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From: shore@mtxinu.COM (Melinda Shore)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: MACH kernel - source become pd?
Keywords: MACH
Message-ID: <1369@mtxinu.UUCP>
Date: 14 Oct 90 01:07:47 GMT
References: <450@dill.UUCP> <26980@mimsy.umd.edu>
Reply-To: shore@mtxinu.com (Melinda Shore)
Organization: mt Xinu, Berkeley
Lines: 27

In article <26980@mimsy.umd.edu> chris@mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes:
>(Things look good; CMU already gives away Mach
>for free.  The problem is that you must first show your AT&T source
>license.)

And NFS and others.  AFS pulls out pretty easily if you don't want
it or can't get a license, but the ufs filesystem is Sun vnode-based
and (alas) doesn't come out as cleanly.  Drivers, math libraries,
debuggers, etc. are also usually under somebody or other's license
(different companies hold licenses for different platforms -
representative companies include Sun, DEC, IBM, Prime).

>(a) CMU Mach != NeXT Mach;

Indeed.  NeXT Mach is based on Mach 2.0 (no external pagers, for
starters) - we're shipping Mach 2.5 with extensions, and CMU is
currently working on 3.0.  3.0 is the microkernel Mach, and the
one most likely to become "free."

This question keeps coming up over and over.  It's going to be
awhile before there is an entirely license-free Mach-based OS.
Even when the microkernel becomes available and FSF provides a
complete user-level environment, somebody will still need to
provide drivers, filesystems, etc.  [Get to work :-)]
-- 
Melinda Shore                                 shore@mtxinu.com
mt Xinu                              ..!uunet!mtxinu.com!shore