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From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,alt.religion.computers
Subject: Re: A3000UX competition
Keywords: think c.s.a.advocacy!
Message-ID: <4735@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 8 Dec 90 20:52:51 GMT
References: <12003@hubcap.clemson.edu> <36449@cup.portal.com> <1990Dec2.153612.28555@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG>
Followup-To: alt.religion.computers
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 45

>2) _The_ thing that made BSD so much better than its AT&T parent that
>AT&T finally had to bow to the inevitable (as the workstation market
>"all" went BSD) and mutate SYSV4 into a BSD clone to be marketable, was
>the ready availability of _almost free_, _full_ source code licences to
>the user/programmer community,

Well, BSD source licenses required AT&T source licenses, so the cost of
a BSD source license >= the cost of an AT&T source license.  Given that
it required a "32V or better" license, those folks with 32V licenses
only paid the price of a 32V license, rather than the price of an S5
license, but I don't think AT&T's sold 32V licenses for a while.

*Commercial* sites didn't get licenses that I'd call "almost free",
although university sites did.

>so that the tremendous resource of free user community programming
>effort could be brought to bear on improving BSD through several
>extremely impressive upgrades while AT&T fell further and further
>behind.

I suspect it can be attributed more to the fact that, when VAXes started
becoming UNIX platforms, the VAX UNIXes from AT&T were far elss
functional - especially for big virtual-memory jobs (the reason why
Berkeley put demand paging into BSD) - than the Berkeley versions.  This
"seeded" the VAX UNIX community with BSD - especially those members of
the community more likely to develop software - so that the bulk of the
user-community improvements were for BSD.  This may have been somewhat
of a self-sustaining process, helped along by the fact that, for much
the same reason, those workstation vendors who adopted UNIX started with
BSD.

>Now that AT&T has wrested control of the future of Unix back from the
>user community, are we going to see the same dreary game of
>home-mortgage-sized source licence fees and vendor-only code
>improvements retarding the future of Unix,

Not all vendors *now* make all their improvements generally available. 
You can't say that's all AT&T's doing.

>or has the lesson of open software systems finally been learned, so
>that cost-of-media source code licenses and ready adoption/sharing
>of user written OS improvements will keep the future of Unix bright?

Perhaps, if 4.4BSD comes out and is mostly or completely AT&T-free, it
will provide an alternative to AT&T UNIXes?