ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) (11/07/90)
About how much does it cost to get source to, say, SCO or ISC Unix? I've been doing drivers for both of these, and there are various things that these companies have left out of their documentation that access to the source would clear up quite well (not to single out these two. They are the ones I've used, but I have no doubt that all the vendors documentation suffers the same type of problem). Sometimes, after spending all night in crash analyzing a kernel dump to figure out which undocumented field in which undocumented kernel data structure was not set up by my driver because the need to do so is not mentioned in the documentation, thus leading to a kernel crash, I really desire to be able to look at the source code (which would clear this sort of problem up in a few minutes). Tim Smith
jgd@rsiatl.UUCP (John G. DeArmond) (11/08/90)
ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith) writes: >About how much does it cost to get source to, say, SCO or ISC Unix? My AT&T package on the subject is 2 years old but in 1988, the kernal and utilities license for V/386 was $80,000. Binary redistribution rights and unbundled utility rights are similiarly obscene. This just goes to show that Unix truly is the product good enough that even AT&T cannot kill. Support Mach in your lifetime. John -- John De Armond, WD4OQC | "The truly ignorant in our society are those people Radiation Systems, Inc. | who would throw away the parts of the Constitution Atlanta, Ga | they find inconvenient." -me Defend the 2nd {emory,uunet}!rsiatl!jgd| with the same fervor as you do the 1st.
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (11/09/90)
>This just goes to show that Unix truly is the product good enough >that even AT&T cannot kill. Support Mach in your lifetime. You'll have to support more than just Mach, as has been pointed out more times than I care to remember - the AT&T-free parts of Mach don't even include, as I remember, replacements for the functionality of the traditional UNIX kernel, much less libraries and utilities atop it. For the rest, you'll probably have to look to 4.4BSD or GNU....
richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) (11/11/90)
>>This just goes to show that Unix truly is the product good enough >>that even AT&T cannot kill. Support Mach in your lifetime. > >You'll have to support more than just Mach, as has been pointed out more >times than I care to remember - the AT&T-free parts of Mach don't even >include, as I remember, replacements for the functionality of the >traditional UNIX kernel, much less libraries and utilities atop it. For >the rest, you'll probably have to look to 4.4BSD or GNU.... Pay attention Guy. He did say "in your lifetime". Which I took to mean that he knew that there will be a wait before the complete, free Mach is available. But everything I've heard says that a completely free Mach IS being worked on seriously. It might not be available next year, but hopefully in our lifetimes. -- Richard Foulk richard@pegasus.com
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (11/13/90)
>Pay attention Guy. He did say "in your lifetime". Which I took to >mean that he knew that there will be a wait before the complete, free >Mach is available. > >But everything I've heard says that a completely free Mach IS being >worked on seriously. It might not be available next year, but hopefully >in our lifetimes. Whether a "complete, free Mach" is relevant to the question depends on what "Mach" means here. Unless the folks at CMU doing Mach are the ones planning to come up with the whole thing, I'd say that a "completely free Mach" is only *part* of a completely free UNIX-compatible OS. I.e., you'll have to support more than just the stuff CMU is doing with Mach, whether the "more than just Mach" is the stuff Berkeley is doing, or the stuff that FSF is doing, or whatever.
richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) (11/13/90)
From: rms@ai.mit.edu (Richard Stallman) Date: Sun, 11 Nov 90 16:07:14 -0500 To: info-gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu Subject: GNU kernel status We are still waiting for Mach. Mike Bushnell, a GNU staff programmer, says that the code for the microkernel itself looks clean enough. Supposedly the lawyers at CMU are now choosing the details of the wording for the copying conditions. Meanwhile, we are preparing to start work on turning POE (a partial emulator for Unix on top of Mach) into a full emulation. Just as soon as they put the proper notices into the source files. (CMU says that POE doesn't stand for anything, but I think it stands for "Preserve Our Essence".) -- Richard Foulk richard@pegasus.com