From: murthy@cs.cornell.edu (Chet Murthy) Subject: Re: BSD Unix aka Freedom is a myth.... Date: 21 Jul 1992 11:27:05 GMT
>Sender: merlin@neuro.usc.edu (merlin)
>[Lots of stuff deleted from a press release or newspaper article?]
>Further, AT&T's question about the time investment of BSDI in bringing out
>their product [compared with their own cost over many years] will likely go
>a long way toward supporting their unfair competition claim. If it took a
>small company like BSDI only a couple of years with a small team of people
>to produce BSD/386 vs the multi year investment of a corporate giant - then
>it is very possible AT&T may prevail on the unfair competition claim.
Y'know, Doug Comer's XINU, Linus Torvalds' Linux, Tanenbaum's Minix,
and I'm sure there are others, all stand as good arguments that the technology
if UNIX isn't just an AT&T invention anymore - the V sytem, Mach,
ad a zillin other ways of implementing the core of UNIX exist.
I think that even if BSDI fails, even if 386BSD fails, and even
if the entire Berkeley net2 distrib gets nuked,
free unix is perhaps 2 years away - in 2 years, linux will be stable.
In two years, the GNU Hurd will be stable. And AT&T can
do almost nothing abot that, eh?
But you're right - I'm pissed, too. From what I heard of the history,
BSD started with V6 unix, a developed a _whole_ _lot_
of what currently constitutes UNIX. To claim that AT&T did ti all is
goinga bit far.
--chet--