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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!kithrup!sef From: sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) Subject: Re: Funding 4.4BSD Development Organization: Kithrup Enterprises, Ltd. Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1992 23:40:31 GMT Message-ID: <1992Jun25.234031.6037@kithrup.COM> References: <79@ampr.ab.ca> Lines: 104 In article <79@ampr.ab.ca> lyndon@ampr.ab.ca (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes: >Before everyone throws their money away trying to keep CSRG alive, >consider that the way every gov't institution works makes it impossible >for us to "fund" the CSRG. Any money sent to UCB goes into the general >revenue fund (at least that's the way it works at every gov't and >post-secondary institution I have dealt with). Wrong. One *can* donate money (as a "gift," not a "grant") to CSRG *specifically*. Not all of the money goes to CSRG, however. I think Kirk said that 50-75% would go to CSRG, the rest elsewhere (obviously, I forget all of the details). >It you want to see BSD continue as a living entity, take your money >down to the BSDI folks and exchange it for a distribution tape. *sigh* That does *NOT* contribute towards a "free" BSD. Yes, the BSDi license is "only" $1k (although previous advertisements also said that the production release would be $1.5k; this may have changed since, however), and I, right now, do recommend their product for people who want a running system. Other people, however, either want to hack around, or prefer a little inconvenience in order to have a "free" system, and, for them, there are alternatives (386bsd, the 386bsd mach single server, stuff like that). >At this point BSDI and CSRG aren't really that different. Yes, they are *incredibly* different. I do worry, sometimes, about what happens if/when your statement becomes completely true. But, then, I'm a worrier 8-). >Yes, BSDI is >in it for the bucks, but then again BSD from UCB was never really "free" >either. We payed via the license fee, and the money that lets UCB operate >to begin with doesn't come out of thin air. You paid (not "payed," btw; silly english 8-() for an AT&T license. If you already had one, you did not have to pay anything: you could get BSD from anyone who had it and was willing to make you a tape. When the Net/2 tape came out, you could ftp it from any place that had it (uunet eventually offered it). The $600-$900 that you paid to UCB was a pittance (although it was quite useful to CSRG even so). BSDi is now charging $1k for what I freely admit is a lot of work. (They rewrote some missing functions, they rewrote missing utilities, they integrated everything, they wrote device drivers or integrated drivers from other people, they *tested*, and they offer support. Last, and certainly not least, they make *releases*. *None* of that is trivial, folks, and is *easily* worth $1k. Or even $1.5k.) Bill Jolitz is spearheading an effort to make a truly free BSD-based system. He is also doing a lot of work. His initial two releases were not as stable, complete, or well-put together as BSDi's (but, then, his "product" was also a bit younger). He does not, at least right now, offer guaranteed support (he may answer your email, or, if you post about it, there is a huge community of people who will read it, and some of them may be able to offer help), and at least part of the delay with the 0.1 release is, I'm sure, due to the troubles with making a decent release (i.e., making a set of floppies that will install on more-or-less generic hardware, format the disk, work with cards that may be installed differently, etc.). Due to their work, CSRG has provided a base system that other people can use. Telling people that "BSDi is cheap enough, you should pay them" is offensive to me, although I cannot really say why. (I got into an argument with someone because I thought he was telling me that.) Part of it is because, even if BSD/386 were $100, it would *still* not be cheap enough, not unless I could give copies to anybody who wanted it. I am, of course, a special case (some would say a bizarre, twisted, and weird case, and, frankly, they might be right 8-)). After CSRG dissolves, if BSDi becomes the focal point for BSD development, then all new developments will probably become proprietary to BSD (meaning that, in order to get it, you will have to pay BSDi money, and will not be able to share it with anyone who is not a BSDi licensee). This is fine -- but a lot of very good things came out of CSRG and BSD, and the fact that they were free had a lot to do with it (the networking, for example, could be used, at at least some point in its development, without any AT&T license at all). Right now, there is complete C library available for free, because it was written by / for CSRG (it happens to include Chris Torek's stdio library, which is very well written). Anyone can use this library, for whatever purposes they want (i.e., it is not copyleft!). People like BSDi can even come along, and make a commercial project out of it. BSDi did not, for example, *have* to distribute source code to anything but the copyleft portions of BSD/386 (and, in the future, they will have binary-plus-copyleft-sources-only releases). CSRG stands for Computer Science Research Group. By not being commercially-oriented, I think they were able to do things that they might otherwise not have been able to do. BSDi will probably not be able to do as much research as the people involved might like (I hope I'm wrong, however). Oh, well. I apologise for the length of this. I mostly wanted to get across the point that I, at least, want a free system for myself, and I think that having one available is a very valuble thing to the community, but that I also with BSDi lots of luck, as I think their success would also be a very good thing for the community (the two are not mutually exclusive). I hope I managed to get that across in anything other than this paragraph 8-). -- Sean Eric Fagan | "My psychiatrist says I have a messiah sef@kithrup.COM | complex. But I forgive him." -----------------+ -- Jim Carrey Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.