Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 07:32:57PM -0800, Greg A. Woods wrote: .... which is dated July 1992, and describes a "launch" of 386BSD Release 0.0 in March 17, 1992. This is contemporaneous with Linux 0.95a (which by coincidence was also released on March 17th, 1992.) The first "real" distribution, the Soft Landing System, was released in May 1992. (The Manchester Computer Centre distribution in November 1991 was a floppy-based distro containing command-line and development utilities, but not X Windows, so some people don't feel it counts as a full-featured distribution.) It looks like NetBSD's source code repository was established on March 21, 1993. Patchkit 0.2.2 was apparently also released on the same date. NetBSD's first release, 0.8, was released on April 19, 1993. The FreeBSD project was named in June 19, 1993, with its first release in November 1993. So it's easy to use the lawsuit as the scapegoat for why the BSD's failed to take off, but at best it's only one of many factors. The Jolitzs' refusal to accept many patches, forcing a delay of a year before spawning two project forks, was one. The dispersal of effort as a side effect of various people trying to start companies around BSD code (SunOS, NetApp, BSDI, Wasabi Systems, etc.) was another. BSD-licensed code seems to thrive best when there are grants or non-profit institutions funding its work; but attempts to support BSD code from as part of commercial work doesn't seem to have worked out as well. As dwheeler (I think Dave Wheeler, but I'm not certain) astutely observed in 2006: I think the BSD license has been a lot of trouble to the *BSDs. Every few years, someone says, "hey, let's start a company based on this BSD code!" (BSD/OS in particular comes to mind, but SunOS and others did the same). They pull the *BSD code in, and some of the best BSD developers, and write a proprietary derivative. But as a proprietary vendor, their fork becomes expensive to self-maintain, and eventually the company founders. All that company work is lost forever, and good developers were sucked away during that period. Repeat, repeat, repeat. That's more than enough to explain why the BSDs manage to make steps forward, but just don't manage to maintain the pace of Linux kernel development. Meanwhile, the GPL has legally enforced a consortia on major commercial companies. Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and many others are all contributing, and feel safe in doing so because the others are legally required to do the same. It's basically created a "safe" zone of cooperation, without anyone having to sign complicated legal documents. A company can't feel safe contributing code to the BSDs, because its competitors might simply copy it without reciprocating. There's much more corporate cooperation in the GPL'ed kernel code than with the BSD'd kernel code. Which means that in practice, it's actually been the GPL that's most "business-friendly". So while the BSDs have lost energy every time a company gets involved, the GPL'ed programs gain almost every time a company gets involved. And that explains it all. - https://lwn.net/Articles/197875/ I'll also note that the GPL licensing means that I've been able to carry my expertise in the code base across 4 job changes (MIT, VA Linux Systems, IBM, Google). In effect, this arrangement and the business models forced by the GPL allocates more value to the community at large and to the engineers working at those companies, at the expense of value that can be extracted to the corporate shareholders --- for better or for worse. And so while I don't have a private jet like some of the early founders of Sun, NetApp, et. al., and I'm still a working stiff, I lead a comfortable life, and it seems like a good tradeoff to me. :-) In the long run, it might be interesting to see how the Illumos (Open Solaris) derivatives fare compared to Free/Net/Open/Dragon BSD's. There seem to be some interesting cooperation from the set of companies that use Illumos, which is encouraged by the CDDL's weak provisions. So if Illumos and its derivatives are able to overtake *BSD's despite the *BSD's having an earlier start, that might be an interesting confirmation of dwheeler's point above. - Ted