Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!ncar!boulder!sunybcs!bingvaxu!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!auspex!guy From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.misc Subject: Re: Unix technical & commercial considerations (was: free versions of complex software) Message-ID: <15@auspex.UUCP> Date: 18 Oct 88 19:01:14 GMT References: <780@proxftl.UUCP> <600@sering.cwi.nl> <2133@stpstn.UUCP> <492@optilink.UUCP> <485@genesis.ATT.COM> Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 28 >I've used both System V.1/2/3 and BSD 4.2 (vanilla, SunOS, Ultrix) extensively, >and honestly prefer the latter, and I'm still curious to know the reasons >behind the decisions of the likes of HP, DG, TI, Intergraph &c to go with >System V not 4.2. Define "go with System V". For example, as I understand it, many (most? all?) HP-UX implementations are based on at least a BSD kernel, although the fast file system used to truncate names to 14 characters anyway (I've heard you can now ask it not to) and a lot of the user-mode code and much additional kernel code probably comes from System V. By contrast, SunOS implementations are based on at least a BSD kernel and a lot of the user-mode code and much additional code comes from System V. I think the same applies to Ultrix. (In all three cases, there's a lot of HP, Sun, and DEC code in the OS as well. SunOS 4.0's "mmap" sure didn't come from Berkeley....) Lots of UNIXes these days are built from some System V code, some BSD code, and some code from other sources. I'd much rather work on a system with stuff from both than a pure version of either one. >Is it really just the licencing minefield surrounding the >Berkeley version? To what "licensing minefield" do you refer? I suspect you can't get a 32V license any more, so you have to get an S5 license to get BSD source, but so what?