Rick Stevens wrote:
Yup. But IIRC back then BSD was still largely encumbered by AT&T UNIX
code. Otherwise GNU might have never been started as such: BSD could
have been the Free operating system of choice.
Technically BSD was built at the University of California, Berkeley from
UNIX System 7 source from Bell Labs (then part of AT&T). Since they
made changes and such, the Regents of University of California held
copyright over what was then called "Berkeley Standard Distribution" or
BSD. Note that anyone using BSD could NOT call their OS "Unix" as they
did NOT have permission from AT&T.
The history is really much more complex than this. Wikipedia has a nice
graphic of how the open/commercial parts developed at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix. But basically since the
government-regulated monopoly (AT&T) that did the initial work could not
sell it directly, they licensed it for research purposes to universities
where the original BSD additions were components that had to be
installed on top of the AT&T code.
This is what gave rise to SunOS,
Solaris, Ultrix, Irix, AIX, and damned near every other thing that
sounded vaguely like Unix and had an "x" in it. They're all BSD
derivatives and carried a license from the Regents.
When the AT&T monopoly was sensibly split up, it was then able to
license directly to the other commercial vendors and developed its own
retail version. Subsequently the BSD contributions were incorporated
into AT&T's SysVr4 which became the base for most of the commercially
licensed versions and simultaneously the *bsd side rewrote the original
AT&T portions to have a freely distributable version. An AT&T lawsuit
against BSDI over this failed, but greatly hampered acceptance and use
of this free code at precisely the time that Linux became available and
almost worked. You probably know the rest.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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