On Thu, Jan 20, 2005 at 08:38:18AM -0500, b zz wrote: > Hello, > Sorry for my poor english language because I'm french.. > I would to know who is the creator of 4.4 BSD. > Cordially, > Ben Clark.
Bon jour, Ben! There - that's almost all my French - so your English is far superior to my French. BSD Unix anything came out of CSRG UCB. How's that for alphabet jumble? CSRG is the Computer Science Research Group of the University of California at Berkeley (UCB). BSD, in fact, stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. Many interesting people were in that group at the time, including some of the founders of Sun MicroSystems and other movers and shakers of the industry. The University of California bought a full source licence from AT&T Bell Labs, which had produced The Unix Operating System (at that time, they were quite adamant that "Unix" was not a noun, but an adjective which needed a noun to modify), and, at the time, offered the full source license for $200,000 commercially or $20,000 to educational institutions. The source license, interestingly, granted you the right to redistribute derivative code (code based on the licensed code), but only to another license holder. Consequently, BSD Unix spread like wildfire through educational institutions, to whom $20,000 was not an unreasonable sum. They'd mail off their check to AT&T, and sometimes, before it even got there, mail off a photocopy of the check to UCB along with a nomial media charge, and get back a 9-track tape with the full BSD on it. This included a LOT of AT&T-developed code, but since you were an AT&T license holder, that was OK. That was in the time of the Dec VAX 750 and 780, and the Dec PDP-11/63 and 11/70 - around 1975. The catch was that it was not really practical to run BSD Unix without the source, no-one was really serious about making binary distributions, and you still needed a license from AT&T to be able to receive it. Furthermore, the educational source license did NOT include a provision for redistribution to commercial binary license holders, even if someone had made a binary distribution. (Obviously, everything in computers is binary. What this convention meant was an object-code or executable-only distribution where everything is at least compiled, and no source code is distributed.) The effort began to re-write all the AT&T "encumbered" code, but therein lies a tale of mystery, intrigue, and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night. I recommend the Handbook and _The Complete FreeBSD_ by Greg Lehey for a history of What Came After That, the relationship of BSD to SyS III, Sys V, OSF-1, et al. Suffice it to say, for now, that part of what the "Free" in FreeBSD means is that it is free of all proprietary intellectual property and legally unencumbered for unlimited distribution. Ew - English can get so odd: "Proprietary property". But you all know what I mean. -- John Lind [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
