dick@cca.ucsf.edu (Dick Karpinski) (10/08/90)
In article <8883@helios.TAMU.EDU> cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu (Chuck Herrick) writes: >... to avoid another Berkeley-Sun debacle. In other words, you all >paid for BSD UNIX to be done at Berkeley with your tax dollars... and >now when you buy a Sun you're paying for it again, since Sun was >started by some of the same people who did BSD at the Berk and who >then took it to sell it for profit. I don't intend to flame, but to disagree that Sun's use of Berkeley code is somehow bad or wrong. Instead, Berkeley made many advances and charged only a distribution fee for their part. Yes, you still need an AT&T license, but that's intellectual property for you. Sun adapted it to their hardware. You are welcome to do that too. Other people adapted it to other hardware, too. The practice is so widespread that it becomes annoying for those who deal with the guts of these systems to have to fix the same bugs over and over for each different kind of machine. My guess is that the typical price for all these BSD adaptations is less than it would have been without funding Berkeley with tax dollars. In fact I count those dollars as among the best ever spent in the name of national defense, a notoriously poor performer in terms of economic benefit per dollar spent. Still, I quite agree that it would be nicer if such software were really free to the users. That's why I hope that CMU does manage to produce an AT&T free version of the micro-kernel and make it freely available. When they do, Stallman can proceed to make a full-function operating system from it to complete the decade or so of work and have OS/compiler/editor/utilities all free and source guaranteed to be available for distribution cost alone. On a slightly different tack, Berkeley itself seems to have a firm intention to make BSD4.4 completely AT&T free to provide another alternative source available version of Unix. Given, as well, that the quality of junk computers is rising very fast, the opportunities that begin to open up for some enthusiastic teenage hacker to make tremendous advances begin to boggle the mind. These are interesting times to live through. Dick