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The Roots Of BSD 103

Posted by Nik from the NP:-Tunnel-of-love dept.
drix was the first to write in with this "Standard fare roots of the BSD/hacker movement piece over at Salon. The picture of the FreeBSD devil guy is pretty cool." This is actually another chapter in Andrew Leonard's Free Software Project online book. Well written, but occasional errors (FreeBSD and BSDI have not merged, for example) cast doubt on some of the facts. Informed comment from people who were there would be appreciated.
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The roots of BSD More

The roots of BSD

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  • Re:"the devil guy" has a name... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    His name is not Chuck. This is not informative.

  • Re:Call me stupid, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ever installed obsd? I have, the average user WOULD be better off installing obsd and leaving it alone than installing redhat (which I use also) and trying to "harden" it for hours... Sure I could mess with redhat for hours and almost have a theoretically secure machine, but has the code been audited? How long has RH gone without a remote exploit... The two are completely different animals...

  • BSDi and FreeBSD have too merged! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, at least Walnut Creek, the distributor of FreeBSD has merged with BSDi. That is generally perceived as a merger between BSDi and FreeBSD.

  • +1 "interesting"??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Oh lord. Not only do we have ill-informed posts, we have ill-informed moderation. If /. is ever going to stop the egress of truly technical folks, this type of nonsense has to stop.
    Repeat after me:
    BSD != Solaris
    early SunOS came from BSD, V7 and SysIII
    Bill Joy was the primary architect of 1BSD
    Bill Joy left in the early 80's to form Sun
    SUN == Stanford University Network, fwiw.

    BSD is not some freak "fork" of Solaris, its the other way around.

  • Re:...and lost it to linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Perhaps you mean Slate? Microsoft is listed as a premier advertiser on Salon, but that's it.

  • Re:The cute little daemon... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    it's a cartoon. who cares?

  • [Possibly OT] SCO Ancient Unix status? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anyone know what the word is on the "new" fee-free Ancient Unix hobbyist licenses from SCO? I'm itching to get my hands on Kirk McKusick's CSRG archive, and have waited patiently for the new license to show up as an offer.....

  • Why does this not have a BSD icon? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ..topic says it all.

  • Re:Doomed to Failure? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    But the sad thing is that most /. readers are in group (4). Get over the shock value of that statement. It's true.

    How many here can do their own "from scratch" build?

  • Just a minor clarification:

    Everyone on slashdot should know by now that the penguin/Tux/flightless bird and Daemon/devil/beatific background process are by now.

    If it bugs you, well, go hit your head into a wall a few times. Because that's what I do every time someone points out a stupid correction to some commonly-used slang for an informal mascot that we all already know about in the first place.

    Can I read slashdot with -Wall -pedantic disabled now, or do I have to recompile with -DNOT_ANAL -DNO_MORONS too?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].

  • The reason that I got into Linux over FreeBSD in 1995 when I decided to give the Free Unixes a whirl was quite simple. FreeBSD didn't support my cd-rom drive and Linux did. All of my friends were staunch BSD supporters. They weren't interested in Linux because it was a "toy" OS. As far as I could tell the BSD folks were not even interested in patches that would allow better support of my ATAPI CD-Rom drive. Real production systems used SCSI kit after all.

    Which is funny, because, if Salon is to be believed, part of the reason that BSD Unix was so popular was that it ran on inexpensive "junk" hardware. Nowadays, of course, BSDers scoff at Linux because of all of the weird hardware it supports. Of course, it's only weird if you don't own it.

    It is also quite true that Linux is geared more towards the UNIX initiate. This could be fixed easily enough. Heck, even setting the default shell to something other than sh would make FreeBSD more palatable to the newbie. However, from what I have gleaned from BSD advocacy sites like Daemonnews.org [slashdot.org], there is very little effort to change the different flavors of BSD so that they are more user friendly. They are content to let Linux bring them converts to the *NIX way of thinking.

    Which is just as well, I suppose. However, many Linuxers find that the benefits of the BSDs don't quite warrant leaving.

  • Next time, don't use "-pendantic" when using your brain.

    NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD all have different variations of the daemon. You wouldn't put up the OpenBSD daemon that looks raytraced and call it the FreeBSD daemon, would you?

    -jason

  • Perception is not reality.
  • > Take voting in an election as a good example.
    > People want most of all to vote
    > for the winner. So, whether they
    > understand, believe in, or agree with, a
    > candidate is moot. They will vote for
    > the candidate that they believe will win.

    Uh? I vote for the man which I think is capable and has some "nice" idea.
    Polls says that he won't be the winner, so what ?
    I can vote as a reaction if the polls says that someone that I really don't like, I may vote for his direct opponent even if I like better a "smaller" candidate.

    But voting for "the winner" ?? It sounds ridiculous, I think that you'd better ask around other peoples opinions before saying things like this.
  • That's bullshit, BSD has plenty of hippies working on it, and did in the past. And, fyi, I don't know many hippies who are drug addicts, have VD, or any magnetization problems. I quote from the FreeBSD FAQ:

    Q. Has anyone done any temperature testing while running FreeBSD? I know Linux runs cooler than dos, but have never seen a mention of FreeBSD. It seems to run really hot.

    A. No, but we have done numerous taste tests on blindfolded volunteers who have also had 250 micrograms of LSD-25 administered beforehand. 35% of the volunteers said that FreeBSD tasted sort of orange, whereas Linux tasted like purple haze. Neither group mentioned any particular variances in temperature that I can remember. We eventually had to throw the results of this survey out entirely anyway when we found that too many volunteers were wandering out of the room during the tests, thus skewing the results. I think most of the volunteers are at Apple now, working on their new ``scratch and sniff'' GUI. It's a funny old business we're in!
  • rm -fr /*
  • from netcraft ... www.salon.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.23 mod_oas/4.65 on Linux.
  • Actually, far as I know, Salon is independent. I do believe you're thinking of Slate, which is a part of MSN.
  • This article got me thinking about how I got into linux in the first place. I mean, no matter how I look at it, and without getting into open-source ideology/licencing wars.... bsd and it's derivatives are great. FreeBSD is great. NetBSD is great, and was far more cross platform than linux (still is I bet).

    So.. what got me into linux in the first place? I'll tell you what.

    The problem, I think, with the 'free' BSD implementations, was that, although it was available, it wasn't really there for people outside of it's own little circle. Nobody was 'spreading the wealth'. Or at least, nobody that I came into contact with. Linux, on the other had, seemed to be growing and spreading by people who were getting their first glimpse of unix. I got into it around .96 or so, sometime in mid 1992 I believe...though I'm not sure. I never heard of BSD until much later.
  • Actually, as it stands right now, no one really controls the entire linux OS. If Linus were to go, I suppose Alan would take over the kernel development, but a LOT more people are involved in Linux(or GNU/Linux), that make it a good operating system, Linus, the Free Software Foundation, the Gnome project people, the KDE project people, the maintainers of apache, and the all of the other package maintainers out there.

    So who leads Linux? I think from a marketing aspect, which is the reference you seem to be giving, it would be the companies controlling the distributions. RedHat, Corel, and Caldera are probably in the front there right now.

    Given the current status of Linux as a whole, not just the kernel part, I don't think that loosing any key player would stop its momentum, even though it might sting a little.

    Actually, I think this has been one of Linux's best points. Software projects that aren't as good as others seem to have a way of dieing out, and the great software projects change hands when the original author is tired. (Look at Moria as an example of that.) :)

  • Actualy, Joy isn't a billionare. And while you may injoy the fortunes of owning some SUNW, Joy dosn't. He cashed out as soon as he could, and is only worth 10 million or so. Ellison, on the otherhand is a billionare.
  • i'd go with openBSD if you must go with a BSD but consider sticking with redhat. remember that its the admin who determines the security of the machine - the OS just provides the tools to do so. i'd choose linux over BSD any day if only because its what im familiar with (and something i *know* how to secure thru lots of experience). your security on your firewall depends on the firewalling rules you write more than anything else (since bad rules can have insecure machines inside your network compromised no matter what OS you run the firewall on). im happier with ipchains than BSD stuff anyway, so thats what i use.
  • >and a pair of Z8000-based machines, possibly the
    >first microprocessor-based
    >machines on the Internet.

    Were they by any chance Onyxes ?
  • That was very interesting. I would suggest that Linux's (3) is currently quite active from the kernel mailing list. Hmm, d'y'have an opinion as to how HURD measures up with that model?
  • "I say we change the Linux mascot to a Dinosaur who wears shades and flys an airplane."

    Yeah, that did wonders for Netscape *cough*. Who wants their software associated with a dinosaur? I prefer this fox logo: http://www.early.com/~emackey/linux/

    At least a fox is agile, fast, and cunning. A penguin is just fat and slow (well, except in water), and just hobbled about. Yeah, that's what I want to think of my software as...

    Please adopt the fox...hey, maybe someone should make a distro just to gain popularity for this logo...
  • Penguins live in Antarctica man, how can you get any cooler than that?!
  • Chill out man!
    Have you been reading too much Ayn Rand lately or watching too much of the 700 club?
  • I have actually had more than 10 people say this very thing to me in realy life. It's hard for me to fathom this kind of behavior but I have seen it in real life.
  • I'm interested in knowing how you coaxed linux into doing such things as randomizing the running ID's, getting a truely (very very close) random urandom bit for key generation, ridding redhat of every buffer overflow in the main source among other things.

    Thanks for your informative response.
  • Fail, what failure? Until one or another side gives up, no victory is permanent. This will be rammed home when the Netscape 6 Mozilla variant ships (as if the rebirth of Apple wasn't enough to beat this point to death).

    BSD is likely to have more penetration on the desktop by mid 2001 than Linux because Mac OS is going to start counting as a BSD install come 1/1/01. Where it will stand on the server end is going to be the interesting question.

    DB
  • The survivor in a proprietary world of closed "standards" indeed is not necessarily the best. In the examples you mention, the loosing of the best has to do with installed base, and incompatability of the better one, which still looses because of the larger installed base. Users are locked into one alternative.

    OTOH with open standards, open source and interoperability, things are different. Here there is no locking out of the better alternative, since the two (better and worse) alternative can work together and noone is forced to use the worse alternative for the sake of compatability. Even if one of them implements a different API/standard/protocol, the other one can look at it and copy it.

    Alas, w.r.t. Linux there is more and more non-open source (commercial apps). Still, since Linux itself is open, FreeBSD can build a almost 100% perfect Linux emulator (unlike Wine, which cannot work very well since Windows' source is not available).

    Note that I do not claim that BSD will win in the end, since I don't claim that it is better. It's internals may be better, but in other respects (support for crappy hardware, easy-to-use packaging) Linux may be better.

    But I am convinced that in the end the best one (in perception of end users) will win, and both will evolve to improve further in a darwinian 'struggle for life'.
  • Just a minor clarification:

    Tux is the Linux Penguin
    Beastie is the BSD Daemon

    enough with "the bsd devil" or
    "freaking penguin"...

  • An animated paperclip?

  • The Chapter Twenty Years of Berkley Unix: From AT&T Owned to Freely Redistribuatble by Mcusick & Co. does a very good job at describing the movement and development from the AT&T based Berkley Unix to the Free versions that we have today.

  • He had an article in NewsWeek a few months ago. It pretty well followed the 'this will change everything' model the mass press uses about anything technical. It really was a disapointment. Lumanaries that proclaim paradigm shifting changes don't seem to have enough left over to make anything happen.
  • Technically, he is not BSD's, either. He is Kirk McKusick's. Probably escaped, full grown, from his forehead after a 36 hour coding binge.
  • Linux is justa kernel, so everything else came either from BSD, GNU/FSF and a other random places/people.

    What I want to know is, if BSD is so fucking great why did Sun dump it and go AT&T-ize Solaris/SunOs?

    Maybe the article is just badly written/biased, but it lends support to my belief that BSD is where it is relative to linux is because BSD seems to have too much ego-centrism and elitism. I'm don't believe I am nor ever will be as good at programming as Bill Joy is/was (does he still code?) but that "must people suck/fuck them" attitude presented in the article alienates the very users he's trying to court. Maybe that's why solaris doesn't come with a compiler anymore, too keep us "losers" from even trying.
  • That mascot is way too "horny 13 year-old"-ish.
  • But aren't they planning on merging the two code-bases?
  • Ok, No bsd software ever had a buffer overflow bug. Bwuuuuhahahahahahahahaha!
  • Because they're filthy child-molesting communists!

    Just kidding!!!
  • Yeah, screw those freaking lusers, why do they even use computers, they hardly even understand the detailed core of the OS. I mean shit, I can quote kernel source by memory. I mean, all these lusers trying to run businesses and crap like that. You should have to get a liscense to own a computer! And you could only get it from Bill Joy, in person. That way computer users will all be pure BSDer's with out wacky ideas that non-conform to my very specialized worldview.
  • Microsoft doesn't have one mascot. It reserves the mascots for its product lines. Like the e-with-an-orbit for IE, usually done in animations as the e under the Earth (perhaps implying where they got their inspiration from?); and the stained-glass-house four boxes for Windows (which everyone throws stones through)...
  • Bull. There was discussions about that on FreeBSD mailing lists and someone pointed out that majority of their systems are running 3.x version and they are in process of upgrading to 4.0 since 4.0 is so surprisingly stable. Jordan Hubbard even wrote that 4.0 is the most stable .0 release FreeBSD had ever. Besides, what "sixty" machines are you talking about? Last time I checked, Yahoo was running at least 2000 FreeBSD boxes.
  • now that Linus is working for Transmeta

    Now? Linus started working for Transmeta in January 1997 [metroactive.com]. A lot has happened in the Linux world since then, Mr. Rip Van Winkle.

    Linux has been under active development spearheaded by Linus (who maintains his day job, too). Linus is integral to the direction of Linux kernel development (he decides what is officially in the kernel) but he is not the only interested party -- many expert developers around the world participate. Why do they let Linus determine the direction of the kernel? Is it a licensing arrangement? No! It is something more binding: Respect.

  • is surely not that it enlightens anyone or introduces new perspectives or insights

    this story relates to the editorialization of technology reporting, completely ignoring all the facts and events and private cultures which is exactly what /. is supposed to be about

    hell, salon should be damned pleased that the story here was posted, given that no doubt a fair few threads here will actually TRY to introduce th edetails that a real good piece of reporting could have originally covered

    so somehow this is an honor system - and i just curse the nth beer cut in and took away my BSD memories :(Berkeley used to offer tapes of Joy's OS (sic) for $1000 to interested institutions and allowed unlimited distribution therefrom, probably giving REDHAT, the dumasses their path to $$ (sorry, packaging model) oh, something like (im wrong here, 5 yrs?) before Linus thought of using GNU.

    yep, Joy wrote a whole deal of that OS, and the only thing that really shocks me about this brilliant man is how he got beholden to a company that would never show anything to anyone if they could help it - and then he cashed out early, and never spoke

    Joy is crucial to our understanding of open_source_like OSS *because* he was an idealist, completely unlike the "leadership" of Linus - who comes across as a quiet home boy pragmatist (dammit mod me down for that comment, but wasnt Joy's argument against technolgies the swan song of a true idealist?? and so you see the real difference trying to show out)

    all for now, thanks for reading . . .

  • "Bill Joy, now a billionaire capitalist"

    you must be joking - Joy sold his SMCC stock for about 10$mln very early on - he was so naive this guy is never what you just implied

  • I'm interested in how all these people come to the conclusion that solaris is slow. Did you untar a large file on a sparc20 with a *SCSI2* drive? Well thats why its slow. A cheap upgrade for the new Ultras is to get a 7200 rpm IDE drive and dump the stock 5400 rpm. According to benchmars Solaris x86 outperformed linux and NT on transactions per second. I find FreeBSD to be much more zippy than linux. Why do large sites such as yahoo, apache, hotmail, sony japan and cdrom.com use FreeBSD?
  • Go to www.openbsd.org and www.freebsd.org and read the FAQ. Then make your decision.
  • BSD comes from a free release of SysV. BSD is what one would call, the real deal UNIX.
  • I think you are right about the lack of people hearing about BSD. I was fortunate enough to have freinds who were heavily involved in FreeBSD. After spending most of my time with FreeBSD, at times I can barely stand to use linux. Linux is great because it brings people in to the unix world, but at times it just feels like a cheap knock off. I don't program my self, so I can't say anything about their respective licenses. All I can comment about is the feel from an administration point. I just like the feel of BSD better. If you just run linux, give bsd a try, you may find that you like it. To me, it just feels more solid.
  • Sure it is! You're just examining the wrong criteria. "the best" at doing what?
  • I think its great that we're getting an open source side of the origins, instead of the dam-ned Pirates of Silicon Valley, Conglomerrates (sp?) rule view. Though Tux COULD whip the BSD Devil. -Absy
  • For the record, the Slashdot article doesn't refer to the Daemon incorrectly, so much as it quotes the user drix, who refered to the Daemon incorrectly.

    ------
    "I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday."

  • That is a daemon, dude. And you do not want him to get nasty with that pitchfork, do ya? Besides, is it just me or did Tux really gain a little weight. Man, is his new ass huge!

    Whta the article really shows, though, is how easy it is to "fail", not that BSD really failed...but the perception is that it has, and that Linux carries the flame now.

    Tom

  • Actually, I haven't confused the two. I haven't evaluated Linux' quality, only its success in the market place.

    I'm not saying that BSD is bad and Linux good, I am saying that BSD must make the market aware or die. That is the reality of the world, quality does not rise to surface by itself, it must be pushed weedled and dragged there.

  • What is the real diffrence (from a security standpoint) between Free BSD and OpenBSD.

    The reason I ask, is that we are about to launch an app where users will be connecting through our Firewall. We currently run a Linux (redhat) server which acts as lan/web/firewall/UT server, and we are about to do a MAJOR upgrade. So I'll get to the point. We have been advised to go with a dedicated machine running *BSD as our firewall, which seems logical and secure, but we are unsure as to which BSD Variant to go with.

    I apologize in advance for my lack of /. purity, but at least I know a little Linux. :)

  • Also, I thought I remembered hearing, not that long ago, that salon.com switched to a Linux host.
  • Linux isn't 'ahead' on my home network. I have two NetBSD-x86 boxes, one NetBSD-Mac68K box (SE/30), and only one Slackware box. Slackware has the feel of BSD which is probably why I still have it around. Dual-boot is not permitted on any of my machines.
  • I would second your observation. I had zero experience with Unix systems when I bought that Yggdrasil Plug-and-Play CDROM set (they called it LGX in their failed attempt to wrap Linux in their proprietary labelling) back in the Fall of 1993. After years of tooling around in Linux, one weekend, about two years ago, I decided to download NetBSD. The first machine I installed it on was a Toshiba Laptop, over NFS (exported from a Slackware box, of course). In NetBSD I discovered the clean design that I thought was in danger of disappearing in a cloud of proprietary packaging schemes like RPM.

  • Oh, puh-leeze! In 1985 it was far from obvious that Intel would dominate the market for desktop CPU's. The architecture of the 386 was really ugly compared to the 680x0 series and any Unix-ish port would have been crippled by it. Moreover, there wasn't any perceived rush to "beat" MS-DOS to the desktop since no-one really knew back then how big and monopolistic Microsoft would become.

    Howzabout you make some hardware/software predictions today, and we'll check back in 15 years and see how accurate they were? This business doesn't lend itself to easy prognostication.

    DC Airbag

  • A monitor with a blue screen?

  • Getting the root of BSD? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Isn't is illegal to try and get root of a BSD system (at least, one that isn't your own)...
  • The material that is in the article is very interesting; the BSD's have been decidedly underrated in their contributions.

    But there are four things that the Salon article missed that I'd quite like to see a "central" presentation on:

    • The story of BSD 386, and the Fear Of Lawsuit.

      Back in the late '80s, I saw some folks in Ottawa playing around with it, with some paranoia going on over whether the lawsuit-happy would be stamping it out.

    • The flowthrough to NetBSD versus FreeBSD versus BSDi

      These started as varying approaches to the use of the "ashes" of BSD 386. I'm sure there's more of a story to it than that.

    • The establishment of OpenBSD

      Perhaps with further commentary as to the "splits."

    • The final developments of 4.4 BSD Lite

      Which had pretty big plans, notably including filesystem efforts (journalling FFS, tmpfs, and such).

      It's not clear what, of the final efforts on the academic side, have headed into active versions.

  • Beta Video tapes, DAT Audio, Digital AM/FM Radio, all have been "the best" and all have simply died.

    beta survives as ``betamax'' and is used heavily in the broadcasting industry, and DATs are still used by tapers and for mastering in the pro-audio world. the algorithms developed for digital radio survive in MPEG2 layer III...

    and btw... walnut creek and BSDi merged [freebsd.org] back in March, so FreeBSD is effectively backed by BSDi now.

  • Perhaps most important was the development of NFS, which was introduced formally by Sun but based directly on work by the CSRG.

    To which CSRG work are you referring here?

    Another important building block was Berkeley sockets/STREAMS. These are the things that distinguished Berkeley from AT&T UNIX in the mid-1980s

    STREAMS is a System Vism (influenced by the "streams" [bell-labs.com] done by Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs Research.

  • System V R4.0 was the result of merging a few parts of BSD into System V R3.2 plus providing a compatability layer for much of the rest.

    ...as well as merging a fair bit of SunOS 4.x (the VM system, the VFS layer, the NFS code, and the dynamic linking mechanism, for example, although the versions in SVR4 had some additional changes, including renaming the as_hole() routine as_gap(), as I remember - yes, as_hole() was intentionally called that...) in as well.

  • OK -- I did goof. I should have written that BSDi had merged with Walnut Creek CD-ROM. I just got off the phone with Kirk McKusick and he straightened me out.

    There is the expectation, according to McKusick that there will be some merging of the code bases between BSD/OS and FreeBSD. McKusick says that the source code to BSD/OS will be made available to FreeBSD committers, who will be able to take pieces of code, and once having integrated them into FreeBSD, change the license to a BSD-style license.

    I'll make a change in the text ofmy story and log the correction in my revision log.
  • On the other side of things, Linux might not exist
    either if the FSF hadn't gone with Hurd running on Mach, but something "simpler".

    The snowball might have started rolling several years earlier. Whether it would have ended up in a better result or not is impossible to say.

    Same thing with BSD really; without the lawsuit it would have been quite possible that Linux would have a BSD-based TCP stack (sure there would have been licensing issues, but at that point they would have been pretty easy to solve,
    Linux didn't even start as GPL)

    Or maybe Linux wouldn't have started at all and we'd have a GPLBSD for those who don't believe in the BSD license (with a GPL-style license that allowed the BSD advertising clause)

    Btw., you just gotta love embarassing quotes from the past ;)

    "/I/ think it's better than minix, but I'm a bit > prejudiced. It will never be the kind of professional OS that Hurd will be (in the next
    century or so :), but it's a nice learning tool (even more so than minix, IMHO), and it was/is fun working on it. "

    - Linus in December 1991

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Actually, this process is pretty much Darwinian. In the context of biological evolution "best" really has no meaning other than "survivors". The best survive, because they're best at surviving. Tautological, but there you go.

    So publicity is a survival mechanism that companies use in the Darwinian world of the marketplace. There are many different successful strategies, and many niches to occupy. Just like in biology.

    Not that there aren't differences between technological and biological evolution. Heredity isn't quite as clear in technology, for example.

  • Well, you got closer, but still no cigar.

    System V R4.0 was the result of merging a few parts of BSD into System V R3.2 plus providing a compatability layer for much of the rest. It was done by AT&T USG (Unix Systems Group) and Sun (under contract). (STREAMS was already part of System V R3.2, and actually had grown out of the "packet driver" work Bell Labs had started years before Berkeley sockets; Dennis Ritchie himself had devised STREAMS as a way of accommodating a variety of different proptocol stacks and network drivers, though he wasn't happy with the USG's adaptation of it.) This formed the basis for Solaris 2.x. But the USG continued, adding security and SMP features to System V and improving the VM system, resulting in System V R4.2. There was actually a considerable divergence between this system and Solaris 2; Sun did their own SMP and security enhancements starting from the System V R4.0 code base (which they ultimately bought the rights to). Unix and the OS development part of USG was sold to Novell, which marketed System V R4.2 as "Unixware." It was, IMHO, a much better system than Solaris (at the time), but Novell simply couldn't stand to support a product that competed with NetWare, and after a few years of letting Unixware wither on the vine, sold what was left of the USG and System V R4.2 to SCO. SCO wisely dumped their own System V R3.2-based technology as fast as they could, but by that time Linux was becoming a strong competitor--and we all know what's happened since.

    I've used professionally every product mentioned above (with the exception of NetWare), and I've used BSD from release 2.4 (which ran on PDP-11's).

    It's sad when posts composed of guesswork and half-truths get moderated up by moderators who have even less of a clue. Like one of the earlier posters on this topic, I'm just about ready to abandon Slashdot as the noise has simply drowned out the signal at this point.

    -Ed
  • Sun became a company in 1982 (when Bill Joy left Berkeley for Sun). BSD was there Waaaaay before that.

    SunOS 4.1.x and before (Solaris 1.x) descended from BSD. SunOS 5.x and above (Solaris 2.x) is SVR4, which was developed mainly by Sun and AT&T by merging the best of both codebases (BSD and SVR3).

    Get your facts straight before posting, please.

    -Kevin
  • The missing piece in aleonard's chapter is about the erratic course AT&T took regarding UNIX during the 1980s. When it finally decided that it was worth promoting as a salable commodity, licensing and use restrictions tightened considerably, but they failed to extend the OS in the directions that it needed to go to meet the burgeoning needs of local and connected networks (which then became known as the Internet).

    Perhaps most important was the development of NFS, which was introduced formally by Sun but based directly on work by the CSRG. Another important building block was Berkeley sockets/STREAMS. These are the things that distinguished Berkeley from AT&T UNIX in the mid-1980s and caused sysadmins who were not encumbered by AT&T purchase requirements to go with the Berkeley flavor during that foundational period. In Cuckoo's Nest, Cliff Stoll alludes to some of these differences from his work as a part-time sysadmin at LBL.

    Finally seeing the commercial potential in the late 1980s, particularly driven by corporate markets moving to Oracle and other UNIX-based business applications, and the growing importance of Sun, Apollo, HP and other entrants in both the server and workstation markets, AT&T was faced with two facts in its pursuit of a payoff for its languishing UNIX product: (1) its inability to succeed in the retail systems market against more experienced competitors like HP and more eager ones like Sun; and (2) the ongoing breakup of the Bell System under MFJ III.

    Consequently, AT&T sold UNIX off to Novell, in one of the classic examples of the "greater fool" theory of marketing, since Ray Noorda and his merry band in Utah had not Clue 1 about what to do with it. Novell's Univel subsidiary was set up to put together a repackaging called Unixware which never really got a foothold. The only good thing about all this for Novell was that they eventually enticed Eric Schmidt over from Sun to run the company. Schmidt, Berkeleyite to the core, flung the doors wide open to IP and eased away from IPX, and Novell has been able to find a role in the modern corporate market for servers and directories when it was almost guaranteed that the company would sink without a trace in the mid-1990s otherwise.

    But the fight over the intellectual property rights of the AT&T and Berkeley flavors was heating up even in the late 1980s. Probably the best coverage of the ensuing battle was in UNIX Review columns over those years, and I hope aleonard will review those as his book project goes forward.

    Through a rather complex and messy process, there was a showdown between Novell and UC Berkeley, the very end of which is described in the FreeBSD handbook capsule history [freebsd.org].

    For about 18 months, it was entirely unclear whether an open UNIX would be possible; this was the period when 386BSD was basically frozen and Linux and other now-forgotten "free U**xlike" things were being worked on. And the reason that those were happening was the continuing expansion of the DOS and Windows 3.x market which brought about decreasing costs and increasing capabilities to desktop machines. Desktop UNIX on the Intel platform only really became usable with the faster late-1980s 80386, and was still basically a toy before 1990; most desktoppers were running SunOS 4.x boxen or maybe AT&T, HP or Apollo workstations to do local development and the very earliest forays into what became ISPs.

    The legal battle over the status of UNIX allowed a critical mass to converge on development of Linux, which was far enough ahead in 1994 that even my Bay Area friends were probably installing it more than the BSDs (with the exception of Berkeley grads of course!). The "distribution" concept promoted most effectively by Yggdrasil and Slackware played a major role in this, because small-PC UNIX players no longer basically had to be kernel hackers by necessity.

    There's also no question that the *BSD groups develop with more of the "cathedral" mode than the "bazaar" mode, but that may be an appropriate niche-ification as we go forward. Certainly those of us with more an affinity for the Berkeley flavor will continue to lean toward *BSD than Linux with its stronger SYSV heritage. But in reality, the differences really are a matter of preference, not capability.

  • Let's just say that there's been a lot of claims made, and no real decisions yet, shall we? You know what media coverage can be like, even friendly media coverage.


  • See also Keith Bostic's interview at O'Reilly's FreeBSD DevCenter [oreillynet.com]. He is one of the BSDi founders and runs Sleepycat Software (BerkeleyDB - the base for Perl's DB_File Module).




    --
  • >The Chapter Twenty Years of Berkley Unix: From
    >AT&T Owned to Freely Redistribuatble by Mcusick &
    >Co. does a very good job at describing the
    >movement and development from the AT&T based
    >Berkley Unix to the Free versions that we have
    >today.

    The full text of this article is available at http://www.oreilly.com /catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html [oreilly.com]
  • go to rpm.org and get your head out of the sand. all the code is there along with a detail spec. RPM is NOT a proprietary scheme - its just a tar file with a specfile attached. i suppose you consider .deb file format to be proprietary too.
  • It's been there for a while. I'm just browsing through 4.3BSD-Reno source. Link here. [sco.com]
  • Bill Joy was some kind of freakin genius and since he had access to AT&T UNIX he was able to run with it and create a greatly improved version. But then he dishoners the open source methodology because most of the eyes looking at it wouldn't see the nastiest bugs and wouldn't provide code that was good enough. That statement really illustrates how he doesn't understand open source (in the esr nomenclature since we are talking about the "many eyes" benefits in his essays) because the "many eyes" theory is NOT that thousands of eyes will together find the bugs... it is to make it POSSIBLE for that one genius out there who can fix the bug to do the job... just like Joy was that genius who could really get his head around BSD UNIX code. When I heard him give his opinions on open source at a Sun/Java conference last year in Seattle, even after going over how he was able to improve UNIX in the '70s I was really put off.
  • The best survive, because they're the best at surviving.

    Yes, but the idea of market economics is that the best at surviving are also the best at giving the user what he wants. That appears to be untrue in the software industry, at least in the long term. (Does anybody want Outlook viruses? Does anybody want BSODs?)
  • Agreed. I prefer this fox logo:
    http://www.early.com/~emackey/linux/

    At least a fox is agile, fast, and cunning. A penguin is just fat and slow (well, except in water), and just hobbles about. Yeah, that's what I want to think of my software as...

    Please adopt the fox...hey, maybe someone should make a distro just to gain popularity for this logo...
  • WTF are you talking about?? That's a /guy/ fox...
  • ``nik'' claims that ``FreeBSD and BSDI have not merged'', and that Andrew Leonard had been in error reporting that they had. But I think saying they'll merge is a good enough synopsis of the situation:
    There's big news in the BSD community today, as two important mergers are occurring. First, Berkeley Systems Design, Inc., better known as BSDI, and Walnut Creek CDROM, the primary backer of FreeBSD, are merging. The combined company, BSD Inc., will have a strategy of promoting BSD on all levels. This merger, combining the two primary corporate supporters of BSD, will allow the new company to really focus its efforts on the improvement and promotion of BSD.

    The other merger is that of the codebases of BSD/OS and FreeBSD. This merger will occur over (hopefully) the next year and result in a single operating system, still named FreeBSD. FreeBSD will remain completely open source and primarily under the BSD license, as it is today. Certain commercial drivers and components of BSD/OS which remain under NDA will be administered by BSD Inc. as add-on components. These components, along with the commercial backing, will be the value-added features separating FreeBSD from BSD/OS, which will continue as a commercial product (with FreeBSD at the core).

    (Quoted from an article on Daemon News [daemonnews.org] which has also been covered by slashdot [slashdot.org].)
  • Well, no.

    SunOS came from BSD. SunOS4 still pretty much looked like BSD.

    Then Sun came out with Solaris 2 (and renamed SunOS4 to Solaris 1 after the fact) and began the
    merger of BSD with SVR4.

    Now SVR4 was the last gasp of the AT&T UNIX dynasty. Widely considered to be "The UNIX Standard" at the time. It, of course, was descended from SVR3 (3.2 to be specific) with the addition of some new technology from Bell Labs (STREAMS instead of Sockets--for the not-invented-here crowd).

    Which is all well and good, as far as tangents go, but why do I mention it, you ask... Well the SVR3.2 (and subsequent SVR4) programming manual set was available in regular computer book stores and is written in a nice "standardsy" language. Just perfect for someone who had this idea to clone UNIX. Thus Linux has a System V base (which is part of the gulf between it and BSD).

    But now the twist... Since we started the Sun, and talked about how Solaris was merging SunOS4 with SVR4... (which after the head on collision of Solaris 2.4 turned out alright from the point of view of Solaris (2.)8).

    Think about this: Solaris is like merging FreeBSD and Linux! (As the BSD and Linux zealots run screaming back to their respective battle lines and hide.)

    Pleasent dreams...
  • I think Leonard missed a major issue in why Linux has become "where the action is" in many ways, and that is the license. It's my impression that the ability to put one's work into software that will permanently be free is a major motivator for many people working on Linux, and they would not have the same motivation to work on BSD where their work could be incorporated into someone's closed proprietary software. And that this has helped create the great surge of development activity around Linux as opposed to BSD, which in turn is the main reason why Linux has become so popular (in spite of what may be the fact, and at least is my technically-uninformed impression, that BSD kernel still has many advantages). That is, if the best kernel won, BSD would have won, and perhaps would still win; but instead the best license has won (with the belief that the kernel will ultimately catch up). I'm an outside observer. What do those on the inside think? Is GPL vs. BSD a major (the major?) factor in the ascendency of Linux over BSD?
  • Were they by any chance Onyxes?

    Yes. George Dinolt and I got our version of UNET up on his pair of Onyx boxes, connected over 9600 baud serial lines running SLIP.

    John Nagle

  • He has no name... A lot of people think he's named Chuck though, apparently due to some misinformation from Walnut Creek. See this link [freebsd.org]

  • The real reason BSD lost (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @12:16PM (#1068452)
    In 1985 Intel was preparing to release its first 32 bit processor. BSD's Keith Bostic was appoached by an Intel employee who requested that BSD be ported to the Intel 386. Whether through snobbery or stupidity, Bostic dismissed the request. Like his friend Richard Stallman, Keith Bostic was convinced that the future of personal computing was in the Motorola 68000 series processors. If Bostic had been a little more humble and accepted the Intel challenge, BSD would have had a six year headstart on the competition and Linux probably would never have been invented. It just goes to show that a swelled head doesn't imply extra gray matter. Quite the contrary. By the time Bostic came around the Intel side, it was too late. The lead time had been squandered and Linux was on its way to its legendary success.

  • FreeBSD and Linux (Score:3)

    by Luyseyal ( 3154 ) <swaters@@@luy...info> on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @01:23PM (#1068453) Homepage
    Here is at least one criticism of Linux from reputable Linux hackers (not just some rantings from some elitist BSD fanatic): http://kt.linuxcare.com/ kernel-traffic/kt20000320_59.epl#7 [linuxcare.com]

    Also, some things put off for 2.6 will help tremendously:

    • fully multithreaded TCP/IP stack
    • SCSI layer rewrite
    • hopefully, a standard journaling filesystem (prolly will be EXT3, but you never know...)

    What I would like to see from the BSD community:

    • More willingness to cooperate with Linux developers. Cross-licensed drivers like AIC7xxx is just a start.
    • A revived awareness that Redhat != Linux (you have NO idea how many "*BSD is better than Linux" articles focus only on Redhat.

    I'm sure I've missed lots of things... corrections are obviously welcome.

    -l

  • Lost? Lost? (Score:3)

    by Mr. Flibble ( 12943 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @10:55AM (#1068454) Homepage
    How Berkeley hackers built the Net's most fabled free operating system on the ashes of the '60s -- and then lost the lead to Linux.

    I don't know if "Lost" is an appropriate term. Sure, there are more Linux users out there than BSD (I am one of them.) I am installing OpenBSD on the system I am currently piecing together. If it was not for Linux I would never have known about BSD. True, if not for Linux BSD would probably be at the forefront where Linux is now.

    Still, is that really important? The most important thing about free software perhaps (IMO) even more important than the "free" is the compatible file formats. BSD and Linux are pretty much cousins, file formats are not a problem. BSD is very much like Linux as we all know, but it is not Linux, and thats a good thing. Some buisnesses may not like the GPL, but they need the Unix model, and like free software ideals -just not the GPL- Enter BSD.

    To all the GPL zealots out there, I think that we need both: The BSD licence and the GPL. This promotes competition, and that is good.

    So wish me luck on the install! :)

  • Cooler mascot... (Score:3)

    by spagthorpe ( 111133 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @10:59AM (#1068455)
    I know this is probably heresy, but I think the BSD Devil is way cooler then a freakin Penguin.

  • Early TCP/IP for UNIX. (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @08:06PM (#1068456) Homepage
    I was never all that impressed with the original BSD TCP/IP stack. At Ford Aerospace, we'd been using 3COM's UNET, which could be bolted onto 4.1 BSD or AT&T's UNIX. We had it running on VAXen, PDP-11s, and a pair of Z8000-based machines, possibly the first microprocessor-based machines on the Internet. UNET needed a lot of work; I wrote UDP and ICMP for it, and rewrote most of TCP and IP. It really wasn't that big a deal to read the protocol specs and implement the things. I spent a lot of time getting UNET to interoperate with other TCP/IP implementations, mostly Dave Mills' Fuzzballs and the DEC-20 implementations, rather than UNIX, in those days. Here's a 1983 view [ic.ac.uk] of the TCP/IP implementations.

    3COM dropped support on UNET and TCP/IP around 1983, instead pushing their own, now-forgotten protocol suite for PC LANs. We finally switched to BSD's networking on the VAX when 4.3BSD came out, and even then, it had lousy interoperability with non-Berkeley TCPs. I had to fix the thing myself, for which I got a minor mention in the 4.3BSD release notes.

    The big advantage Berkeley had is that they could give their work away. UNET sold for about $5000 per CPU, just for the protocol stack.

    John Nagle

  • Doomed to Failure? (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @11:11AM (#1068457)

    The current dominance of Linux over BSD leads to the interesting thought that Linux may be doomed to the same (relative) 3rd string status as BSD eventually. Both OS's were formed and are maintained in a similar manner, and both have the same weaknesses that has been killing BSD for the past 10 years.

    It really is a question of strong leadership. When Joy left the BSD movement the problems really began, and now that Linus is working for Transmeta, how long will it be before he too drops his creation in favor of newer (and much more profitable) enterprises?

    I hate to defend Micros~1, but Gates' leadership is the primary reason the company is so strong. Same for Apple & Jobs. You can not have long-term success w/out leadership, and no one took over that position with BSD. If Linus goes, who will replace him?

    I work for an ærodynamics company, and despite our superior product, we may soon be filing chapter 11. Why? Because our brilliant co-founder left to work for a breakfast cereal company (of all things!), and despite the new CEO, nobody can take his place as a strong leader.

    The prestige of parenting a brilliant idea is wonderful, but it seems to me that most will choose to use that prestige achieved to gain a more lucrative position for themselves, dropping their creation like a dirty diaper.

  • Re:Doomed to Failure? (Score:4)

    by Gurlia ( 110988 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @11:45AM (#1068458)

    This is a very interesting thought.

    Though IMHO I think the issue has more to do with continuation than a strong leadership. A strong leader isn't always necessary for continued success, (Apache, anyone?) although it does help a lot. The real issue is, how many of the supporters share the same original insight, motivation, or drive, that sparked the movement in the first place?

    In any movement, you have roughly 4 groups of people: (1) the leader(s), (2) the ones who really believe in what they're doing (ie. the zealots), (3) the ones who not only believe in what they're doing but know what they're doing, and (4) the cheering team. The leaders, of course, are the ones who had the original insight/inspiration that started everything. The cheering team is there because it's the current cool trend, but who have no idea what it's really about. (2) are the zealots who are convinced by the movement and who will stick around even after everything dies down.

    (3) is the important group. Unfortunately, it is also often a very small (or even non-existent) group. These are the people who actually understand the original leader's insights / inspirations, and perhaps has their own insights and ideas, and who know how to go on if the leader(s) resign.

    Anyway, my point is, the lack of group (3) in a company/movement/anything is the real reason there is no continued success, because when the leaders leave, there is nobody who knows how to carry on, so everything dies off. But if there is a group (3), then they will know how to take the lead and continue what the founders started. They may not necessarily be visibly taking over the leadership, but they are the ones continually "fanning the flames" started by the original founder, so to speak.

    Furthermore, in order for a movement to continue, group (3) must somehow be maintained. There needs to be a continual influx of people who actually know what it's all about, and not just there because it's the Next Hip Thing, or merely convinced to dedicate their lives to the Right Thing (but not really know the original insight that sparked it off).

    Coming back to BSD / Linux, it's not so much a matter of having somebody capable enough to take over Linus when (if) he stops working on Linux; it's a matter of whether there are Linuxers who share his original insights and who continually have fresh ideas to carry on. Human beings cannot stand stagnation (although ironically they tend to stagnate as time passes); once a movement runs out of fresh ideas, people get bored and leave, and it dies off.


    ---

  • Re:BSD's Importance (Score:4)

    by Gurlia ( 110988 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @11:02AM (#1068459)

    I actually never realized just how much BSD has influenced the free software movement until I started noticing just how many parts of Linux systems inherit from BSD. The whole socket abstraction to TCP/IP (and other protocols) came from BSD, basic utilities like renice, write, and others as well. This may not sound like much, but you just have to read the source for things like IRC clients or other net apps to realize just how pervasive that BSD idea of sockets is. Plus, I live on renice so much that I can't imagine life on Linux without that little contribution from BSD. :-)


    ---

  • BSD's Importance (Score:4)

    by LaNMaN2000 ( 173615 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @10:51AM (#1068460) Homepage
    There is no doubt that the importance of BSD to the free software movement has been vastly understated. What is disappointig about the article is that it focuses as much on Joy's personality rather than the incredible accomplishment that BSD was.

    It proved that software projects could be distributed yet centrally managed--a fact that needed to be established before telecommuting could become mainstream. Sure, Joy is interesting, but the fact that a culture beyond open-source owes its existance to BSD is completely understated.

  • The cute little daemon... (Score:5)

    by seebs ( 15766 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @11:08AM (#1068461) Homepage
    Well, if you want to know about factual errors, how about the one where the slashdot article refers to the Berkeley Daemon as "the FreeBSD devil"?

    :)

    1. He's a daemon, not a devil.
    2. He's BSD's, not FreeBSD's.

  • History is Not Darwinian (Score:5)

    by WebBug ( 178944 ) on Tuesday May 16, 2000 @11:14AM (#1068462) Homepage Journal

    Ah, BSD, looking back it is like looking into another world altogether. I remember other products from the same period that were "the best" and yet, those too are long gone.

    History looks back not on the best, but on the survivor. Beta Video tapes, DAT Audio, Digital AM/FM Radio, all have been "the best" and all have simply died.

    The causes are varied but they all share a common thread. Microsoft realized very early on that if you want to survive it matters not if you are the best, but rather that everyone recognizes that you are "it". Sony blew it with Beta because they did not allow general propegation of their standard. The VHS format was given away for free and adopted instantly by the pornography movement in the US and became the instant standard.

    BSD never made themselves a public entity. Linux has fought tooth and nail to make themselves visible. Outside of the computer professional field I doubt if anyone has heard of BSD, free or not.

    Unfortunately, it is the public's awarness that determines a products viability, and most importantly it is the public perception that a product is "used" that makes it indeed used.

    Take voting in an election as a good example. People want most of all to vote for the winner. So, whether they understand, believe in, or agree with, a candidate is moot. They will vote for the candidate that they believe will win. MS was preceived as having "won" the OS wars way back in the late '80's, even though MacOS, OS/2 and others were far far ahead of Windows 3.0.

    In Summary: Publicity Pays, big time

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