[TUHS] Re: NFS 40th anniversary event

[Jonathan Gray <jsg@jsg.id.au>]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:18:34AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM Douglas McIlroy
> <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's RFS never made it outside
> > Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
> > systems by mapping UIDs.
> 
> I believe it did?  If I recall correctly, it was available with System
> V, though perhaps I am misremembering.
> 
> I have no doubt that RFS was technically superior to NFS, but Sun had
> non-technical market advantages. Assuming that I am remembering
> correctly, I suspect it was unsuccessful commercially for two reasons:
> 
> 1. Sun gave NFS (and the associated RPC layer) away for free, under a
> particularly liberal license, which lead to lots of interoperability
> (Larry's and Dave's comments notwithstanding). I suspect by the time
> RFS was available, it was much more expensive and less interoperable
> across heterogeneous systems.

The NFS reference code was licensed under NDA with some cost involved
according to Rick Macklem who wrote the NFS code in 4.3BSD-Reno.

Rick Macklem post to comp.protocols.nfs Aug 6, 1999
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.protocols.nfs/c/npQbxPe_ZeQ/m/Z_yQcsh56mkJ

The userland RPC part was under different terms.

"Sun will publish the source code for the user-level libraries that
implement RPC and XDR."

Bill Shannon post to net.unix-wizards Jan 13, 1985
https://groups.google.com/g/net.unix-wizards/c/PkJdZgCbrC4/m/u0kt3eeFSt4J

Sun RPC sources were later posted to mod.sources and included
on USENIX tapes.