On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 6:50 PM, Robert Sneidar <slylab...@me.com> wrote: > I seem to recall some noise has being made in the past that bits of Linux > source >was actually copied from Unix source, but I don't think anyone ever actually >proved >that. At one point, Novell stated that they didn't think that there was any >Unix code >in the SCO version.
I don't think anything ever came of that, no. > Linus Torvalds has said that if 386BSD had been available at the time, he >probably would not have created Linux. I forget the exact sequencing there. It is a pity that he didn't stumble across the project (was it still in litigation? I forget.) 386BSD came from a license to BSD. AT&T claimed that it had some of their code in it. Lawyers made money. Code replaced. >The original OS X was built on BSD Unix. 386BSD becomes FreeBSD, which amicably splits into FreeBSD concerned about just a couple of platforms, and NetBSD, determined to run on anything with a pmmu and the ability to emulate an FPU. NetBSD then has a far from amicable split and produces OpenBSD as a splinter, largely/entirely due to Theo's inability to get along with just about anyone. The three share code back and forth quite often. If I got everything straight, Darwin was drawn primarily from NetBSD, but modified to use the Mach microkernel like NeXT. It drew from other BSD licensed unix, too. However, it release-syncs to FreeBSD instead (or at least used to). Apple apparently fed back plenty of bug fixe in the process. OSX then runs on top of Darwin. > I do not think it would at all be fair to call Linux UNIX at it's core, as > the Linux >kernel was written in C. The Unix kernel was written entirely in assembly >language. 40 years ago, on the PDP-8, the predecessor to the PDP-11, on which it became famous. The switch to C is *very* early, driven by porting. Also, there is more than a passing resemblance between C and PDP-11 assembly (and this is not a coincidence. Snarky folks have been known to accuse one of being the other). The unix kernel was C based by the time Linus was typing. The Linux kernel was not drawn from the Unix codebase, but certainly provides the expected functionality of a Unix kernel. The "at its core" bit is more my finding describing a unix as "Linux at its core" a bit backwards. I've used both extensively. FreeBSD is my own preference, but I've gone back to macs (which remain primarily BSD boxes for me. But Spotlight leads to my keeping macos on them.) -- Richard E. Hawkins, Esq. (702) 508-8462 _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
