mrt@MRT.MACH.CS.CMU.EDU (Mary Thompson) (10/03/90)
Mach for the i386 does require a BSD source license and also an internet connection to down load the files. We regret that this makes it impractical for distribution to individuals with i386 based machines, but CMU does not have the time or expertise (or licenses) to do binary releases. Mary Thompsn
cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu (Chuck Herrick) (10/04/90)
In article <1990Oct3.162958.28562@cs.cmu.edu> mrt@MRT.MACH.CS.CMU.EDU (Mary Thompson) writes: >Mach for the i386 does require a BSD source license and also an internet >connection to down load the files. We regret that this makes it impractical >for distribution to individuals with i386 based machines, but CMU does not >have the time or expertise (or licenses) to do binary releases. > > Mary Thompsn Well, don't that beat all... the little people need not apply? One wonders who the market for i386 Mach will be down the road... and one hopes all will take note. -- Chuck Herrick cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu
larry@belch.Berkeley.EDU (Larry Foard) (10/05/90)
In article <8785@helios.TAMU.EDU> cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu (Chuck Herrick) writes: >In article <1990Oct3.162958.28562@cs.cmu.edu> mrt@MRT.MACH.CS.CMU.EDU > (Mary Thompson) writes: [unavailability of mach deleted] > > Well, don't that beat all... the little people need not apply? > One wonders who the market for i386 Mach will be down the > road... and one hopes all will take note. >-- > Chuck Herrick cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu I agree I am working on UNIX application software for the 386, I would have loved to have used MACH but the makers of MACH seem to have no interest in making it available to "real" people. I can't understand why some one goes through the effort to write a revolutionary OS and then keeps it locked in a closet because they won't take the effort needed to get it out to the public. The PC market is being taken over by Windows 3.0 and Sys V unix, if MACH should ever become available to the general public, it may be to late, every one will already have software for SYS V. Every one seems to talk about the AT&T source license as though they grow on trees, maybe they do if you work for a multi billion dollar corporation, but what about small companys and individuals? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ DISCLAIMER: This probably reflects the views of my company and if it doesn't I'll brainwash them };-)
srodawa@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Dr. Srodawa) (10/06/90)
In article <8785@helios.TAMU.EDU> cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu (Chuck Herrick) writes: > Well, don't that beat all... the little people need not apply? > One wonders who the market for i386 Mach will be down the > road... and one hopes all will take note. The little people will be able to buy the package from MtXinu. Just like the little people buy SCO Xenix or SCO Unix instead of a source license from AT&T. -- | Ronald J. Srodawa | Internet: srodawa@unix.secs.oakland.edu | | School of Engineering and CS | UUCP: srodawa@egrunix.UUCP | | Oakland University | Voice: (313) 370-2247 | | Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401 | |
cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu (Chuck Herrick) (10/07/90)
In article <3270@vela.acs.oakland.edu> srodawa@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Dr. Srodawa) writes: >The little people will be able to buy the package from MtXinu. Just >like the little people buy SCO Xenix or SCO Unix instead of a source >license from AT&T. Oh really? But when you buy UNIX from SCO what you're paying for is a product privately developed and produced supposedly with no funding from U.S. tax dollars... Mach has been funded virtually entirely by the U.S. Government, which means that OUR TAX DOLLARS HAVE ALREADY BEEN SPENT to fund some professors and graduate students to develop it. DO Y0U EXPECT US TO PAY FOR IT TWICE? I want an answer to the following question: just how much is MtXinu paying to the U.S. Government for Mach so the U.S. Govenment can recoup its investment in Mach and CMU in the form of U.S. tax dollars? And while we're asking, how does a private enterprise like MtXinu get its hands on a publicly-funded project like Mach? And who is MtXinu anyway? Are they a private shell formed to make a profit from work already paid for by U.S. taxpayers? -- Chuck Herrick cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu
srodawa@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Dr. Srodawa) (10/07/90)
In article <8874@helios.TAMU.EDU> cnh5730@calvin.tamu.edu (Chuck Herrick) writes: > Oh really? But when you buy UNIX from SCO what you're paying for > is a product privately developed and produced supposedly with no > funding from U.S. tax dollars... Mach has been funded virtually > entirely by the U.S. Government, which means that OUR TAX DOLLARS > HAVE ALREADY BEEN SPENT to fund some professors and graduate > students to develop it. DO Y0U EXPECT US TO PAY FOR IT TWICE? > I want an answer to the following question: just how much is > MtXinu paying to the U.S. Government for Mach so the U.S. > Govenment can recoup its investment in Mach and CMU in the form > of U.S. tax dollars? > And while we're asking, how does a private enterprise like MtXinu > get its hands on a publicly-funded project like Mach? And who is > MtXinu anyway? Are they a private shell formed to make a > profit from work already paid for by U.S. taxpayers? I don't see it your way at all. The Mach "product" really consists of two parts..the part written at CMU and underwritten by tax dollars and tha parts written by AT&T and Berkeley and Sun. When this is sold to universities, the cost is very low, because AT&T and Berkeley charge universities very little for source code licenses. CMU must verify these licenses and then provides access via servers..they don't even ship a product. When you buy a product from a place like MtXinu, you ARE NOT PAYING TWICE for a product. The price charged by such a firm covers the cost of the licenses and royalties and the cost of value added by the distributing company..testing, improvement, integration, customer service, etc. So long as CMU doesn't charge them for the work developed at Carnegie-Mellon under federal grants, you are not paying twice. This same thing happens when you buy a TCP/IP package from a vendor. They may have started with the Berkeley TCP/IP package, which is available absolutely free to anyone. They then installed it within their environment, which usually means putting in the socket hooks. You pay for a product which started as a freebie with the value added additions written by the vendor. You could have it for free if you wanted to put in all the hooks yourself. Ron. -- | Ronald J. Srodawa | Internet: srodawa@unix.secs.oakland.edu | | School of Engineering and CS | UUCP: srodawa@egrunix.UUCP | | Oakland University | Voice: (313) 370-2247 | | Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401 | |
rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) (10/10/90)
Things are getting out of hand here. Now, just for reference, I've got a 386 machine at home waiting for an OS, and I'd love to have a free Mach- based system to run on it, so I guess I can identify a bit with some of the recent postings. HOWEVER, I don't *expect* to get such a system for free, and I sure-as-hell don't go around questioning the schedules, motives, integrity, and tax status of any organization that has failed to give me a handout! (I've got one machine at home running a Sys V UNIX, and you'd better believe I had to *pay* for the software on that one--even though it came from the company I work for! It ain't free, folks.) Both CMU and mt Xinu are making serious, sincere efforts to make Mach available as soon as possible, in a reasonable, useful fashion. There have been some entirely unwarranted attacks on them from people who have made no effort to find out what's really going on. First, repeat after me 100 times: "The Mach kernel is *not* an operating system." Now, about some of the whining, from various folks... > OK, so how about CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) just finish > the job and rewrite the rest of UNIX under Mach and release it > into the public domain. What's this "finish the job" crap? Maybe it's the job you'd like them to do, but you're not paying the bills. CMU is moving toward producing a freely redistributable Mach kernel, and they'll do other things besides, but where is it written that it's CMU's job to recreate UNIX? I would think that a university would pursue more challenging work than reinven- ting a 20-year-old wheel. You might also consider that the UNIX kernel is a tiny part of the whole operating system, and the Mach 3.0 kernel is small relative to current UNIX kernels. Your "finish the job" really means "tackle a project two orders of magnitude larger" (and boring:-). > How much, if any, money that went into Mach came from United > States tax dollars?.. either directly or indirectly, including > NSF or other scientific forms of funding... and into Mach in ANY > form, including graduate student funding? > The reason I ask should be obvious... here you'd have people with > 386's who paid for Mach and who can't even be Beta sites. Just because something was developed "with tax dollars" (a phrase that almost always signals a red-herring argument) doesn't mean you can demand the results at your convenience. Even if CMU *could* redistribute the whole system, if they started handing it out to everyone who asked for it, they'd be spending all their time handling distribution and none of their time doing the real work. Demanding the Mach 3.0 work at this point is a bit like demanding copies of the lab notebooks for government-funded research. CMU *is* doing a lot to get Mach out for people to work with. And anyway, where is it written that anything developed with tax dollars has to be handed out to any taxpayer who asks for it??? (Care to wander over to the NSA and ask them for the programs they've written "with tax dollars"?:-) > Supposedly CMU is working on stripping all the AT&T code out of > Mach 2.5 and shipping it as Mach 3.0 which could then be freely > distributed software... CMU is working on a *kernel* (in the classic sense of a minimal core of mechanisms) with no AT&T code. The Mach 3.0 kernel by itself bears about the same relationship to a full operating system as an engine block does to a car. Even if the 3.0 kernel could be distributed by itself, it's not clear what good it would do. >...In the Free Software Foundation's bulletin of > June 1990 they mentioned that Mach 3.0 might be available by the > beginning of the summer. That was over 3 months ago and still no sign > of 3.0 in sight... The FSF's bulletin of June, 1988 said essentially the same thing--that a freed Mach kernel would be available soon. So what? Even though there is collaboration between FSF and CMU, that doesn't mean that FSF can declare schedules for CMU. Folks ought to keep in mind that CMU is not a software vendor. They're doing research. (Reminds me of the [hopefully apocryphal] story of some- one complaining, "How does Berkeley expect to sell software when they won't answer their phone?":-) > ...I would have > loved to have used MACH but the makers of MACH seem to have no interest in > making it available to "real" people. I can't understand why some one goes > through the effort to write a revolutionary OS and then keeps it locked in a > closet because they won't take the effort needed to get it out to the public. The "makers of Mach" have done a *lot* of work to make Mach available. They have spent far more time than you can imagine getting it out, helping people get up to speed working with it, going over the same problems again and again. (Their patience amazes me.) Many groups in industry and academia are working on Mach, *right now*. But they're groups who have the appropriate licenses, so that CMU doesn't have to hassle or fund that, and they're prepared to deal with a system in flux. In other words, not only has CMU *not* kept Mach "locked in a closet"; they've spent as much effort as can be reasonably expected to get it out, quickly. > The PC market is being taken over by Windows 3.0 and Sys V unix, if MACH > should ever become available to the general public, it may be to late, Good grief! Mach is *not* a product. It takes a lot of work to turn even good, stable research work into something that can be sold into a real end-user market. The folks working on Mach 3.0 are still making *major* changes to some parts. Releasing Mach to an end-user community now would surely doom it. > >The little people will be able to buy the package from MtXinu... ... > Oh really? But when you buy UNIX from SCO what you're paying for > is a product privately developed and produced supposedly with no > funding from U.S. tax dollars... Mach has been funded virtually > entirely by the U.S. Government, which means that OUR TAX DOLLARS > HAVE ALREADY BEEN SPENT to fund some professors and graduate > students to develop it. DO Y0U EXPECT US TO PAY FOR IT TWICE? Right. The distribution media just fall out of the sky. Manuals materialize at the wave of a wand. All conceivable hardware is already supported, bug-free. Questions and problems are answered telepathically by omniscient support people who donate their time. Get real. Learn the difference between a research project and a product. > I want an answer to the following question: just how much is > MtXinu paying to the U.S. Government for Mach so the U.S. > Govenment can recoup its investment in Mach and CMU in the form > of U.S. tax dollars? Suppose someone told you that mt Xinu is being paid to turn it into a product?! Stuff *that* one in your little fit of rage! Folks, if you don't know what it takes to turn a working piece of soft- ware into a product, you ought to study the matter a fair while before you set about flaming. It's expensive. It's more expensive than you can imagine, unless you've done it several times. > And while we're asking, how does a private enterprise like MtXinu > get its hands on a publicly-funded project like Mach? And who is > MtXinu anyway? Are they a private shell formed to make a > profit from work already paid for by U.S. taxpayers? What a crock! You certainly don't let near-total ignorance stand in the way of innuendo, do you? Looks to me like you're trying to find a way to browbeat people into giving you something for nothing. If you don't know what mt Xinu is, why are you slamming the company? And if you'd like to know about them, you're more likely to find out by asking some polite questions than by attacking. In the case of Mach, mt Xinu is the commercial entity which can handle the details and hassles of redistribution and support. They've worked the licensing problems. They're doing the work to turn it into a product. All that seems pretty simple and not particularly nefarious. -- Dick Dunn rcd@ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd Boulder, CO (303)449-2870 ...Worst-case analysis must never begin with "No one would ever want..."