On Fri, Jun 3, 2022 at 4:17 PM Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> writes:

>> I do not agree. Linux won because BSD was embroiled in litigation.
>
> Like I said, we experienced that differently. In my opinion, people lean
> on the litigation excuse when they don't want to admit that *BSD was not
> a good way to do operating system development.

What were the differences? The BSD projects were:

- 386bsd: run by Jolitz, with no input from anyone else
- NetBSD: forked from 386bsd, run by Chris de Metriou as a
cooperative effort between a host of indviduals (me included)
- FreeBSD: forked from NetBSD almost immediately, by a group of
contributors who felt that performance and device support on the Intel
platform was more important than maintaining hardware portability

The FreeBSD 1.x CVS tree shows that it started from NET/2 with the

patchkit added on. It didn't start from the NetBSD tree that I've been

able to find (and I've studied the early CVS history for the git migration

extensively). And oral history from many of the founders who were

also patchkit contributors also matches this recounting... Though I

guess a lot turns on whether you consider the patchkit early NetBSD

or not...

I do agree with the rest of this, though.

- OpenBSD: forked from NetBSD after de Raadt established a kind of
record by being kicked off both the NetBSD and FreeBSD mailing lists.

OpenBSD forked from NetBSD after Theo had a personality dispute with

the NetBSD folks. It had little to do with the FreeBSD lists judging from

his email at the time and my early interactions with that project.

Warner