Xref: utzoo comp.os.minix:12320 comp.sys.amiga:66010
Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!haven!mimsy!jds
From: jds@mimsy.umd.edu (James da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: New MINIX available (UNIX clone with full source code)
Message-ID: <26566@mimsy.umd.edu>
Date: 16 Sep 90 00:33:02 GMT
References: <7559@star.cs.vu.nl> <90257.232245UH2@psuvm.psu.edu> <7571@star.cs.vu.nl> <1990Sep15.182737.22534@lavaca.uh.edu>
Reply-To: jds@cs.umd.edu (James da Silva)
Organization: University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science
Lines: 27

In article <1990Sep15.182737.22534@lavaca.uh.edu> jet@karazm.math.uh.edu
(J. Eric Townsend) writes:
>In article <7571@star.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes:
>>Mach is not a clone of UNIX.  It IS UNIX.  The Mach 2.5 kernel contains
>>most of the 4.3 BSD inside of it, which in turn, cotains thousands of
>>lines of AT&T code.  You cannot get Mach if you do not have an AT&T
>>source license.
>
>This will not be true in the very near future.  The next major version
>of Mach will be free of AT&T code, thereby making it publicly available
>to those of us w/o > $100K to spend on a UNIX source license (what
>a Sys V license costs last time I priced them).

You might not need a $100K source licence, but you WILL need a few
person-years of programming work: the free Mach release will contain the
Mach micro-kernel (nugget?) only, not a replacement for the BSD Unix code
that runs on top of it.  You will have to write the filesystem, device
drivers, network support, etc, etc, etc.  Have fun. :-)

Actually, between CMU, Berkeley, the FSF and the many net.contributors, we
_will_ eventually have a completely free Unix.  It's a couple years away
yet, I think.

Jaime
...........................................................................
: domain: jds@cs.umd.edu				     James da Silva
: path:   uunet!mimsy!jds	 	    Systems Design & Analysis Group