It does me no credit, that I initially reacted very badly to 386BSD,
and the initial {Net,Free,Open} situation.
First, be careful. What we sometimes call 386BSD as a 'release' started just as a port of NET2 to the 386 based 'commodity' hardware platform. The history is that in the late 1970s/early 80s Bill Jolitz was working for Nat Semi and ported BSD 4.1, to a multibus based NS16032 board that NS had built, which was similar to the Stanford University Network (SUN) terminal what had a 68000. He eventually built a 'luggable' using that and updated to the port to 4.2++. He (and Lynn I believe) started a company to sell that hardware/software solution and for whatever reason, it did not really take off.
At some point, he got his hands on a 386based PC (Compaq I think) and started to move his port over to that system. A number of people helped him (for instance I did a bunch of the AT/disk controller work as I had access to the WD design documents for another consulting gig I had at the time - Bill mentioned this in the articles BTW).
Bill and Lynn's NS16032 and 386 code went back to the CSRG 'masters' - although how and that happened was never completely clear to me. The SCCS deltas tell at least part of the story. Bill managed to make a bootable image that mostly installed on a PC/386 as the minicomputer versions did from the formal release. The ftp area of ucbvax had all of these bootable images available for download such as one for an HP 68K system and I think the DEC VAX and PMAX, the CCG system and a few others IIRC. As I have said in other messages if you were a UCB licensee you had the passwords to look/download from that area. Bill placed that version in the same ftp area. The 386 based port went viral at least with the UCB licensees. (In fact, if Linus had known about it, theoretically he could have used it also. His university was licensee, but as Larry McVoy likes to point, not all the schools were as free with the IP, so I will not go down that rathole).
The bottom line is that many people (like me on a Wyse386) started with Bill's original port; including the BSDi founders.
When Jolitz and BSDi went separate ways, Jolitiz continued to update the CSRG 386 based tarball (to an extent). One of the issues was there originally was attempt to keep the different architectural versions of BSD in sync ( to a point and NetBSD does yet exist). A number of people were unhappy and the speed, depth etc. of the 386 version, most notably Jordan Hubbard and FreeBSD was born. The two biggest issues Jordan wanted to fix, was easier install and a bit wider support for more hardware (again I sent Jordan the changes to FreeBSN 1x for the Wyse and a couple of NCR boxes). The NetBSD project would birth from the original ideals of CSRG and trying to keep everything the same but that's still in the future.
I found all this "fragmentation" pretty hard to understand. -BSDI felt
like it had occupied the space, and I couldn't entirely understand
what was going on, or why any of it mattered.
What I think I missed (didn't understand) was how draining support was
for Berkeley, and in the absence of a sugar daddy
Herein is the issue that many people on the sidelines missed.
CRSG was a large project and funded a lot of work at UCB in EECS. It never funded me (I was funded by Tektronix, HP, DEC et al), but that project did a fund a number of students. However, at some point CSRG stopped being a research project and started being a support project for DARPA. There was also a good deal of resentment by some groups in EECS that were not getting DARPA funding.
I'll not say if that was good or bad but I will say that it did cause great deal consternation at UCB within the department and many people doing more formal research were not happy. In the end, the EECS Department mothers and fathers along with the Dean et al, decided to stop/end the CSRG project. Many people who were directly or indirectly working on BSD, like Mary Ann and myself, had graduated and had since left. Bob Kridle had formed Mt. Xinu, Asa Romberger has formed Unisoft, Joy had left/was leaving for Sun, etc. So the question remained what to do with CSRG. As to what everyone would do, became every person for her/himself and as we know some of the folks, along with a few folks from the USENIX community formed BSDi.
As was noted elsewhere, NetBSD would eventually be formed by volunteers to keep the different ports alive (in fact much of the efforts was from folks not at UCB), but that was still in the offing. Remember, while CSRG itself was not a research project, a lot of people around the world were using the BSD code base for their own research. The whole idea of NetBSD was to create a uniform platform that people could compare things. So, the question of how that was to come about or do any work on BSD if DARPA was not paying the bills, was still an open one. But, the idea that would eventually create FreeBSD, was supporting a pure commodity solution for day-to-day use, not as a research platform. [I'll leave off the later OpenBSD/NetBSD fork by Theo here as it has little to do with the question].
BSDi had a similar/same goal of producing something like SunOS/VMS etc but supported on commodity hardware. That solution was to sell it and using the revenues from the support contract, be able to pay people to do that work. As I said and in some other messages, it is noted that Bill Jolitz wanted something more FOSS. Truth is BSDi code was 'open source' but it took a $1K license to get the source from them.
In the end, the real problem was not the infighting between the different BSD camps, but AT&T, who wanted the entire pie. Clearly, their executives saw anything other than their complete control of the UNIX IP as a threat. Hence the court case, the eventually AT&T/Sun relationship etc...
Your lack of 'sugar daddy,' really comes back to that. There were few people at the time that could pay the bills. Until then DARPA had been it. I do not know if DARPA wanted out or if another group could have been formed that could take over CSRG. I did have discussions with Rob over a beer that at least the thought had crossed the BSDi folks mind, that once started; they would apply for a DARPA contract.
At the time had blow up, I was a consultant and I personally was considering what I was going to do next and if they had had a real future, the talks with Rob might have gotten more serious. My wife wanted me to stop being independent if we were to start a family (I would join Locus instead).
BTW: I was in an interesting position as I was friends with all of the different sides in the war/original fight. Like Jolitz, I wanted to see what we now call a 'FOSS' release of BSD. But like Rob, I knew it was going to take some revenue stream to make it happen/continue the support. In the end, the AT&T legal mess blew it all up. BSDi ended up failing and Jordan's work stayed around.
BTW: what pays for Linux development these days by number of 'committers salary' is Intel (#1), IBM (#2), then a load of other firms including the different distros. But for any platform to be successful and actually continue to be used in the market, someone has to pay the salaries of some set of professional programmers to do the work.
That said when AT&T injoined BSDi and UCB a lot of people (myself included) started to hack on Linux. But just think if AT&T had actually won the case and courts decided UNIX was allowed to be a trade secret, then Linux and all of the UNIX 'clones' would have been in violation.
No matter what flavor of UNIX you like, we are all in debt to UCB and BSDi for settling the IP argument. The court was clear, the >>ideas<< behind UNIX (a.k.a. the intellectual property) came from Ken, Dennis and friends at AT&T and they did own it. But because of the 1956 consent decree that published the ideas and the moment the ideas were published, we all can now >>use<< them. The provenance of the source code does not relate to the provenance of the idea, so the source code itself does not define what UNIX is or is not.
I bring this all up in hopes to try to close this rat hole of Linux, vs. *BSD. Like editors, we all have our own favorites. That's cool, we don't want one thing to be forced down our throat. Having a choice is what is good. And what I value, Larry or Jon may not necessarily like. Most of us if not all on this list probably want something that approximates Ken and Dennis's original ideas not what IBM, DEC, CDC were trying to make us use in the old days or what Microsoft calls a system today.
The discussion of how we got there and what people valued at the time is useful so we can try to remember the history and learn from it; but getting into right/wrong, good/bad, or you could have had this is a tad tiresome; IMO.