Doc, SysV unix became commercial and closed after the AT&T breakup. But prior to the breakup, as you yourself point out, "all UCB had to do was copy the tape."
Bell Labs wouldn't let just anyone copy the tape if it wasn't de facto open source. And the reason it was open source was because AT&T was barred from selling it. UCB wasn't the only entity which got the source of SysV unix at this time, others included BBN I believe. And I don't think 4.0BSD was completely SysV-code free. That's why there was a lawsuit in 1997 (?) which resulted in the settlement. Even Jolitz' 386BSD had to replace a couple of crucial files in 4.0BSD which were encumbered. On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Pablo Manalastas <[email protected]> wrote: .. > You got your Unix history mixed up Orly. Very early in > the development of Unix, all that Berkeley had to do was > to go to Bell Labs and copy off the Unix source code on > tape. This is how BSD started. And BSD grew even faster > than SysV. So at the start, Unix was de facto open > source, until 1993 when AT&T made Unix commercial, and from > that time on, no one could look at the Unix source code > without paying AT&T license fees. Bell Labs never gave > away the source code because of the anti-trust settlement > with the U.S. government. They could not, because at this > time, Unix was already closed-source commercial software. > > Because of this closed-sourcing of AT&T Unix, Berkeley had > to do a complete rewrite of the BSD kernel in order to come > out with 4.0BSD, which did not have any AT&T source code > in it. 4.0BSD became the precursor of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and > OpenBSD. -- Orlando Andico +63.2.976.8659 | +63.920.903.0335 _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
