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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!reason.cdrom.com!usenet From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: Curious about *BSD History Date: Fri, 05 Apr 1996 11:48:43 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 131 Message-ID: <3165791B.52BFA1D7@FreeBSD.org> References: <4k1nue$lm8@orb.direct.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0b2 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) To: Ken Clark <ken@direct.ca> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:16672 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:2763 Ken Clark wrote: > I have read Jordan Hubbard's FreeBSD history, but it seems to duck the > details of what happened to Bill Jolitz and why FreeBSD and NetBSD went their > seperate paths. I am honestly not trying to incite a flame war here, and Well, I didn't "duck" the issue so much as decide that there wasn't much I could say about this in 10,000 words or less, so I decided to avoid wearing out my fingers. FreeBSD and NetBSD went their separate ways initially because they were actually started very much around the same time, and it wasn't initially clear that either group was more than just a fond dream, so there was no clear impetus to join up. The groups that formed also formed out of those individuals who could get along with one another, and anyone who had a serious problem with one group jumped ship to join the other. Over time, we managed to find ourselves in a situation were the groups were fairly polarized, both personally and technically. The NetBSD people wanted to run on as many platforms as they could, the FreeBSD people being more driven towards the goal of making *one* system as user friendly and generally useful as possible. In retrospect, I think that this was for the best - it gave each group the freedom to focus on a specific area of OS design and prevented any one group from going crazy with too much to do. I certainly know that I'd have never wanted to be release engineer if I'd had more than one platform to do releases for! The situation today is one of more cautious optimism about the two groups working together on areas of common interest, and there has been some progress in that area. > What happened to Jolitz? What happened that so radically changed his > position on 386BSD? (If you read the old release notes, there were On that one, I truly have no idea. He essentially disappeared a few years ago, though I notice that he now has a book out. I attended a talk of his a year or so back where he also promised to put 386BSD 1.0 up for FTP someplace and fulfil his stated goal of making it a "research OS", but this never (to my knowledge, anyway) happened and it appears to have gone back underground. As to what changed his mind, I also have no idea. He can be rather tempermental, to put it mildly, and something clearly got him into an isolationist frame of mind. I don't really worry about this much, to be honest, since I don't think there's much point. > after 0.1? Why did he not support the patchkits? The FreeBSD history > says that Jolitz "withdrew his support" for the BSD interim (later FreeBSD) > project. Why? Does anyone have any old posts from the era explaining this? He said he had other plans for 386BSD and didn't want us using the name. No further justification was ever given. > Wasn't there to be a 386BSD 1.0 from Jolitz alone to be released > on CDROM? Did this happen? I seem to recall people saying Jolitz I believe so, though I don't know of anyone who's ever tried to run it (and I have asked on numerous occasions, being somewhat curious). At $79 a pop, or whatever, it was certainly too expensive for me to want to indulge my idle curiousity. > was writing a book on BSD. Did he? What does he do now? I am sure > there are more details here that would be interesting. He did do the book, which you can buy. I have no idea what he does now, though I hear he consults for Sun or somebody. > Next, why exactly did *BSD fracture into FreeBSD and NetBSD? I've answered this one above. > I think I might have trouble getting an answer to this > one, but certainly wanting multiplatform support is not a good enough reason Oh, I don't know about that. Have you really thought about how much effort that is? Now consider all the effort that _still_ needs to go into *BSD to make it user friendly and I think you'll see that there are two very large bodies of work here. If I had 50 people working for me, as is the case in most large OS groups, then I might well be tempted to tackle the entire problem set but such is simply not the case. We have to pick our battles carefully with so few soldiers on the field. > even harder for someone not in the know to understand, why OpenBSD? What > caused this, especially so late in the game? Personal politics. Somebody got kicked out of the NetBSD core group and started OpenBSD as a grudge. A real shame, that one, since as you say it was so late in the game and so unnecessary. From what I can see, it's just NetBSD with a few bells on here and there and certainly not unique enough to justify a wholly different lineage. I guess someone in the *BSD world had Linux-envy and felt there were too few releases of it.. :-) > Something else you also don't hear much about: What became of the "encumbered" > 4.4BSD? Are there people/institutions that have a UNIX license and Sure. There are quite a few people who still use it, I believe. I don't know how the sale of UNIX technology to SCO has effected them, but I would hope not adversely. > what effect did the USL/Novell/BSDI/UCB have on *BSD other than causing > certain kernel files to be re-written? Did Novell "win" anything in the > final analysis? Where any lessons learned? Well, the FreeBSD group was forced to more or less start over with 2.0, which was pretty traumatic but that's about it. Did Novell "win" anything? Definitely not - I'd say they spent a lot of litigation dollars which, in hindsight, were wasted. They ended up selling the whole kit and kaboodle again shortly afterwards, and quite possibly at a loss. > Finally, and I know I am going to get it for this one, what happened to > Jesus Monroe Jr? I am actually more serious about this question than He's still around. He's recently been asking me if I'd meet him for dinner in the south bay sometime, just to meet me, but my schedule has been such that I haven't gone anywhere _near_ the southbay for months now, so that one's been sort of indefinitely postponed. I saw him briefly at Jolitz's talk, so I at least know what he looks like.. :-) > into everyone's kill file and go away? Got committed maybe? Did > he ever release his famous QIC-40 tape driver? AFAIK, he was never committed and never released the QIC-40 tape driver.. I guess that's two for two.. :-) -- - Jordan Hubbard President, FreeBSD Project