[HN Gopher] The Berkeley Software Distribution
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The Berkeley Software Distribution
Author : rbanffy
Score : 116 points
Date : 2024-03-07 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| hcfman wrote:
| Beautiful bit of history. I remember quite a lot of it being old.
|
| Nice work by the author. Without people taking the time to write
| things like this up history gets lost.
|
| Years ago I build one of the first local search engines for the
| Netherlands called Search.NL. I am indebted to the writer of the
| only page that refers to this history any more here:
|
| https://www.eindhovenfotos.nl/1/ilse.nl.html#news1-y8
| tingletech wrote:
| > The first copy we know to make it out of Berkeley was to Tom
| Ferrin at UCSF on the 9th of March in 1978. The license was
| signed on the 13th, the media was an 800 bpi tape, and on the
| tape was the "Unix Pascal system" and the "Ex text editor."
|
| UCSF and UCB (as well as all the UC campuses and enterprises) are
| technically the same legal entity, incorporated by article 9
| section 9 of the California constitution. Strange that they
| signed a license, when I worked for the regents we called them
| MOUs if it was a "contract" with another part of ourselves.
|
| When I started working for UCSD and found out we were licensing
| BSDi for some boxes I was sort of confused, like why don't we get
| that for free?
| alberth wrote:
| > MOUs
|
| MOU = Memo of Understanding?
|
| (Which are typically non-binding but formalized acknowledgement
| of intent)
| tingletech wrote:
| yes, we were told we could not contract with ourselves, so we
| had to do memorandums of understanding when we had revenue or
| other agreements between units.
|
| We also had a policy to follow state law (which does not
| apply to UC unless UC is specifically mentioned in the law).
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Is UC federal land or something?!
| fredoralive wrote:
| As noted above, the University of California is given
| special status by a section of California constitution,
| so it has special status through that. It's presumably
| clauses like that fact it's governed by the Regents
| "...subject only to such legislative control as may be
| necessary to insure the security of its funds and
| compliance with the terms of the endowments of the
| university..." that mean it isn't normally affected by
| new laws.
|
| (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySe
| ctio...)
| dekhn wrote:
| Tom was my manager for a while when I was a programmer at UCSF
| (~20 years after this event). He ran the Computer Graphics Lab
| which had a bunch of SGIs and DEC Alpha servers to do molecular
| modelling and I was 'the first linux guy in the group' (they
| asked me why I used linux when bsd existed). I remember him
| saying that whenever he licensed a commercial UNIX he insisted
| the contract include a section giving him access to the source
| code for the kernel ("because you never know when you will have
| to recompile the kernel or debug a kernel-space problem").
|
| He's also known for presenting at USENIX on how to enable a
| hardware-disabled (but physically present) instruction on a
| cheaper version of the PDP/11. You'd cut a trace in the
| microcode and add a jumper wire, and presto! you had a fast
| floating point instruction that was previously disabled.
| retrac wrote:
| There's an alternate universe, almost identical to our own, where
| BSD 4.4 was released slightly earlier, its legal status was not
| ambiguous, it got ported to the 386 in '90, Linus never bothered
| to write Linux, and every machine from smartphone to server runs
| some version of BSD.
| jeff_vader wrote:
| And we're all happy CVS users.
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure there is no universe
| where that is true.
| drewg123 wrote:
| We'd all be happy perforce users :)
|
| (For a long time, before git and subversion, even though
| the official freebsd repo was in CVS, a lot of development
| happened in perforce)
| bch wrote:
| > a lot of development happened in perforce
|
| Interesting - that I didn't know. Based on my personal p4
| experience, I'm sorry anybody else had to use it.
|
| That said - nobody has mentioned that git (and hg) was
| preceded and directly inspired by Larry McVoys
| BitKeeper[0]. Indeed, I've heard rumor that both "git"
| and "mercurial" were named after people's perceptions of
| others personalities during the Linux/BitKeeper
| breakup/debacle.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper
| drewg123 wrote:
| It was a lot better than the alternatives at the time,
| which were CVS and SCCS.. :)
| bhasi wrote:
| Still is, in some hardware companies.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| My understanding is that git and mercurial were created
| independently around the same time, so in a world where
| Torvalds didn't create git we'd probably all use hg.
| Although, it isn't super hard to imagine him still working in
| system software and eventually creating git under almost the
| same circumstances, just that it would be used on a BSD
| rather than Linux.
| walteweiss wrote:
| I studied CS in the university and there was that guy who
| was a computer geek (out of very little among my fellow
| students), but actually was just your average gamer with
| close to zero knowledge of anything computer beyond double-
| clicking the shortcut to CS / Half-Life / WarCraft / Dota /
| whatever else was popular back then.
|
| I met him 15 years later. We had some casual chat about
| this and that. And at some point he said--
|
| Well, I have to give you a bit more of the context. He was
| a junior front-end (React, ofc) developer at that point.
| Yes, 15 years later! He just arrived into the profession
| due to his wild incompetence. Although he sold himself as a
| senior to the company! Still, he was very incompetent, and
| I had those wild eyes of wondering how on Earth some
| company would even hire such a guy, not to say giving him a
| senior role!
|
| He was talking about this front-end thing. That there's
| that other OS, Ubuntu, and he thinks he'll try it instead
| of Windows. As _drumroll_ for some reason (for some
| reason!) this git thing works better on Ubuntu than it
| works on Windows. My first try of Linux was like 15 to 20
| years before the talk, so I was like spilling my coffee on
| him with laughing.
|
| And here is your comment, casually pretending everyone on
| HN is aware of that history of git. And that it's that git
| guy is somehow related to this Ubuntu thing, you know.
| arp242 wrote:
| That BSD would most likely be similar to what Linux is today.
| There's this idea that this alternative universe would have one
| of the BSD variants as they exist today be dominant, but colour
| me skeptical on that.
|
| RedHat would have been a "BSD company", systemd would have been
| a "BSD thing", Hans Reiser would still have written ReiserFS,
| but for BSD, Steve Balmer would have ranted that "BSD is
| cancer", etc.
|
| There would be some technical differences of course, but I
| suspect many of them would be relatively small and not all that
| interesting.
|
| So basically it would have been "Linux, but with fewer Penguins
| and more Satanism".
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The key difference would be if they kept permissive licensing
| or if there would be copyleft BSD derivatives. For example,
| without GPL forcing the kernel to stay open source, Android
| phones would be a lot harder to modify
| kmeisthax wrote:
| To be clear, the only GPL source in Android is the kernel.
| Google took great pains[0] to avoid shipping copyleft code.
| This is why they were able to make most of Honeycomb
| proprietary[1]. They can't withhold source on the kernel,
| but most of what makes Android Android isn't part of Linux
| and thus the GPL does not apply[2].
|
| From
| https://source.android.com/docs/setup/contribute/licenses:
|
| > For userspace (nonkernel) software, Google prefer Apache
| 2.0 (and similar licenses such as BSD and MIT) over other
| licenses such as the GNU Lesser General Public License
| (LGPL).
|
| Android is already permissively licensed and that's half of
| why Google can legally lock things down[3] so easily. The
| other half being that Google requires a CLA from outside
| contributors, which is just plain silly for a permissively
| licensed project. Then again, GNU did the same thing at one
| point.
|
| In the alternate world where BSD was unambiguously legal
| and RMS was the Ted Nelson[4] of Free Software, I don't
| think they would have independently invented copyleft. A
| lot of the BSD people had very reactionary opinions to the
| concept, and while some of it might be motivated by their
| personal disdain for RMS, it's hard to separate RMS and
| copyleft.
|
| Given all that, a legally unambiguous BSD almost certainly
| would have wound up being eaten by Microsoft rather than
| AT&T and the UNIX Wars. All the anger from early 2000s
| Microsoft about Linux was solely because the GPL prevented
| them from just writing a better version of Linux or GNU
| that other people couldn't have. Microsoft was very good at
| taking open standards and extending them with the goal of
| making their implementation _replace_ the standard. The GPL
| copyleft was the perfect thorn in the foot of a Microsoft
| that liked to cheat the norms of standards bodies.
|
| [0] At least on early versions of Android, this went as far
| as changing all the system paths. GNU and Android can
| technically coexist under the same Android/Linux kernel.
|
| [1] Even the FOSS release of Ice Cream Sandwich
| deliberately omitted all the Honeycomb-related tags to
| frustrate attempts to use Honeycomb under the FOSS terms of
| the later AOSP release.
|
| [2] Linux is commonly stated to be GPLv2, but it
| additionally has an exception stating that user-mode code
| never trips the GPL copyleft, as a "just in case" sort of
| thing. This is the reason why Nvidia is allowed to have
| kernel modules, and also the reason why Linus explicitly
| refused GPLv3. The v3 anti-TiVo clause forbids you from
| shipping an application on the same consumer electronics
| system as GPL software, if the application refuses to run
| if the GPL software is modified. This is perfectly
| reasonable for GNU but flies in the face of the whole "user
| mode APIs are not copylefted" thing.
|
| [3] Android ain't done 'till Termux won't run.
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
| arp242 wrote:
| Most Android phones are already so locked down and partly
| proprietary that it's a right pain to meaningfully modify
| anything without jumping through tons of hoops.
|
| In short, I don't think it would have made much of a
| difference. "GPL vs BSD" is an old debate that's been done
| a million times, and I never seen any convincing argument
| one way or the other. Plus there's long been copyleft (GPL,
| CDDL) parts to many BSD systems, both in userspace and
| kernel.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I feel a bit of history is slipping away. Linux forced a lot
| of companies and individuals to keep stuff together in a way
| that uniquely unified industry against Windows and custom
| embedded software stacks.
|
| Without the Linux kernel we'd have a bunch of competing
| proprietary forks bickering at every turn.
|
| You could have forgotten video drivers from major vendors
| like NVidia. Even with Linux it was an anomaly.
| bluGill wrote:
| Huh? We have many competing forks - debian, redhat,
| ubutntu, arch... Sure there is mostly on kernel, but there
| is a lot more to an OS than a kernel.
|
| Linux didn't force anyone to keep stuff together. It just
| is to your advantage to work together most of the time.
| Anyone who didn't work together soon paid a price as
| something you want couldn't easily be brought to you.
| wbl wrote:
| No there would have been some big differences. The first is
| that threads would have a kernel representation unlike in
| Linux where the kernel just knows about processes. This
| mistake caries over to tools like strace that grab one thread
| by default because they don't know the others.
|
| Secondly with integrated user space and kernel packaging and
| distribution would not be a necessity. That would change a
| lot of things.
|
| Microsoft had taken the TCP implementation from BSD for
| Windows as shown in the copyright notice. The relationship
| would be different.
|
| We would not have alternate libcs. Containerization would be
| built around slightly more heavyweight jails which look like
| real systems as more software would be assuming that
| environment.
|
| With systemd there is a real need, but I would hope the
| solution is better.
| freeremote wrote:
| I was a BSD admin for 4 years back in the early 00s after
| running Sun Solaris DNS servers for a well known domain
| registrar. Ran Web servers, and later firewalls using
| FreeBSD. While I really like BSD for a server, I've had
| terrible times with it on laptops. I've tried them all: Free,
| Net, Open, Ghost, and others that are no longer being
| developed. I've standardized on Debian over the years because
| it just works. I buy refurb Lenovo laptops from eBay for
| about $120. I would like to see BSD grow and become more
| popular on the desktop. For now, Debian is just super stable
| and good enough.
| lproven wrote:
| It may have come closer than you realise.
|
| << My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and
| make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now
| perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded
| splendidly and the world would be a very different place today.
|
| RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such
| an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have
| been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems
| to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based
| on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI.
|
| So RMS said to himself, "Mach is a working kernel, 4.4-Lite is
| only partial, we will go with Mach." It was a decision which I
| strongly opposed. But ultimately it was not my decision to
| make, and I made the best go I could at working with Mach and
| doing something new from that standpoint.
|
| This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so. >>
|
| http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530
| microtherion wrote:
| In fact, one of the two major smartphone platforms IS running
| some version of BSD.
| dboreham wrote:
| Not really. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU and
| https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
| bch wrote:
| Wow! Amazed to see Apple is still committing to the repo
| (albeit a huge code dump, latest of which was ~5 months
| ago)!
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Well, they don't really have a choice, do they?
|
| My uninformed understanding is: Darwin is Open Source, so
| when they improve/extend/modify it for their own needs
| (Darwin still is the foundation for macOS, iOS etc.),
| they must make those changes available.
| wbl wrote:
| Not the kernel: that's BSD licensed
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| No; open source encompasses copyleft, which broadly
| requires derivative works to be under the same or similar
| license, and permissive licenses, which generally don't
| care and are happy to let you incorporate the code in
| differently licensed derivatives up to and including
| producing completely proprietary programs using
| permissively licensed open source code. Darwin _largely_
| uses permissive license code, in particular from the
| BSDs, which means that it 's under very little obligation
| to share. (IANAL and this is somewhat oversimplified, but
| that's the gist)
| microtherion wrote:
| Yeah, I know, it's a somewhat complicated story. But even
| the kernel has, as the Wikipedia article confirms,
| considerable BSD heritage, and the userland is even more
| BSD flavored. I would think that the vast majority of Mac /
| iOS programmers has never made a direct Mach system call in
| their code.
|
| At the very least, you can say that OS X is more BSD than
| Linux is GNU.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The vast majority also doesn't do POSIX stuff, rather
| Objective-C and Swift framework calls.
|
| The UNIX compatibility on NeXTSTEP, and follow up culture
| on OS X, was that BSD layer was to bring UNIX stuff into
| the system and get those DoD contracts, not much so for
| the software born on the platform.
|
| Even NeXTSTEP drivers were Objective-C.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Kirk McKusick gives a great ~45min talk called the history of BSD
| at conferences. There are essentially 3 versions (one about the
| lawsuit, one about the TCP wars with BBN, and one about the early
| history), and he asks the audience to vote on which version they
| want to hear. Search for Kirk McKusick history of BSD on YouTube,
| or come to a BSD conference to hear it.
|
| And I'd recommend coming to a conference, just so you can talk to
| Kirk. He's one of the most down to earth, friendly and just
| generally nice luminaries I've ever talked to in person.
| microtherion wrote:
| Yes, I have fond memories of the one or two times I heard him
| as well.
|
| One bit I remember from his presentation was his parable of BSD
| as the building of a road, with Bill Joy (IIRC) hacking a path
| through the jungle with a machete, someone else driving a
| bulldozer along that path, somebody pouring asphalt, somebody
| adding streetlights, and finally somebody (I seem to recall it
| was Sam Leffler) painting the streetlights.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I've actually bought a recording of these talks something like
| 20 years ago. It was either on DVD or maybe even VHS.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Oh! I forgot he still sells those. Its now offered as a
| downloadable video file as well.
|
| See https://www.mckusick.com/history/videoorderform.html
| TomMasz wrote:
| I recall the brouhaha that erupted around Sun's move from a BSD
| foundation to System V. I've always felt it was a downgrade.
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