14 Aug
2025
14 Aug
'25
1:29 a.m.
Indeed, IBM had quite broad support for NFS.
There's a whole chapter in this Redbook (1993) about OS/2 NFS clients
working with AIX, MVS, VM, and OS/2 servers.
https://ia801201.us.archive.org/11/items/gg243531/gg243531_TCPIP_2_0_for_OS…
On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 5:54 PM Charles H. Sauer (he/him) <
sauer(a)technologists.com> wrote:
On 8/13/2025 7:31 PM, Jonathan Gray wrote:
On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:18:34AM -0400, Dan
Cross wrote:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.protocols.nfs/c/npQbxPe_ZeQ/m/Z_yQcsh56mkJ
On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00 AM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy(a)dartmouth.edu> wrote:
The NFS reference code was licensed under NDA with some cost involved
according to Rick Macklem who wrote the NFS code in 4.3BSD-Reno.
Rick Macklem post to comp.protocols.nfs Aug 6, 1999
I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's
RFS never made it outside
Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
systems by mapping UIDs.
I believe it did? If I recall correctly, it was available with System
V, though perhaps I am misremembering.
I have no doubt that RFS was technically superior to NFS, but Sun had
non-technical market advantages. Assuming that I am remembering
correctly, I suspect it was unsuccessful commercially for two reasons:
1. Sun gave NFS (and the associated RPC layer) away for free, under a
particularly liberal license, which lead to lots of interoperability
(Larry's and Dave's comments notwithstanding). I suspect by the time
RFS was available, it was much more expensive and less interoperable
across heterogeneous systems.
The userland RPC part was under different terms.
"Sun will publish the source code for the user-level libraries that
implement RPC and XDR."
Bill Shannon post to net.unix-wizards Jan 13, 1985
https://groups.google.com/g/net.unix-wizards/c/PkJdZgCbrC4/m/u0kt3eeFSt4J
Sun RPC sources were later posted to mod.sources and included
on USENIX tapes.
That's consistent with my memory. In particular, if I recall correctly,
when I was still at IBM and we wanted to include NFS in AIX 3, it was
challenging ($$$) to negotiate a satisfactory license for NFS, but we
eventually obtained a license to include NFS in all IBM products (not
just AIX).
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