 
> burdens". But the latter didn't happen often enough at times, 
> especially as people moved on from the FreeBSD project and complex 
> software became unsupported. It's really no different than what all 
> the distributions have to do on Linux, but had a different bias for 
> forcing the question than FreeBSD did in the early days. That's 
> largely changed, and has mostly worked out....
>
> The bigger issue with 'large trees' is that there was no convenient, 
> binary packaged way to subset. Having everything in one tree avoids 
> much of the version chasing that you have with Linux packages that the 
> package set maintainers have to grapple with...
>
I can give a hardy "second" to this statement.  Having to maintain some 
non-trivial in-house packages on Linux distro's as well as on FreeBSD 
really drove this point home for me.  For example, the LOE was 
tremendous to support a Python version which was not supported by RedHat 
for example, not to mention the ongoing effort to keep the primary 
packages and their dependencies up to date was a major challenge as 
well.  Working on the ports tree was much nicer in this regard as it 
allowed me to reuse work done by others.

Having said that it certainly feel that since FreeBSD did not have a 
good story precompiled package management (as opposed to yum, apt, etc.) 
was a real detriment to wider adoption to aspiring hackers. Between 
pkgin/pkgsrc and the new pkg too in FreeBSD I feel they are much better 
positioned for people who just want to install software and get to the 
job at hand.

-pete

-- 
Pete Wright
pete at nomadlogic.org
@nomadlogicLA

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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Derek Fawcus]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 02:13:51PM -0800, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> This was sort of true back when Linux came as 2 floppy images, but
> didn't remain true for very long.

Well I remember starting with the 0.12 root + boot disks,  but the MCC
distribution (4 or 8 1.44M floppies?) became available not too long after.

At the time a colleague and I had been considering coughing up for
the BSDi distribution, but found Linux so played with it instead.

DF

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Dave Horsfall]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2018, Derek Fawcus wrote:

> At the time a colleague and I had been considering coughing up for the 
> BSDi distribution, but found Linux so played with it instead.

It would've been early Linux for me, but some personal issues stopped me 
from actually doing it (all I had to do was to collect the box -- a 386 -- 
that someone else had done for me) otherwise I would've learned to loathe 
Penguin/OS that much earlier :-)

As it was, $BOSS paid for my BSDi source licence, and when WinDriver 
bought them out and suppressed it I went to FreeBSD instead (after a brief 
tangle with some pompous OpenBSD jerks).

FreeBSD is still my main server (an ancient P4 at the moment, with a 
massive 512MB of memory; it used to be a Celery w/ 128MB) with MacBook and 
Debian clients.  And I really must repair the keyboard on the EeePC 701 
(running EeeBuntu) some day...

-- 
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU)  "Those who don't understand security will suffer."

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 02:13:51PM -0800, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> 2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit.  At
> the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally.

At the time of the AT&T lawsuit, most of the people who would be
interested in using a Un*x-like system on their personal x86 systems
probably wouldn't have been worried about their own personal legal
liability.  The decision of corporations to use Linux was well *after*
the AT&T lawsuit was resolved.

The lawsuit have suppressed the willingness of the 386BSD's to
advertise what they had --- I had no idea 386BSD was far as advanced
as it was, because I didn't happen to have been at that magic BOF
where word was apparently passed around on the down low.  But that's a
little bit different, and more subtle, than just saying "safer bet
legally".

> 3) Linux got a reputation as an OS you had to be an expert to install,
> so lots of people started it to install it to "prove themselves".
> This was sort of true back when Linux came as 2 floppy images, but
> didn't remain true for very long.

Something to remember is that in early 90's, floppy disks was the only
affordable way hobbiists to get OS's installed on x86 systems.  Even
OS/2 as distributed from IBM / Microsoft came on 30+ floppy disks.  In
1990, CD-R recording system cost $35,000 (and dollars were bigger back
then).  In 1992, the price had dropped to $10-12k, and it wasn't until
1995 that he first CD-R system under $1000 was available.

So I would argue that Linux was *easier* to bootstrap than
NetBSD/FreeBSD during that era.  The fact that we could shrink a
kernel and a root file system down to two 1.44 MiB floppy disks
required an on-trivial engineering effort, and it meant that all you
had to was to download and write half-dozen to a dozen flopy disks,
and then it was *trivial*.

In contrast, bootstrapping a BSD system if you didn't have a
quarter-inch tape drive (which was $$$) was non-trivial.  So I would
argue the reverse; the fact that Linux was easier to install may have
helped it.

> 5) I think FreeBSD's ports and similar huge-source-tree approaches
> didn't work out as well Linux developers contributing their changes
> upstream.

I'd frame this slightly differently.  The fact that we had multiple
Linux distributions meant that we had competition to make a better,
easier-to-install userspace, while keeping a common kernel.  Also,
distributions cooperated with each other in a very surprising way.
One archetypal story was one where at a Linux meet-up, Bob Young, who
was one of the founders of Red Hat, was helping to hand out Slackware
CD's because that was what was available.  Bob's philosophy was that
growing the pie was way more important that fighting over the share of
the pie.

In contrast, during that era, NetBSD and FreeBSD were busily
quarrelling with each others, with politics and ill-will due to people
being ejected from the core team which caused the various BSD forks.
I can't imagine this being helpful in the long term....

In particular, the kernel engineers who were hired by the distribution
vendors were working together on a common kernel, and on low-level
userspace subsystems (glibc, PAM, etc.) were also done with a huge
amount of cooperation.

						- Ted

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Andy Kosela]

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 02:13:51PM -0800, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> > 2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit.  At
> > the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally.
>
> At the time of the AT&T lawsuit, most of the people who would be
> interested in using a Un*x-like system on their personal x86 systems
> probably wouldn't have been worried about their own personal legal
> liability.  The decision of corporations to use Linux was well *after*
> the AT&T lawsuit was resolved.
>
>
Exactly.  I always stress that the AT&T lawsuit's negative impact on
adoption of Open Source *BSDs is exaggerated.  Remember that back in the
early 90s both Linux and Net/FreeBSD were just hobbyist systems...  We were
all doing it as a hobby for fun.  No one was aware that this is going to
catch on in the enterprise...

I think that if somebody was already exposed to BSD code in the 80s it was
more natural for him to adopt open source *BSD.  Otherwise he went with
Linux.  Initially I think it was a little bit smaller and simpler too.

Until the decision of the really big corporate players like Oracle and IBM
to support Linux in the late 90s, both systems went head-to-head, and one
could even argue that *BSDs had a technical edge over Linux.

It all changed after year 2g when it became apparent that Linux is slowly
winning the battle for "hearts and minds".

We should be happy that hobbyist Open Source Unix systems have been so
widely adopted at all though; otherwise we would all be living in the NT
hell.

--Andy
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Robert Brockway]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2018, Andy Kosela wrote:

> I think that if somebody was already exposed to BSD code in the 80s it was
> more natural for him to adopt open source *BSD.  Otherwise he went with
> Linux.  Initially I think it was a little bit smaller and simpler too.

Here's a case study...

I installed Linux on my PC in June 1994 after my university exams had 
finished.  I only decided to go with Linux over NetBSD the night before I 
was heading to university to start downloading the 30 or 40 floppy images 
I'd need to do the install.

The *nix enthusiasts on campus were split fairly evening between Linux & 
NetBSD[1] at the time so I was fairly assured of advice and help 
regardless of which way I went[2].

I chose Linux over NetBSD for one reason.  Linux had a DOS emulator 
(DosEMU).  Even then I wanted to run an emulator rather than multiboot.
NetBSD got support for the dos emulator later but by then I'd made my 
choice.

As an aside, while downloading the floppy images I came to the notice of 
local sysadmins.  I had to go see one of the sysadmins about my usage of 
system and network resources.  That sysadmin was George Michaelson, who is 
on this list.  Hi George!  George and I have since worked together.

IIRC the university introduced a local Slackware mirror soon after.

[1] FreeBSD wasn't getting as much attention among enthusiasts at my 
campus and OpenBSD was still a glint in Theo's eye.

[2] A year later I founded a computer club on campus which embraced all 
flavours of *nix hobbyist.  It's still running 23 years later.

Cheers,

Rob

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[George Michaelson]

hah! you ran a damn sight further with your acquired knowledge than I
did I hasten to add. I now lean on the knowledge of my betters almost
all the time, to do my job. I'm suffering almost 100% continuous
imposter syndrome.

I remember we were a bit heavy handed with downloads because of
paranoia bout funding the data in the AARNet model. Most other
international academic nets wound up paying for bandwidth as a capex
with no cost recovery because physics and bombs wanted it to exist.

(physicists who feel offended, consider yourself astronomers, and then
stars are just giant fusion bombs)

Australia decided to drive to an economic rationalist model where the
money raised paid the cost to increase the bandwidth when the core net
was on 65% utilisation all the time, which usefully was the observed
rate when TCP clagged up with the window/backoff/RTT of the day. So it
was a self-perpetuating perpetual motion mache for making money to buy
bandwidth. You (in a very perverse sense) were driving it north to 65%
quicker than the UQ people wanted to pay for it, hence our heavy
handed back pressure not to do that (tm).

We did the mirrors, because squid caches hadn't been invented. If we'd
had caches we might not have done the mirrors. By the time squid
caches existed we had the mirrors so we kinda had both. Mirrors made
life better.

I don't think it was this time, but one of the times I was heavy
handed with people like you, who used the damn thing, I got carpeted
by the computer center director for "not being nice to the users"
which was hugely embarrassing and he was kind enough to let me off
with a warning instead of a career limiting boot out the door.

Now, we just let the floodgates open. I think I throw away .ISO files
on my macbook drive, because its easier to refresh off the distro
core, or I'm running Docker images and they load way more crap anyway.

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Clem Cole]

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On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 6:02 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 02:13:51PM -0800, Dan Stromberg wrote:
> > 2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit.  At
> > the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally.
>
> At the time of the AT&T lawsuit, most of the people who would be
> interested in using a Un*x-like system on their personal x86 systems
> probably wouldn't have been worried about their own personal legal
> liability.  The decision of corporations to use Linux was well *after*
> the AT&T lawsuit was resolved.
> ​
>

​Ted, I pretty much agree with everything you have said except for one
thing.  I don't think it was ever about person liability.

As you pointed out, we all just wanted something to work on hardware that
we owned.   In fact, like Linus, I had also purchased Minux for $75 from
the book publisher before BSD/386 came out and ran it on my PC.   I think
many people wanted that.  Linus himself is on record, if he had known about
BSD/386 - he would have used it.  But he got Minix and did not support that
we wanted.

As I point out in the paper, Unix originally ran on hardware that cost
between $50-250K in 1975 dollars,  So the Unix users did not own that
hardware themself - their school or employer did.  But the PC
changed situation that pretty dramatically.  And just as we wanted UNIX at
work on PDP-11s (and later vaxen) we wanted it on our personal machines too.

BSD/386 was a UNIX implementation for the hardware that I owned.   And many
like minded people to myself who did have access to BSD/386, saw the law
suit in the light of ``if BSD was in violation of the AT&T Copyrights''
(and I thought it was BTW) - there was an issue,  It would mean it would
mean the only 'UNIX' for my PC was Minix (which ran without the MMU, small
address space etc.).  So here is an alternative -- Linux -- that's not
perfect, but sure beats Minix.  Ok, its not BSD and does not have
networking, no graphics/window manger, and it crashes but ... well we can
fix that.  People added networking, ported X over etc...

Like you I started with the bits from Linus and it was a little difficult -
 lot of DIY - column A, tab B, update this.  Then I discovered the first
full ``distro'' that seemed to make sense (Slackware) - which in fact was
similar to BSD at the time (used V7/BSD conventions) and it mostly worked.
IIRC, Networking came shortly their after, and Linux starts getting better
and better.  I would not say it was fun, I was grumbling because I had
already seen BSD/386 - but I pushed on because I was worried BSD/386 was
not going to be available to me on my home system.

In fact, BSD/386 at that point had a better install and that would get even
better after the suit ended with the fork that Jordan Hubbard and Co did,
but I think that was good.  As the 386 installs for a BSD got better, it
pressured the Linux guys to make their stuff even better.  And by that
time, Linux pretty much had parity on the kernel side, if not started to
get the lead [Linux supported modules early on, which I think was a
technological development that is overlooked but was huge in making Linux
flexible when it needed to be].

BTW: lets not forgot the larger issue.   At this point the
'better' kernel technology is in Solaris, Tru64 et al.. but that's not
running on PC technology.  Few people can afford such a machine for
themselves. [BTW: I had proposed that OSF/1 try to market their system
directly around then for $100 - but the OSF sponsors were all selling
hardware and none saw the need].   But at the same time, BSD/386 is now
unclear what is going to happen.   And most importantly this new market of
users for their personal systems, does not care that PC and Linux is not as
good the 'best' - like Solaris/Tru64/Aix --
 i.e. The Christensen disruption is complete -- the worse technology, found
a new user base that can (and does) grow (grew) incredible fast.   Soon the
'worse' technology surpasses the sustaining one.



But then it comes out, the suit was not about copyright, but trade
secrets.  We all had been 'mentally contaminated' by the AT&T IP at our
respective colleges and universities.  So the court does do the right
thing, and AT&T loses the case.  By that time, enough people had made Linux
work.  It was a different comparison and I think the momentum had
shifted.  Also,
I think you are absolutely right about the fighting between the commercial
vendors and then later the different *BSD folks.   And I think that
fighting helped to carry the day - personal users just did not want to mess
with it.

Linux was (is) an excellent solution.  I use it everyday.   It helps to pay
my salary.   But I do think it would have been some flavor of BSD/386 that
would be doing that if the law suit had not occurred.  To me, the law suit
is what moved people that wanted a UNIX on a PC and once they moved from
BSD/386 or just discovered Linux, they was (is) not real reason to switch
or go back.  The suit was certainly what scared a lot of us -- the issue
was not liability - it was the risk of losing access to UNIX technology for
systems that we owned.

And that was/is huge.

Clem
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 08:29:27PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> Like you I started with the bits from Linus and it was a little difficult -
>  lot of DIY - column A, tab B, update this.  Then I discovered the first
> full ``distro'' that seemed to make sense (Slackware) - which in fact was
> similar to BSD at the time (used V7/BSD conventions) and it mostly worked.

The lots of DIY period was between 1990 and 1992.  At that point we
used HJ Lu's boot/root diskette images, and you then manually
installed various software packages (emacs, gcc, etc.) by untarring
compressed tar files.

The very first distribution was MCC Interim Linux (from the University
of Manchester) in February 1992.  In May 1992 the University of Texas
released the TAMU release, and Peter MacDonald released the
Softlanding Linux System (SLS).  In December 1992 Yggdrasil released
their first relase that had X Windows.  And Slackware forked off from
SLS in mid-1993.

> In fact, BSD/386 at that point had a better install and that would get even
> better after the suit ended with the fork that Jordan Hubbard and Co did,
> but I think that was good.  As the 386 installs for a BSD got better, it
> pressured the Linux guys to make their stuff even better.  And by that
> time, Linux pretty much had parity on the kernel side, if not started to
> get the lead [Linux supported modules early on, which I think was a
> technological development that is overlooked but was huge in making Linux
> flexible when it needed to be].

386BSD 0.0 was released in March 1992, and BSD/386 first release
(0.3.1) was in April 1992.  Both of there were *after* the very first
Linux distribution from the University of Manchester.  From what I can
see, the reason why the Linux distributions were getting batter was
competition from each other: MCC, SLS, Yggdrasil, Slackware, etc.

I certainly see anyone who was saying "ooh, we need to improve our
distro's installer because 386BSD or BSD/386 is competing with us".
Instead, various Linux enthusiasts were posting reviews comparing the
ease of installation of MCC vs SLS vs Slackware, etc.

> BTW: lets not forgot the larger issue.   At this point the
> 'better' kernel technology is in Solaris, Tru64 et al.. but that's not
> running on PC technology.  Few people can afford such a machine for
> themselves.

Indeed.  From http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php, "Why is Linux
Successful?  An Opinion", published at Uniforum NZ in April 1999:

    "Linux has always had a pragmatic view of hardware, whist the BSDs
    carried a purist view. When I got my first 386 I had MFM style
    disk drives. At that the BSDs only supported SCSI. Now SCSI is
    undoubtedly the correct choice, however it did not match the
    common hardware profile out in the market. Linux had the advantage
    for the first three years that I ran it of supporting a more
    diverse range of hardware than the BSDs. The BSDs assumed you had
    purchased a machine to run a Unix-style OS on, while Linux assumed
    you had a machine and wanted to try Unix. Linux was much
    friendlier to someone just wanting to dip their toes in the
    water. In this respect Linux did something that the BSDs were
    unable to do to any great degree - grow the Unix user base."

> But then it comes out, the suit was not about copyright, but trade
> secrets.  We all had been 'mentally contaminated' by the AT&T IP at our
> respective colleges and universities.  So the court does do the right
> thing, and AT&T loses the case.

Well, MIT actually had multiple AT&T Licenses which did *not* have the
mental contamination clause.  That was because MIT steadfastly refused
to allow MIT students and staff to be contaminated, and MIT had more
friends in high (low) places at AT&T than USL's licensing department.
So although the USL's Licensing division was quite frustrated about
this, MIT was able to get research grants that included full Unix
source licenses all of MIT without the mental contimnation clause.  So
that means all of the MIT Project Athena Alumni who first looked at Unix
sources at MIT would not have been so contaminated.

In addition, given that the POSIX.1 1990 specifications was available,
a lot of the more advanced system calls were implemented from that, it
seems.... dubious that AT&T would have been able to claim that an
ANSI/ISO Standard was somehow a trade secret.  Given how ridiculous
lawyers can be, I'm sure they could *make* such a claim.  But whether
it would have been laughed out of court is a different question.

     	      	      	       		    - Ted

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Jon Forrest]

On 2/7/2018 7:13 AM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:

> Well, MIT actually had multiple AT&T Licenses which did *not* have the
> mental contamination clause. 

This was also an issue at UC Berkeley, but with Microsoft Windows.
I was working in the Postgres group which Microsoft was very
generously supporting with software. There were discussions about
getting a Windows source license but the CS department didn't
want their people becoming contaminated.

I remember the first time I saw Linux. Ironically it was on the
desktop machine of a guy who was in the BSD developers office.

Jon Forrest

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Clem Cole]

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Again I agree with much of what you said.  But there are a couple of things
your are forgetting....

On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 10:13 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

>
>
> Well, MIT actually had multiple AT&T Licenses which did *not* have the
> mental contamination clause.

I fear, you are
​falling
 into an
 error of thinking about UNIX as the *source cod*
*​e from Murray Hill* as opposed the* intellectual property *->* i.e.* an
*implementation* *vs,* *the ideas* of how to build the a computing system.
    The ideas was
the point of the AT&T case
​ with BSD (as a number of people including some on this list have said --
AT&T was talking about trade secrets - which are ideas).  Note I failed to
understand this difference myself at the time, most of us did also I fear
because as you said -- we all just wanted Unix for a PC based platform that
we own for ourselves.  However, I believe that understanding that
difference is why the AT&T *vs*. BSDi/UCB case is so important to
history,
​ and Linux's history in particular.​


What
​ doomed
 AT&T was they were required by law to release the IP (1956 consent decree)​
​ to any interested parties for a fair and reasonable license, but they had
to continue to make their IP available to the academic community at no
charge [I site the paper from one the law reviews that is really detailed,
so I'm summaries the results.   Send me a message offline if you want to
know more].  The fact is this worked out fine for technologies like the
transistor.   People licensed it, AT&T never really made the kind of money,
TI, Fairchild, *etc* did, but it was AT&T IP that used.  Folks took out a
license and the wider electronics industry was born from that invention.

However, later
AT&T's own personal start to publish papers and books about the
​ UNIX​

​IP
 in the open literature.
​  It is these two acts together that the court said, meant that AT&T could
not longer claim trade secret - they licensed it AND they told people about
it.   They 'taught' the world - mentally contaminated us all - with their
ideas.  Linus for instance says he had Maury Bach's book when he was
building Linux and I have been lead to understand that Maury's book was
used as evidence in the case ( as was the original 1974 paper).​ The point
is once the IP was generally known, it was no longer a secret and AT&T
could not claim same.   It also why the famous 6 files had to be removed
from the implementation that BSD had.   Those were bases on the copyright
ownership and AT&T was allowed to claim copyright (as many people like me,
had expected them).  They just could not claim copyright on the parts that
UCB had developed - even if they were the same ideas (IP) and AT&Ts.

So, I'm trying to be careful... this discussion was how did the Linux
implementation of the UNIX IP displace the BSD implementation of the same
IP?   I believe that it is a classic example of a Christensen disruption...
a new market (PC based UNIX) was created nd people wanted something to fill
it.   Linux was there to file it and did a great job and AT&T stopped
any alternative (BSD on same) long enough, that it did not matter - Linux
had filled the void well.   The sustaining
technology
​ (BSD) stays with those that could afford it on their platforms (Sun, DEC,
*etc*...)​


Stepping back a bit ... an interesting question is what about Sun's 386
attempts?  The original RoadRunner was a pretty slick machine.  But here is
where I think they got stuck the same way DEC and other did.  They made
their money on the HW but it was the SW that drove the sale.   So they
wanted to SPARC et al.  So they kill RR.  By, the time of they retrench and
Solaris/386 was released for "commodity HW", again - too expensive for the
low end and they did not want the Intel chips on the servers to compete
with their own HW.

Clem

As a minor footnote, I've always wonder about the SCO case being anything
but a delay tactic against Linux.  Give the courts results from the AT&T*
vs*. BSDi case, I'm personally surprised they got as far as they did.  I
really would expected to be tossed out at the start (hut Im not a lawyer of
course).   Clearly, the courts had declared that ideas were free and clear
for anyone to use.   So how SCO could have claimed anything against anyone,
I find hard to fathom.   Again the courts got it
right
​, but it took a loot of time and effort for then to decide something that
the another court had already decided.​
ᐧ
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Dan Cross]

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On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 12:27 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> Again I agree with much of what you said.  But there are a couple of
> things your are forgetting....
>
> On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 10:13 AM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> Well, MIT actually had multiple AT&T Licenses which did *not* have the
>> mental contamination clause.
>
> I fear, you are
> ​falling
>  into an
>  error of thinking about UNIX as the *source cod*
> *​e from Murray Hill* as opposed the* intellectual property *->* i.e.* an
> *implementation* *vs,* *the ideas* of how to build the a computing
> system.     The ideas was
> the point of the AT&T case
> ​ with BSD (as a number of people including some on this list have said --
> AT&T was talking about trade secrets - which are ideas).  Note I failed to
> understand this difference myself at the time, most of us did also I fear
> because as you said -- we all just wanted Unix for a PC based platform that
> we own for ourselves.  However, I believe that understanding that
> difference is why the AT&T *vs*. BSDi/UCB case is so important to
> history,
> ​ and Linux's history in particular.​
>
>
> What
> ​ doomed
>  AT&T was they were required by law to release the IP (1956 consent
> decree)​
> ​ to any interested parties for a fair and reasonable license, but they
> had to continue to make their IP available to the academic community at no
> charge [I site the paper from one the law reviews that is really detailed,
> so I'm summaries the results.   Send me a message offline if you want to
> know more].  The fact is this worked out fine for technologies like the
> transistor.   People licensed it, AT&T never really made the kind of money,
> TI, Fairchild, *etc* did, but it was AT&T IP that used.  Folks took out a
> license and the wider electronics industry was born from that invention.
>
> However, later
> AT&T's own personal start to publish papers and books about the
> ​ UNIX​
>
> ​IP
>  in the open literature.
> ​  It is these two acts together that the court said, meant that AT&T
> could not longer claim trade secret - they licensed it AND they told people
> about it.   They 'taught' the world - mentally contaminated us all - with
> their ideas.  Linus for instance says he had Maury Bach's book when he was
> building Linux and I have been lead to understand that Maury's book was
> used as evidence in the case ( as was the original 1974 paper).​ The point
> is once the IP was generally known, it was no longer a secret and AT&T
> could not claim same.   It also why the famous 6 files had to be removed
> from the implementation that BSD had.   Those were bases on the copyright
> ownership and AT&T was allowed to claim copyright (as many people like me,
> had expected them).  They just could not claim copyright on the parts that
> UCB had developed - even if they were the same ideas (IP) and AT&Ts.
>
> So, I'm trying to be careful... this discussion was how did the Linux
> implementation of the UNIX IP displace the BSD implementation of the same
> IP?   I believe that it is a classic example of a Christensen disruption...
> a new market (PC based UNIX) was created nd people wanted something to fill
> it.   Linux was there to file it and did a great job and AT&T stopped
> any alternative (BSD on same) long enough, that it did not matter - Linux
> had filled the void well.   The sustaining
> technology
> ​ (BSD) stays with those that could afford it on their platforms (Sun,
> DEC, *etc*...)​
>
>
> Stepping back a bit ... an interesting question is what about Sun's 386
> attempts?  The original RoadRunner was a pretty slick machine.  But here is
> where I think they got stuck the same way DEC and other did.  They made
> their money on the HW but it was the SW that drove the sale.   So they
> wanted to SPARC et al.  So they kill RR.  By, the time of they retrench and
> Solaris/386 was released for "commodity HW", again - too expensive for the
> low end and they did not want the Intel chips on the servers to compete
> with their own HW.
>
> Clem
>
> As a minor footnote, I've always wonder about the SCO case being anything
> but a delay tactic against Linux.  Give the courts results from the AT&T*
> vs*. BSDi case, I'm personally surprised they got as far as they did.  I
> really would expected to be tossed out at the start (hut Im not a lawyer of
> course).   Clearly, the courts had declared that ideas were free and clear
> for anyone to use.   So how SCO could have claimed anything against anyone,
> I find hard to fathom.   Again the courts got it
> right
> ​, but it took a loot of time and effort for then to decide something that
> the another court had already decided.​
>

Clem's entire post is too good not to quote in its entirety.

But it raises a question I've had for some time: what about clones like
COHERENT? COHERENT was kind of primitive by BSD (and even Linux) standards,
but had a lot of functionality and was pretty cheap (4 floppies for $99 or
so) and ran on more or less standard PC hardware; I'm surprised more people
weren't running it at home. Also, it seems that they'd weathered the storm
of an AT&T legal challenge managed to stay afloat, as related in Dennis
Ritchie's famous telling of it:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.folklore.computers/_ZaYeY46eb4/5B41Uym6d4QJ

I wonder why the unchallenged existence of Unix clones like COHERENT and
Minix wasn't enough to kill the trade secret argument before it even got
out of the gate.

Clem, is your paper online somewhere?

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 2:21 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> I wonder why the unchallenged existence of Unix clones like COHERENT and
> Minix wasn't enough to kill the trade secret argument before it even got
> out of the gate.
>
It was a V7 clone (like Minix).  I've forgotten but I thought it originally
ran on 286 (again like Minix).
​But, ​
I'm not sure why it was not as popular.  Maybe the difference was that it
was a V7 clone and closed source as it were
​, while ​
Minix was a tad cheaper and you got the sources.
​  Also it (again like Minix) was floppy based.  By that time AT&T UNIX or
BSD Unix is running on 'JAWS' [just another workstation] those systems
tended to have disks in them and UNIX really need one in practice.   As Ted
points out and I agree (as pointed out by Jolitiz in his DDJ articles, I
was partly responsible for the original BSD/386 hard disk driver)​, the
Linux support for ST506 and ESDI disks was very early and actually pretty
stable in the earliest versions of Linux.   In fact, because I was
familiar
​with the HD stuff from BSD/386 it was one the first things I had
personally checked out and was pleased to see was solid.​




>
> Clem, is your paper online somewhere?
>
​Not yet - I'll send out an URL when the conference papers all go on line,
but if you privately send me a message I'll send you a PDF.  Note, a couple
of you have an earlier (near final) draft, so send me a note if you want
the printed one.   The differences are minor-> some clarification/some
small rewording to dealing with English colloquialisms that were not
understood by the French. ​


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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Nemo]

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On 07/02/2018, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote (in part):
> As a minor footnote, I've always wonder about the SCO case being anything
> but a delay tactic against Linux.  Give the courts results from the AT&T
> vs. BSDi case, I'm personally surprised they got as far as they did.  I
> really would expected to be tossed out at the start (hut Im not a lawyer of
> course).   Clearly, the courts had declared that ideas were free and clear
> for anyone to use.   So how SCO could have claimed anything against anyone,
> I find hard to fathom.   Again the courts got it right​, but it took a loot of time
> and effort for then to decide something that the another court had already decided.​

The entire painful journey can be read on Groklaw and well worth
reading when you have a spare month or so.

N.

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Theodore Ts'o]

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On Wed, Feb 07, 2018 at 12:27:34PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> I fear, you are ​falling into an error of thinking about UNIX as the *source cod*
> *​e from Murray Hill* as opposed the* intellectual property *->* i.e.* an
> *implementation* *vs,* *the ideas* of how to build the a computing system.

So what exactly were they claiming?  An interface copyright on
open(2), creat(2), etc.?  Were they they trying to claim that the
concept of an inode was at trade secret?  How the Bourne Shell worked?
How to implement a virtual memory subsystem?

The very first version of POSIX 1003.1 was released in 1988.  This is
four years befure the AT&T lawsuit.  So between the ideas found in
say, Multics, and those things which were promulgated in an
international standard --- which included AT&T representatives ---
exactly what would be covered under Trade Secret law?

> ​  It is these two acts together that the court said, meant that AT&T could
> not longer claim trade secret - they licensed it AND they told people about
> it.

That's basic Trade Secret law.  That's *not* a new and novel law that
the court was promulgating.  It's a basic legal principle taught to
undergraduates --- at least those who take "IT Law for Managers"
offered by the MIT Sloan School :-).  (I always tell students that I
am mentoring that you they should strongly consider taking a basic
legal class and learn enough about accounting to read a balance sheet
and income statement).

More to the point, Trade Secret works differently from Copyright or
Patent.  If Alice reveals to Bob a trade secret under an NDA, and Bob
reveals it to the world, Alice can sue *Bob* for gazillions.  But if
Bob publishes the trade secret in a Usenix ATC paper, and Charlie
learns about it from said Usenix ATC paper, and there is no NDA
between Alice and Charlie --- Alice does *not* have the power to sue
Charlie regarding the trade secret.

Hence, the concept of "AT&T mentally contaminating the world" is
simply not how Trade Secret law works.  And that is a reason why the
wise I/T manager might have to trade off using Trade Secret (where
protection lasts as long as you can keep it a sekrit) versus Patent
(where the protection survives even after it is publically disclosed
--- and you do have to disclose it --- but the protection is
time-limited).

						- Ted

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Dan Cross]

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On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 2:49 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 07, 2018 at 12:27:34PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > I fear, you are ​falling into an error of thinking about UNIX as the
> *source cod*
> > *​e from Murray Hill* as opposed the* intellectual property *->* i.e.* an
> > *implementation* *vs,* *the ideas* of how to build the a computing
> system.
>
> So what exactly were they claiming?  An interface copyright on
> open(2), creat(2), etc.?  Were they they trying to claim that the
> concept of an inode was at trade secret?  How the Bourne Shell worked?
> How to implement a virtual memory subsystem?
>
> The very first version of POSIX 1003.1 was released in 1988.  This is
> four years befure the AT&T lawsuit.  So between the ideas found in
> say, Multics, and those things which were promulgated in an
> international standard --- which included AT&T representatives ---
> exactly what would be covered under Trade Secret law?
>
> > ​  It is these two acts together that the court said, meant that AT&T
> could
> > not longer claim trade secret - they licensed it AND they told people
> about
> > it.
>
> That's basic Trade Secret law.  That's *not* a new and novel law that
> the court was promulgating.  It's a basic legal principle taught to
> undergraduates --- at least those who take "IT Law for Managers"
> offered by the MIT Sloan School :-).  (I always tell students that I
> am mentoring that you they should strongly consider taking a basic
> legal class and learn enough about accounting to read a balance sheet
> and income statement).
>
> More to the point, Trade Secret works differently from Copyright or
> Patent.  If Alice reveals to Bob a trade secret under an NDA, and Bob
> reveals it to the world, Alice can sue *Bob* for gazillions.  But if
> Bob publishes the trade secret in a Usenix ATC paper, and Charlie
> learns about it from said Usenix ATC paper, and there is no NDA
> between Alice and Charlie --- Alice does *not* have the power to sue
> Charlie regarding the trade secret.
>
> Hence, the concept of "AT&T mentally contaminating the world" is
> simply not how Trade Secret law works.  And that is a reason why the
> wise I/T manager might have to trade off using Trade Secret (where
> protection lasts as long as you can keep it a sekrit) versus Patent
> (where the protection survives even after it is publically disclosed
> --- and you do have to disclose it --- but the protection is
> time-limited).


Yes: AT&T's legal argument was bad. Isn't that why they lost the lawsuit?
:-D

        - Dan C.
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2018 at 02:53:10PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
> 
> Yes: AT&T's legal argument was bad. Isn't that why they lost the lawsuit?
> :-D
>

AT&T's legal argument was against BSDI and UCB.  People
misunderstanding the difference between Patent law and Trade Secret
Law into thinking that we were all contaminated and Unix was Doomed
(tm), wasn't, as far as I know, part of AT&T's lawsuit.

In the Alice/Bob/Charlie example I gave, the lawsuit was "Alice can
sue Bob for gazillions".  The assumption that Alice could then sue
Charlie who learned about the "trade secret" in a Usenix ATC paper is
a fear that others had, and wasn't part of the Alice versus Bob
lawsuit.

And *that's* why it was so important that MIT's Unix license didn't
have the trade secret clause.

						- Ted

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 3:26 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

>
> And *that's* why it was so important that MIT's Unix license didn't
> have the trade secret clause.
>
​But the court ruled that AT&T had made the ideas public so the any other
clause one way or the other does not matter.
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Clem Cole]

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On Wed, Feb 7, 2018 at 3:26 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

>
> AT&T's legal argument was against BSDI and UCB.  People
> misunderstanding the difference between Patent law and Trade Secret
> Law into thinking that we were all contaminated and Unix was Doomed
> (tm), wasn't, as far as I know, part of AT&T's lawsuit.
>

Sadly, yes it was so... (and I still have my 'mentally contaminated'
button).​  So now you do know,

Again this is why (and I have asked counsel this question) so what if they
had won?   I have been advised that all UNIX implementations would have
been subjected to the ruling world-wide or at least subject to a number
of treaties enforce in the USA and the EU (although how many AT&T would
have litigated against we will never know).   My friends that are lawyers
that have examined this question have said in practice it would have been
very hard to pursue (which may have been part of the reason the court did
what it did - i.e. the test could this be enforced).

It would have been very different world that I am fairly sure.

Clem
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo]

Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> writes:

> Indeed.  From http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php, "Why is Linux
> Successful?  An Opinion", published at Uniforum NZ in April 1999:
>
>     "Linux has always had a pragmatic view of hardware, whist the BSDs
>     carried a purist view. When I got my first 386 I had MFM style
>     disk drives. At that the BSDs only supported SCSI.  [...]

I wonder when that was...  *My* first 386 was the one I ran 386bsd on,
and later, when it came into existence, NetBSD.  It had good old ST506
type disk drives (20MB MFM drives, but I formatted them RLL to get 30MB
out of them).  Managed to get four such drives onto it, actually, by
modifying the driver to support multiple controllers, and then rewiring
one controller to hook it to a different interrupt line on the ISA bus.

See item 5.1.7 here: http://www.csci.csusb.edu/dick/doc/386bsd.FAQ.txt

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Tom Ivar Helbekkmo]

Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> writes:

> In contrast, during that era, NetBSD and FreeBSD were busily
> quarrelling with each others, with politics and ill-will due to people
> being ejected from the core team which caused the various BSD forks.

Um, I remember this very differently.  The early split between NetBSD
and FreeBSD was a friendly disagreement over whether to continue to be
cross-platform (NetBSD) or go for maximum performance on x86 (FreeBSD).

The only event that fits your description is OpenBSD, which got forked
off because Theo de Raadt's abrasive personality managed to get him
kicked out of the NetBSD core team, and banned from both NetBSD and
FreeBSD mailing list.

-tih
-- 
Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance
of Lisp.  Lisp is the most important idea in computer science.  --Alan Kay
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[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Arrigo Triulzi]

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> On 7 Feb 2018, at 00:02, Theodore Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 02:13:51PM -0800, Dan Stromberg wrote:
>> 2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit.  At
>> the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally.
> 
> At the time of the AT&T lawsuit, most of the people who would be
> interested in using a Un*x-like system on their personal x86 systems
> probably wouldn't have been worried about their own personal legal
> liability.  The decision of corporations to use Linux was well *after*
> the AT&T lawsuit was resolved.

As a long-time Unix user (since around 1978) I agree with the above: the lawsuit was definitely not very high in my concerns when I wanted a Unix on a cheap PC, I just wanted it to work and, at the same time, I appreciated the impossible ecosystem which the PC brought along with a gazillion different cards all requiring a special driver (I am thinking, in particular, of the “SuperIO” card which my 386SX had to provide two RS232 ports, a parallel port and a 3 1/2” drive - made in Taiwan, zero documentation, etc.). The Unix machines I had access to via work/study were all “big iron” coming from large manufacturers and totally out of my price range.

> Something to remember is that in early 90's, floppy disks was the only
> affordable way hobbiists to get OS's installed on x86 systems.  Even
> OS/2 as distributed from IBM / Microsoft came on 30+ floppy disks.  In
> 1990, CD-R recording system cost $35,000 (and dollars were bigger back
> then).  In 1992, the price had dropped to $10-12k, and it wasn't until
> 1995 that he first CD-R system under $1000 was available.

It was also really rather easy to share a floppy disk amongst friends whereas copying a CD or a tape was really very expensive for a student/amateur.

> So I would argue that Linux was *easier* to bootstrap than
> NetBSD/FreeBSD during that era.  The fact that we could shrink a
> kernel and a root file system down to two 1.44 MiB floppy disks
> required an on-trivial engineering effort, and it meant that all you
> had to was to download and write half-dozen to a dozen flopy disks,
> and then it was *trivial*.

Absolutely true.

I would have never tried Linux had it been possible to install FreeBSD/NetBSD on the PCs I had access to from a floppy disk. This changed around 1994 when I managed to boot NetBSD from floppy on a Dell 486SX with very specific hardware (network card, etc.) which I had managed to find thrown away by a big bank in the City.

My dream was a Sun but all I could afford was a 2nd hand battered 486SX…

Arrigo

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Wesley Parish]

On 2/7/18, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:
> IMO:
> 1) It kinda did catch on, in the form of macOS, but there was a time
> when it was nearly dead as the major vendors moved to System V.  For
> some reason, Sun was the last major vendor to make the move, but they
> caught most of the flack.

And for what it's worth, the iPhone. IIRC, a nephew once showed me a
bash prompt on his iPhone and some nifty tricks he was teaching
himself with it.

> 2) I think the main reason BSD nearly died, was the AT&T lawsuit.  At
> the time, Linux appeared to be a safer bet legally.
> 3) Linux got a reputation as an OS you had to be an expert to install,
> so lots of people started it to install it to "prove themselves".
> This was sort of true back when Linux came as 2 floppy images, but
> didn't remain true for very long.

Well, put it this way, to install MS/PC/DR DOS you fooled around with
a limited FDISK.COM if the HD was unformated. Then you did FORMAT.COM
and (in 3.3 and earlier) SYS.COM to install the core files. Then you
could run whatever batch files you needed to install whatever
utilities you needed. OS/2 and Windows (including WinNT 3.x) just
added a pretty-pretty interface. OS/2 was more sophisticated than
WinNT's because OS/2 expected to share the hard drive with some other
OS; Microsoft believed it had the computer to itself and is thus not
as sophisticated - but they're still MS/PC/DR DOS  writ large.

To install Linux (I cut my teeth on SLS 0.99pl(largelyforgotten) ) you
had to do something with sectors and the like. And if you didn't know
about sectors, you screwed up and learnt damn fast. It's quite an
education re-installing something because the file system won't fit on
the miniscule partition you've made for it, and you pay attention this
time!!!

> 4) I believe the SCO lawsuit "against Linux" was too little, too late
> to kill Linux's first mover advantage in the opensource *ix
> department.

The major difference between the AT&T versus Berkley and The SCO
(Societe Commerciale du Ondit or RumourMongers Incorporated) Group was
people knew about the AT&T case and were prepared; in addition, SCO
ran into the Internet-powered Groklaw Effect.

You can't use vague allegations to win your case when there's a bunch
of people around who can take your vague allegations and feed them to
the alligators.

> 5) I think FreeBSD's ports and similar huge-source-tree approaches
> didn't work out as well Linux developers contributing their changes
> upstream.
>
Wesley Parish

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[emanuel stiebler]

On 2018-02-07 09:27, Wesley Parish wrote:

> To install Linux (I cut my teeth on SLS 0.99pl(largelyforgotten) ) you
> had to do something with sectors and the like. And if you didn't know
> about sectors, you screwed up and learnt damn fast. It's quite an
> education re-installing something because the file system won't fit on
> the miniscule partition you've made for it, and you pay attention this
> time!!!

But wasn't it the same on *BSD too? If you didn't have a disk which was
supported, and had the right entries already you sat there for a while
with the calculator ;-)

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Arrigo Triulzi]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 815 bytes --]

On 7 Feb 2018, at 09:39, emanuel stiebler <emu at e-bbes.com> wrote:
>> To install Linux (I cut my teeth on SLS 0.99pl(largelyforgotten) ) you
>> had to do something with sectors and the like. And if you didn't know
>> about sectors, you screwed up and learnt damn fast. It's quite an
>> education re-installing something because the file system won't fit on
>> the miniscule partition you've made for it, and you pay attention this
>> time!!!
> 
> But wasn't it the same on *BSD too? If you didn't have a disk which was
> supported, and had the right entries already you sat there for a while
> with the calculator ;-)

Absolutely. In those days it was all about CHS numbers (I also cut my teeth with 0.12 floppies and then SLS, I recently found my X1-X10 “white” floppies with the X11 packages…).

Arrigo

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Chet Ramey]

On 2/7/18 3:27 AM, Wesley Parish wrote:
> On 2/7/18, Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> IMO:
>> 1) It kinda did catch on, in the form of macOS, but there was a time
>> when it was nearly dead as the major vendors moved to System V.  For
>> some reason, Sun was the last major vendor to make the move, but they
>> caught most of the flack.
> 
> And for what it's worth, the iPhone. IIRC, a nephew once showed me a
> bash prompt on his iPhone and some nifty tricks he was teaching
> himself with it.

iOS and tvOS are derivatives of macOS, so the iphone/ipad/apple tv all
run sort-of-BSD. I'm not as sure about watchOS, but I believe it's an
iOS variant. So yes, you can have Unix running on your watch.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
		 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet at case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Nemo]

On 7 February 2018 at 03:27, Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:
> OS/2 and Windows (including WinNT 3.x) just
> added a pretty-pretty interface. OS/2 was more sophisticated than
> WinNT's because OS/2 expected to share the hard drive with some other
> OS; Microsoft believed it had the computer to itself and is thus not
> as sophisticated - but they're still MS/PC/DR DOS  writ large.

I would disagree with this assessment.  NT's VMS heritage has already
been discussed.  I do not know the heritage of OS/2 but to call it DOS
is simply not true.  (Among other things, OS/2 did an excellent job of
virtualizing dosboxes. We were developing PCMCIA drivers with OS/2 in
dosboxes.  When one crashed, you simply opened up another and
continued.)

N.

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Wesley Parish]

On 2/8/18, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 February 2018 at 03:27, Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:
>> OS/2 and Windows (including WinNT 3.x) just
>> added a pretty-pretty interface. OS/2 was more sophisticated than
>> WinNT's because OS/2 expected to share the hard drive with some other
>> OS; Microsoft believed it had the computer to itself and is thus not
>> as sophisticated - but they're still MS/PC/DR DOS  writ large.
>
> I would disagree with this assessment.  NT's VMS heritage has already
> been discussed.  I do not know the heritage of OS/2 but to call it DOS
> is simply not true.  (Among other things, OS/2 did an excellent job of
> virtualizing dosboxes. We were developing PCMCIA drivers with OS/2 in
> dosboxes.  When one crashed, you simply opened up another and
> continued.)
>
> N.
>
I was referring to the installation procedures. IBM OS/2 2.0 to 4.0
installation procedures were more sophisticated than the equivalent in
MS WinNT from 3.x to 5.x because Microsoft did not show any interest
in sharing the disk with anyone.

But it's still true if one refers to single user versus multiuser -
WinNT's got a lot of OS/2 and VMS in its history, and OS/2's got a lot
of IBM's MVS and related mainframe OS knowledge in its background, but
they're not native multiuser. You need to get add-ons to make them
truly multiuser. In that they are still MS/PC/DR DOS writ large.
(Which is ironical considering that there have been at least two
genuine multiuser DOS clones on the market that I know of, DR's
Multiuser DOS - not Concurrent DOS: that was a similar but different
product - and PCMOS.)

Wesley Parish

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Derek Fawcus]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2018 at 03:53:22PM +1300, Wesley Parish wrote:
> (Which is ironical considering that there have been at least two
> genuine multiuser DOS clones on the market that I know of, DR's
> Multiuser DOS - not Concurrent DOS: that was a similar but different
> product - and PCMOS.)

DR's Concurrent DOS 286 was multiuser, but never really made it in
the market in that form due to the issues they had with the 286.

It eventually became FlexOS, but was not really DOS compatible
once it that form.  There was a DOS compatible add-on for the
386 varient of FlexOS, which hints at how limited the DOS
compatibilty of CDOS 286 would have been.

Note that CDOS 286 (aka FlexOS) was a distinct product from
Concurrent DOS.  The former written in C; the latter in assembler
and seemingly derived from Concurrent CP/M.

DF

[TUHS] Why BSD didn't catch on more, and Linux did

[Robert Brockway]

On Sun, 11 Feb 2018, Derek Fawcus wrote:

> Note that CDOS 286 (aka FlexOS) was a distinct product from
> Concurrent DOS.  The former written in C; the latter in assembler
> and seemingly derived from Concurrent CP/M.

Also not to be confused with FLEX, a completely different OS.  That was 
what I initially thought you were talking about but the clue was you 
mentioned FlexOS was multi-user.  The original FLEX was single user.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLEX_(operating_system)

Rob