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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.unix.wizards,comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Mach, the new standard?
Message-ID: <26310@sun.uucp>
Date: Sat, 22-Aug-87 18:55:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.26310
Posted: Sat Aug 22 18:55:36 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 14:49:21 EDT
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Keywords: Mach
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> Summary: Sigh.  maybe mach won't save the world.

Save the world from what?  Having to pay AT&T a license fee?  That wasn't the
intent of MACH.  Even if you replace *every single line* of the kernel with
non-AT&T code, you would *still* have to replace the Bourne shell, the
compilers, the utilities, etc., etc., etc..

> Which in turn requires proof of an AT&T v7 liscense, right?  Will
> we ever again have an operating system that doesn't represent a
> royalty stream for ma bell?

There are plenty of operating systems that don't require this: OS/360 and its
successors, VMS, MS-DOS, etc., etc., etc..  There are even OSes that claim UNIX
compatibility that don't require a license, such as Coherent.

> I realise that Mach is a research tool and not CMU's gift to the
> industry, but would it not have been possible to have avoided
> stepping into the same pile of problems that Berkeley did?

In a word, no.  Where would they have gotten "/bin/sh", "/bin/mail", YACC, LEX,
"grep", etc., etc., etc.  from?  Free versions of or replacements for some of
these do exist, but, as you point out, avoiding AT&T licensing fees was NOT a
goal of MACH.  It simply wouldn't have been worth the effort to get those
versions, write versions of the tools that *don't* have free replacements, and
worry about the distribution restrictions of some of those tools (I don't think
the GNU software is public domain; it is free, but they place restrictions on
its redistibution in order to keep it freely available).

> Haven't the liscensing problems with 4.x proven the wisdom of starting from
> scratch?

No.  They merely prove that there are licensing problems with *not* starting
from scratch; they don't prove that these problems outweigh the problems of
starting from scratch.

> From what I've seen of bell's code it is a net liability anyway.

That's a pretty broad statement; how much of that code have you seen?  Some of
it is good, some of it is bad, some of it is in-between, and some of it is a
mixture of these.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com