[TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw

[clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

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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 - as CSRG had put them on the ucbvax ftp server (truth is they
were actually available to anyone there knew how to grab it -- the attempt
to keep the ftp address 'secret' was pretty shallow - not quite announced
on net.noise but it certainly was passed hacker to hacker if you went to a
USENIX conference in those days).​  The funny part was that Linus
university was a BSD licensee and could have gotten it (although I've
personally never seen or heard of evidence that they did).

So this was an example of ignorance of something, not true in fact - That
said, Linus solved the problem he had.  More power to him.  Although his
original kernel was a far cry from '386BSD' - but that was the point.
 When the AT&T case came out, hackers like me were worried 386BSD was going
to go away and started to help make Linux more complete.

I should (as Larry has pointed out) at the time of Linus original work,
some institutions were far more liberal about source access than others.
So even if Linus has known about Jolitz's work, its not clear he
would/could have had access to it.

ᐧ
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