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From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (Wm. E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Future at Berzerkeley
Message-ID: <13428@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 24 Mar 89 19:34:00 GMT
References: <15184@cup.portal.com> <15407@cup.portal.com> <16230@mimsy.UUCP> <21216@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <13324@steinmetz.ge.com> <28819@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 50

In article <28819@bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
| 
| From: davidsen@steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr)
| >  Is there a future for BSD? Ignoring the issue of when new releases
| >  [ ... ]
| The unasked question here is "Is there a need for an experimental,
| research version of Unix"?

  Unasked by me, for sure. What I'm looking at is "will any non-research
sites still be running anything other than SysV for commercial
production use?" Not that your question isn't a good one, but it's not
my question.

| Right now there are three major sources of experimental Unix
| implementations, Bell Labs, BSD and Mach. They are already
| incorporating experimental ideas which the standards people are
| probably a few years behind on standardizing.

  Well, three places which have their own kermel, although there is a
lot of V7 still in BSD, it seems. Other improvements and non-kernel
features come from places like MIT (X-windows and I think kerborous),
Sun (NFS), Venturcom (real time kernel mods), etc. I'm sure others can
think of dozens of other organizations which have made advances which
have been picked up by BSD, SysV or both.

| Granted a lot of folks ran BSD simply as a production Unix system,
| particularly in Universities. Now production systems are available as
| commodity items from manufacturers so they wonder why, given that
| their needs are fulfilled, would anyone continue with the BSD releases?
|
| But that's all wrong, you were running research versions of the
| system.  If you're satisfied with being about 5 years behind the state
| of the art (4.2 came out in 1983 and that's about where most
| manufacturers are today, 4.3 is 1986 software so that's only three
| years behind) then by all means do so.

  That's what I was asking. Ten years ago there was some reason to go
with the latest version of BSD because you needed virtual memory, fast
file system, etc. This stuff will now be in SysV, along with NFS, RFS,
streams, and a bunch of realtime things which are supposed to come in
V.4.1 as I recall. Will there still be a need for BSD or mach among the
people who don't do kernel research? If the commercail vendors go with
SysV, as it seems they will, will universities find it easier to get
fund$ for research on what vendors are selling and the government is
buying? I'm looking for good reasons other than kernel research, and I
don't think you need a totally new kernel to do that.
-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@crd.GE.COM)
  {uunet | philabs}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me