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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA7030 ; Fri, 15 Jan 93 19:03:36 EST Xref: sserve comp.unix.wizards:28246 comp.org.eff.talk:11651 comp.org.usenix:3109 comp.unix.bsd:10081 Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!olivea!sgigate!sgi!rhyolite!vjs From: vjs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com (Vernon Schryver) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.org.eff.talk,comp.org.usenix,comp.unix.bsd,alt.suit.att-bsdi Subject: Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings... Message-ID: <v0r38cs@rhyolite.wpd.sgi.com> Date: 18 Jan 93 02:13:35 GMT References: <BETSYS.93Jan15143516@ra.cs.umb.edu> <1993Jan17.203539.6063@s4mjs.uucp> Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc. Mountain View, CA Lines: 44 In article <1993Jan17.203539.6063@s4mjs.uucp>, mjs@s4mjs.uucp (M.J.Shannon) writes: > ... > Look, I'm not fond of what USL is doing *as* *a* *corporate* *body*, but > I like a lot of the things the folks in the trenches have done. Do you > seriously want to be abused because of the corporate policies of *your* > employer? Your heart is in the right place. There must be some people in USL who are good people and smart and competent programers. However, I cannot conceive of "[liking] a lot of the things the folks in the trenches [at USL] have done." The things that USL has done have in general been somewhere among undesirable, wrong, illconceived, and poorly executed. I'm sure here there must be something good on the System V tapes from USL in the last half dozen years that were done by USL, but I can't think of one. The few good things that I can think of from the System V tapes that I don't know to have originated outside of USL and at most to have been "improved and productized" (and generally messed up) predate SVR3.0. For example, the improved networking code in SVR4 is really 4.3BSD filtered through Sun and STREAM-ized, as can be easily seen if you `diff` various flavors of 4.3BSD with various SVR4 tapes. The various version networking in SVR3 was also from outside USL. For another example, rumor had it that the Ma Bell inventors of streams were, to put it mildly, less than enthused about how System V STREAMS turned out, which might have something to do with why they were using BSD based source in (I think it was) the 8th Edition. Years ago, code from CSRG could be characterized as "student code." USL kernel code has always had a strong flavor of "COBOL code." Since the days of 4.1, BSD code has become quite reasonable. System V is now ... well, on the grounds that there must be some good people somewhere in there, I'll stop. Most works of man and especially computer software reflect the political and cultural environment in which they were produced. What you would expect from USL is about what you get. Vernon Schryver, vjs@sgi.com