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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!pacbell.com!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!sdcc12!wa137 From: wa137@sdcc12.ucsd.edu (john e. clark) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: Who owns 386BSD? Message-ID: <63899@sdcc12.ucsd.edu> Date: 17 Mar 94 23:55:32 GMT References: <2m787d$dv9@crl.crl.com> <hY+vwi+.dysonj@delphi.com> Sender: news@sdcc12.ucsd.edu Organization: University of California, San Diego Lines: 57 Nntp-Posting-Host: sdcc12.ucsd.edu In article <hY+vwi+.dysonj@delphi.com> dysonj@delphi.com (John Dyson) writes: +William H. Rowan <rowan@crl.com> writes: + +>Is bsd386 available for not a lot of money? Also, does it include networking +>code for TCP/IP? + +Well, your initial subject is not *exactly* the same question that +you ask in the body :-). First, bsd386 is *OWNED* by BSDI while 386bsd and +its offspring (FreeBSD and NetBSD) are freely redistributable and not really +owned by anybody in particular. All of the aforementioned BSD OSes have +*lots* of networking capability builtin including TCP/IP and NFS. FreeBSD +is available from freebsd.cdrom.com and *soon* will be coming out on CDROM +as I hear. The source for BSD is 'owned' by the Regents of the University of California(ie all californians own it), and other contributors as listed in the copyright notices found in the code. In the notice 'copy' privilage is given to all provided the copyright notice is retained. What has not been made clear in the usually ftp distributions is what one needs to do to get a commercial use license, so that one could reproduce BSD for a 'profit'. The fact that you may make a copy of what is on an archive, compile, execute or passon gratis, does not really seem to give you the 'right' to charge money for the package. When you buy a CD-ROM version you are paying for the media only, there is no transfer of 'rights', other than the right to 'freely copy' the source code, a right enumerated in the copyright notice in all the source. (Furthermore responsibility for any damage is disclaimed). When you buy BSDI's product you do not have the 'right' to freely copy it as you do with the BSD source derived from the various archives. One of the claims from companies which support commercial BSD offerings is that they have added, enhanced, fixed or maintained the code so that it is different, better, and supported, and so justify their charge for the product. This is especially true for companies providing BSD on architectures not supported by the Berkeley originals, and it probably gets real murky on those that are supported, "was it live, or was it memorex". As a would be user of either the Freeware or the commercialware versions, one must descide which path to use for acquiring the product, freeware has the price of self-support, commercialware has the price of dollars and doughnuts. As a note many commercial offerings of TCP/IP are based on BSD networking code. As another note, NFS was provided by a non-Sun source, I think Utah, so one does not have to pay Sun royalties on their source, but Sun does hold a patent on either RPC, NFS, or both. -- John Clark wa137@sdcc12.ucsd.edu