Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.wizards,comp.org.usenix
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From: jb...@igor.tamri.com (John Bass)
Subject: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
Message-ID: <1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com>
Organization: Toshiba America MRI Inc, S. San Francisco, CA.
References: <C0yK27.9Ly@csn.org> <1ja6bgINNh23@chnews.intel.com>
<BZS.93Jan16205935@world.std.com>
Distribution: inet
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 93 23:06:16 GMT
Lines: 75
After reading much of the topic it seems to be shaping up much
as the Stalman vs. Industry debate. My views on such are
neither short or to the point.
First, the group at UCB, Joltz, BSDI, and others all have acted
out a plan to attempt to place the AT&T/USL UNIX product into the
public domain. A conspiracy based in false "Robin Hood" ethics.
I doubt the Studios, Screen Actors Guild, or the courts would allow
the Trekies to rewrite every line/scene of each movie/episode (while
preserving the plot and fabric of each story) in an attempt to place
the Startrek industry into the public domain so that freely copyable
and editable movies could by enjoyed by the self proclaimed public.
The fact is, that to do so is blatantly illegal ... no matter how
much a bunch of highschool/college drama school wantabe actors might
cry about freedom of expression while tring ... it's WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
From my view what UCB, Joltz, BSDI and others have done has neither
advanced the art nor been in the UNIX industries best interest. With
forethought and malace they incrementally attempted to place the UNIX
operating system product into the public domain by re-writting it
line by line while leaving the framework and the fabric of the system
unchanged ... same global design, major algorithms, data structures,
internal interfaces, etc ... to what end? Only to attempt to destroy
AT&T/USL UNIX as a commercial product. At best the debate has
cost more than a million wasted man-hours that could have been more
productively used to advance the art with a new design. Their actions
have been WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
They should have followed the example of other university research
teams and done some REAL research to give us a guiding example of
what OS's should look like in the next century instead of perpetuating
the mistakes and frail framework of UNIX's 1960/70's design.
The vast majority of programmers rely on the success of their
employers for continued paychecks to pay for the basics plus
toys we wish for a comfortable living. While most of us truely
enjoy our profession, I doubt most of us would continue if
salaries topped out at $9k/year or we didn't have the dream of
hitting the big one on some speculative development project/startup.
The cry that Bell Labs release of UNIX killed OS research is not
without merrit ... but to belly around the bar and cry in our beer
over 386BSD is even more folly.
Joltz has contended that his goal was to make 386BSD an operating
system research tool/platform would have been most noble ... if it
was atleast a 1990's design instead of a warmed over 1960's design.
The truth is that if this was really his goal, there are dozens of
better OS frameworks than the tired old UNIX design.
There are many ways to build a POSIX compatable OS to advance the
art ... 386BSD is not in my wildest dreams anything other than the
bastard child of a tired old 1960's UNIX OS design.
Bring on the MACH, SPRITE, PLAN9, and other truely inovative designs.
Let the commercial guys milk the MSDOS & UNIX markets and pay our
salaries as long as they can. In a few years MSDOS & UNIX are likely
to be as interesting as IBM 370 OS/MVT, or 360 DOS, or 1620 executive,
or DEC PDP11/RSTS or any of the other OS technolgies I sometime try
to remember from my past that USED TO BE the main stream MUST KNOW.
I LOVE UNIX and have been a wild supporter for 17 years ... but it
has it limits, and just as MS-DOS, those limits are preventing
us from moving forward to better technologies.
It's time we get out of the herd mentality and view the USL vs BSDI
lawsuit as it really is ... a botched attempt by BSDI & Joltz to
plagiarize UNIX. Let's not make folk heros of them over their petty
actions. Lets focus instead on the other teams that are bringing us
our future.
John Bass
Consultant
DMS Design
Path: sparky!uunet!think.com!ames!agate!soda.berkeley.edu!gwh
From: g...@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.wizards,comp.org.usenix
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
Date: 21 Jan 1993 07:01:46 GMT
Organization: Dis-
Lines: 47
Sender: g...@soda.berkeley.edu (George William Herbert)
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <1jlhoq$5t5@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <1ja6bgINNh23@chnews.intel.com> <BZS.93Jan16205935@world.std.com>
<1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu
Summary: Oh Really?
If Berkeley/CSRG was the "Forces of Evil" for having "with malice
aforethought" taken AT&T's money-generating code away from them,
it's taken a long time for the "Forces of Good" to state their
position. I find it idiotic that anyone can take USL seriously
at face value when for at least the last five years Berkeley has
been, with near universal acclaim, saying they were going to do
exactly what they are pretty close to have done; release a free
version, and all AT&T/USL did was hmm and make sure the code that
was released, as it came out, was clean...
UNIX is far from a dead end. Indeed, the very similarity between
UNIX and that which would replace it indicates that UNIX is likely
to remain, in functon if not form.
Free UNIX isn't a threat to commercial products. It never has been.
Free UNIX is an invitation to the whole world to come and play
in our wonderful, feature filled world, with the hardware they
have today and little else. Free UNIX is a tool to enable people,
not a way to bash on companies or restrict research into better
ways of doing something. If something better comes along than
UNIX, I'll take a look. If it's not free, but it's better enough,
I'll pay for it like I (or my company) pay for the UNIXes we use
today. If it's free but supported, we'll smile and take it
anyway, but the money we save there isn't going to be all that
much. But if it's free and millions more people can use the
Internet, Usenet News, email, and the rest of what comes (albeit
not exclusively) with UNIX, then it's not just software, it's
a revolution.
Small minded people at USL think that they're going to lose something
by having this happen. They might have a legal leg to stand on
in saying it's not fair to them if the code release occurs, they might
not: until I see the disputed code, and the court decisions that myst
by necessity rule on how much different code need be to be free, I can't
judge now. But saying that the world will be a better place if it
doesn't happen is ignoring the whole point behind PERSONAL
computing, universal network access, etc. People with computers
are more than just people. I want to see more of it happen.
UNIX is THE tool to make it happen, it's the standard, the
lowest fully capable denominator. I don't give a flying fart
whether something better comes along tomorrow, I want that LCD
in as many hands today as possible. Sitting on our hands waiting
for computers to become perfect before they start having significant
social effects is stupid.
-george william herbert
g...@soda.berkeley.edu g...@lurnix.com
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.wizards,comp.org.usenix,
gnu.misc.discuss,alt.suit.att-bsdi
Path: sparky!uunet!email!vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at!mike
From: m...@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (Michael Gschwind)
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
In-Reply-To: jbass@igor.tamri.com's message of Wed, 20 Jan 93 23: 06:16 GMT
Message-ID: <MIKE.93Jan22144301@cuba.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at>
Sender: n...@email.tuwien.ac.at
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Organization: Vienna University of Technology
References: <C0yK27.9Ly@csn.org> <1ja6bgINNh23@chnews.intel.com>
<BZS.93Jan16205935@world.std.com>
<1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 13:43:01 GMT
Lines: 65
In article <1993Jan20.230616.25...@igor.tamri.com> jb...@igor.tamri.com (John Bass)
writes:
From my view what UCB, Joltz, BSDI and others have done has neither
advanced the art nor been in the UNIX industries best interest. With
forethought and malace they incrementally attempted to place the UNIX
operating system product into the public domain by re-writting it
line by line while leaving the framework and the fabric of the system
unchanged ... same global design, major algorithms, data structures,
internal interfaces, etc ... to what end? Only to attempt to destroy
AT&T/USL UNIX as a commercial product. At best the debate has
cost more than a million wasted man-hours that could have been more
productively used to advance the art with a new design. Their actions
have been WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
Wait a moment! Who copied design, algorithms, data structures,... from
whom? UCB from ATT/USL? Or ATT/USL from ATT? I would think the latter
was the case rather than the fromer!!! Unix as we know it today is a
UCB product (mostly, ie the parts that make UNIX usable!), not an ATT
one. I bet you would not want to work on a PDP-11/V-32 unix - nor
would I (except for historical/amusement reasons). Many of the things
we so much like where written outside ATT and then filtered back in to
ATT unix or were rewritten by ATT.
SO what we like about UNIX (just some features - some of them
are pretty outdated and we don't like them any more (eg vi), but
they were at the time a MAJOR step!):
* written in C ATT
* Paging BSD
* Fast File System BSD
* Job control BSD
* csh (just a personal plug ;) BSD
* IPC/networking/sockets BSD
* vi (eek - but better than ed) BSD
* curses ?BSD?
* lex,yacc ATT
* sendmail BSD
* dbx ?BSD?
* termcap BSD
AT&T Unix was a good thing, but for its time - much of the
improvement, ie. that which made it into a `product' did not come from
AT&T (Unix got wuite a bit bigger and less elegant in the process - I
doubt that the inventors would want to be associated with the
cancerous beast that UNIX is today - for that reason the started out
anew with Plan9 if I understand things) - and the point where the
input of AT&T code stopped is easily discernable with the last source
license UCB took for UNIX - which is way back when, if I understand
things correctly...
So the people who are writting PD unixes - oops, UNIX is TM - who are
writting POSIX conformant operating systems are ripping USL off? Isn't
it more the case that USL is ripping the CS community off by selling a
system of which they very lttle wrote/invented?
mike
--
Michael Gschwind, Vienna University of Technology
m...@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (*) BOZO is a registered
(back in Vienna) trademark of Bush/Quayle 92
(*) UNIX is a registered
trademark of AT&T
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk,comp.unix.bsd,comp.unix.wizards,comp.org.usenix
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fcom.cc.utah.edu!cs.weber.edu!terry
From: te...@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
Message-ID: <1993Jan23.235038.11941@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
Sender: n...@fcom.cc.utah.edu
Organization: Weber State University (Ogden, UT)
References: <1ja6bgINNh23@chnews.intel.com> <BZS.93Jan16205935@world.std.com>
<1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com>
Distribution: inet
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 23:50:38 GMT
Lines: 140
In article <1993Jan20.230616.25...@igor.tamri.com> jb...@igor.tamri.com (John Bass)
writes:
>First, the group at UCB, Joltz, BSDI, and others all have acted
>out a plan to attempt to place the AT&T/USL UNIX product into the
>public domain. A conspiracy based in false "Robin Hood" ethics.
I assume you mean the "conspiracy" involves the "Jolt Cola" corporation --
and "Joltz" is an inappropriate plural. Neither the Bill nor Lynne
Jolitz, nor to my knowledge any member of the 386BSD community, is
involved in the current litigation by USL against BSDI and UCB.
>I doubt the Studios, Screen Actors Guild, or the courts would allow
>the Trekies to rewrite every line/scene of each movie/episode (while
>preserving the plot and fabric of each story) in an attempt to place
>the Startrek industry into the public domain so that freely copyable
>and editable movies could by enjoyed by the self proclaimed public.
>The fact is, that to do so is blatantly illegal ... no matter how
>much a bunch of highschool/college drama school wantabe actors might
>cry about freedom of expression while tring ... it's WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
You have never been to a Paramount-sponsored Star Trek convention, I see.
>From my view what UCB, Joltz, BSDI and others have done has neither
>advanced the art nor been in the UNIX industries best interest. With
>forethought and malace they incrementally attempted to place the UNIX
>operating system product into the public domain by re-writting it
>line by line while leaving the framework and the fabric of the system
>unchanged ... same global design, major algorithms, data structures,
>internal interfaces, etc ... to what end? Only to attempt to destroy
>AT&T/USL UNIX as a commercial product. At best the debate has
>cost more than a million wasted man-hours that could have been more
>productively used to advance the art with a new design. Their actions
>have been WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!
I assume you are talking about the act of the production of the BSD/386
and 386BSD operating systems, rather than UCB's longstanding record of
coming up with ideas and highly trained personnel such as Bill and Lynne
Jolitz, other individuals with long standing records of accomplishment
at CSRG and now working at BSDI, or other individuals elsewhere in the
industry. Certainly we can argue that UCB's training of Bill Joy was
in at least a large portion of the UNIX industries best interest (can
you say "Sun Microsystems"?), and the fact that large portions of the
Berkeley research have been incorporated into SVR4 (...say virtual
memory?).
Your targets are unlikely guilty of either "forethought and malace" (or
"malice aforethought", as the rest of us call it) in the charges leveled
against them, unless you are suggesting that the current litigation was
factored into their risk analysis before release.
>They should have followed the example of other university research
>teams and done some REAL research to give us a guiding example of
>what OS's should look like in the next century instead of perpetuating
>the mistakes and frail framework of UNIX's 1960/70's design.
1) Nearly 2/3's of the code files in SVR4 have statements in their
headers progclaiming their Berkeley origin.
2) 386BSD is not involved in the current litigation.
3) Source code accessability is to software engineering what a
microscope is to a microbiologist. Thus any release of source
code aids research into the topic covered by the source code.
4) Linux impacts SVR4 in exactly the same way as 386BSD;
neither are being litigate by USL at this time.
5) CMU (I assume this to be one of the models being held out as
an ideal) was using Net/2 as a code base for their server
before litigation started against UCB. The MACH "shell"
was to be "BNR2SS" -- Basic Networking Release 2 Single Server.
Thus your argument is flawed by your "tainted" ideal. CMU is
currently considering or has begun using Linux instead (I don't
keep up with *all* research, although I'd like to).
[ ...Unfounded assumptions about why people are in the programming field... ]
[ ...Unfounded association between Bell Labs and USL... ]
[ ...Unfounded assumption that OS research is dead... ]
[ ...Another mispelling of "Jolitz"... ]
[ ...Unfounded trashing of research based on an unfounded association
between 386BSD and SVR4 (probably the result of an incorrect
assumption that 386BSD is being litigated: a falsehood)... ]
[ ...Personal opinions of 386BSD based on the false assumption that it
is entirely/primarily based on the 1974 UNIX design -- oh yeah,
an a confusion of historical fact by attributing the genesis of
the 1974 design to the 1960's instead of the 1970's... ]
A lot of your assumptions (and the resulting conclusions) are farcical
and logically flawed. I will not waste time discussing more than the
characterization of them I have already provided here unless you make
it impossible to avoid.
>I LOVE UNIX and have been a wild supporter for 17 years ... but it
>has it limits, and just as MS-DOS, those limits are preventing
>us from moving forward to better technologies.
Let me provide you with a favorite quote:
"I don't know what language I'll be frogramming in 50 years, but
I know it will be FORTRAN".
The point being that you can not characterize current technology by it's
origins. This is equivalent to arguing against the use of the English
language because you dislike the language Chaucer wrote in.
>It's time we get out of the herd mentality and view the USL vs BSDI
>lawsuit as it really is ... a botched attempt by BSDI & Joltz to
>plagiarize UNIX. Let's not make folk heros of them over their petty
>actions. Lets focus instead on the other teams that are bringing us
>our future.
A personal note:
It's too late; many of the people involved in BSDI, 386BSD, and USL are
already folk heroes. If you are any good at your job, you probably own
books written by these people. Your fallacy lies in thinking that these
people have been elevated to "folk hero" status as a result of the recent
litigation rather than as a result of their past record.
I would love to spend 2-3 hours ripping your posting apart bit-by-bit,
but that is emotional on my part and will serve no useful purpose above
and beyond pointing out that you don't know what you are talking about,
and I have already done this.
Terry Lambert
te...@icarus.weber.edu
terry_lamb...@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
--
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