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From: mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (Michael Gschwind)
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
In-Reply-To: jbass@igor.tamri.com's message of Wed, 20 Jan 93 23: 06:16 GMT
Message-ID: <MIKE.93Jan22144301@cuba.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at>
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Organization: Vienna University of Technology
References: <C0yK27.9Ly@csn.org> <1ja6bgINNh23@chnews.intel.com>
<BZS.93Jan16205935@world.std.com>
<1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 13:43:01 GMT
Lines: 65
In article <1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes:
From my view what UCB, Joltz, BSDI and others have done has neither
advanced the art nor been in the UNIX industries best interest. With
forethought and malace they incrementally attempted to place the UNIX
operating system product into the public domain by re-writting it
line by line while leaving the framework and the fabric of the system
unchanged ... same global design, major algorithms, data structures,
internal interfaces, etc ... to what end? Only to attempt to destroy
AT&T/USL UNIX as a commercial product. At best the debate has
cost more than a million wasted man-hours that could have been more
productively used to advance the art with a new design. Their actions
have been WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
Wait a moment! Who copied design, algorithms, data structures,... from
whom? UCB from ATT/USL? Or ATT/USL from ATT? I would think the latter
was the case rather than the fromer!!! Unix as we know it today is a
UCB product (mostly, ie the parts that make UNIX usable!), not an ATT
one. I bet you would not want to work on a PDP-11/V-32 unix - nor
would I (except for historical/amusement reasons). Many of the things
we so much like where written outside ATT and then filtered back in to
ATT unix or were rewritten by ATT.
SO what we like about UNIX (just some features - some of them
are pretty outdated and we don't like them any more (eg vi), but
they were at the time a MAJOR step!):
* written in C ATT
* Paging BSD
* Fast File System BSD
* Job control BSD
* csh (just a personal plug ;) BSD
* IPC/networking/sockets BSD
* vi (eek - but better than ed) BSD
* curses ?BSD?
* lex,yacc ATT
* sendmail BSD
* dbx ?BSD?
* termcap BSD
AT&T Unix was a good thing, but for its time - much of the
improvement, ie. that which made it into a `product' did not come from
AT&T (Unix got wuite a bit bigger and less elegant in the process - I
doubt that the inventors would want to be associated with the
cancerous beast that UNIX is today - for that reason the started out
anew with Plan9 if I understand things) - and the point where the
input of AT&T code stopped is easily discernable with the last source
license UCB took for UNIX - which is way back when, if I understand
things correctly...
So the people who are writting PD unixes - oops, UNIX is TM - who are
writting POSIX conformant operating systems are ripping USL off? Isn't
it more the case that USL is ripping the CS community off by selling a
system of which they very lttle wrote/invented?
mike
--
Michael Gschwind, Vienna University of Technology
mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (*) BOZO is a registered
(back in Vienna) trademark of Bush/Quayle 92
(*) UNIX is a registered
trademark of AT&T