*BSD News Article 33138


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From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles M. Hannum)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: 4.4-lite?
Date: 24 Jul 1994 22:59:50 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
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Message-ID: <MYCROFT.94Jul24185950@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
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In-reply-to: csgr@cs.ru.ac.za's message of 22 Jul 1994 14:40:26 GMT


In article <30oloq$7k7@quagga.ru.ac.za> csgr@cs.ru.ac.za (Geoff
Rehmet) writes:

   The net is a valid place to ask questions.  I was asking a question
   which is relevant to the problems relating to USL's claims about
   certain files - [...]

Nonsense.  It wasn't even a valid question, since you had no way of
knowing, before I said so, that our agreement with USL required adding
USL copyright notices to any files.

Furthermore, you very well know that most of the NetBSD group only
read Usenet sparingly.  (Actually, I only do when someone tells me
there's a flame war raging and some actual facts are needed.)
Frankly, legal matters, in general, should *not* be discussed in
public.  Hell, CSRG wouldn't tell you the result of their settlement
last I knew, and yet you're apparently willing to believe that code is
free.

   I don't need to go scrounging through the whole NetBSD source tree
   to check for myself - I was assuming that I could get an honest
   answer on the net.

And you did get an honest answer.  I said our tree is USL-free, and it
is.  That's as much answer as anyone should need, unless you believe
that I am lying or have no clue.  In fact, we're actually complying
with what we see as the `worst case' interpretation of agreement,
since there are a couple of (minor) points that are not entirely
clear.

   Charles - I post a query, you get your balls tied in a knot!

It's hard for me to believe that your posting was so innocent, given
the past content of this thread.


In fact, I quote from a prior article of yours:

   As I understand it NetBSD is still using a source tree which is
   derived from the Net/2 tape, and not the 4.4Lite tape (correct me
   if I am wrong), so I don't think that NetBSD-1.0 can claim to be
   4.4BSD-based.

The fact is, our kernel, and parts of user-land (mostly related to
file systems), *are* based on 4.4-Lite.  This has been stated
repeatedly, and yet you continued to refute it without evidence.  It
is *not* necessary to throw away our entire code history to accomplish
that goal, and I personally would find it highly irresponsible of us
to do so.

I consider your statements inflammatory.  You posted as if what were
saying was fact, when in truth it was wrong, and you just hadn't
bothered to check or even listen at all.  This is standard Usenet
technique, and one of the primary reasons I can't stand reading
Usenet.

Questions are okay; statements of false `facts' are *not*.

--
- Charles Hannum
  NetBSD group
  Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sun4c, mac68k, pc532, da30.
  In progress: sun3, pmax, vax, sun4m.