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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!uunet!psinntp!sugar!taronga!peter
From: peter@taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Designing UNIX Lite?
Re: Funding 4.4BSD Development
Message-ID: <C8VG6U7@taronga.com>
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
References: <79@ampr.ab.ca> <1992Jun26.021947.28286@gateway.novell.com> <1992Jun27.165905.27527@wobble.uucp>
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 1992 14:47:20 GMT
Lines: 35
In article <1992Jun27.165905.27527@wobble.uucp> dlu@wobble.uucp (Doug Urner) writes:
>I'm curious. How do the license terms from BSDI prevent you from
>"show[ing] everything to a CS student" or from doing a port to another
>machine (assuming you are willing to pay BSDI the $200 for a right to
>copy)?
Because I want to sell UNIX Lite (or see someone selling UNIX Lite) for $50
a copy. ($50 being the effective price for OS/2: IBM has made the entrance
fee so low there's no alternative).
I'd do that even if I only made $5 or $10 a copy over the license fee, but
I'm not going to take a loss.
Well, once 386BSD settles down this may be possible. So, what does UNIX
Lite have to include?
DOS Emulation. A SVR3 ABI (at a minimum), though the stock software should
not need it: if you have to load an emulator to run Xenix or SCO or Dell
binaries that's OK. If these are physically unbundled, that's OK too.
Small size: a usable "2-user" (really, single-user plus UUCP) system on no
more than 2 1.2M floppies and no more than 2M of RAM. A single-user boot you
can do work with on one floppy, including a RAM-disk driver that you can
load and "boot" into so you can get up on a 1-floppy system and do work.
These are market requirements for the low end. Maybe not for doing real
work, but for providing a platform so that people can depend on being
able to get the system up after a disk crash to the point they can run
the equivalent of Norton Utilities. The current difficulty of putting
a UNIX system back together without a spare hard drive is a real obstacle.
--
`-_-'
Have you hugged your wolf today? 'U`
Peter da Silva, Taronga Park BBS, Houston, TX +1 713 568 0480/1032