On 7/7/2014 11:57 AM, Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
There wasn't that much good BSD code out there when the GNU project started. BSD started provided a complete system at the beginning of the 1990-s. And shortly thereafter it got into a trial with AT&T. Also shortly after development was halted and much of it moved to proprietary forks. By then the basic system for Linux to use (sans kernel) was GNU.
All I know is that in 1990 I bought an AT&T UNIX system which included the AT&T KERNEL, a lot of closed source software and a lot of open source BSD utilities. There was lots of open source programs for UNIX, many of them were public domain (similar to the BSD license). It did have X windows on it, but with my 2 meg of RAM 386SX, it would not run.
By 1995, I was purchasing CD ROMs, with BSD (scrubbed after the lawsuit), which came with a large library of UNIX code, and LINUX distros (more than one), which came with the BSD libraries.
GCC did not come into general use (or at all AFAIK) until SUN started selling Solaris, because SUNOS required you to compile and link modules to change KERNEL parameters, so it came with a C compiler and linker.
System 5 UNIX did not, you had to have a linker, but not a compiler, so the C compiler was not included and cost a lot of money. GCC was popularized so that people could compile things on their SUNS without spending a lot of money for a compiler.
So from my point of view, based on the early 1990's BSD was it, not Linux, and the GPL was not really important then. You could happily run an open source BSD system without any GPL'ed code, and except for the Linux KERNEL. happily run a Linux system without any. Not counting all of those SUN computers that had come one the surplus market when they went to SPARC and then went to the pizzabox systems.
Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson 4X1GM/N3OWJ Jerusalem Israel. _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il
