From: terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C)
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
Organization: Weber State University  (Ogden, UT)
Distribution: inet
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 23:50:38 GMT

In article <1993Jan20.230616.25164@igor.tamri.com> jbass@igor.tamri.com (John Bass) writes:
>First, the group at UCB, Joltz, BSDI, and others all have acted
>out a plan to attempt to place the AT&T/USL UNIX product into the
>public domain. A conspiracy based in false "Robin Hood" ethics.

I assume you mean the "conspiracy" involves the "Jolt Cola" corporation --
and "Joltz" is an inappropriate plural.  Neither the Bill nor Lynne
Jolitz, nor to my knowledge any member of the 386BSD community, is
involved in the current litigation by USL against BSDI and UCB.

>I doubt the Studios, Screen Actors Guild, or the courts would allow
>the Trekies to rewrite every line/scene of each movie/episode (while
>preserving the plot and fabric of each story) in an attempt to place
>the Startrek industry into the public domain so that freely copyable
>and editable movies could by enjoyed by the self proclaimed public.
>The fact is, that to do so is blatantly illegal ... no matter how
>much a bunch of highschool/college drama school wantabe actors might
>cry about freedom of expression while tring ... it's WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

You have never been to a Paramount-sponsored Star Trek convention, I see.

>From my view what UCB, Joltz, BSDI and others have done has neither
>advanced the art nor been in the UNIX industries best interest. With
>forethought and malace they incrementally attempted to place the UNIX
>operating system product into the public domain by re-writting it
>line by line while leaving the framework and the fabric of the system
>unchanged ... same global design, major algorithms, data structures,
>internal interfaces, etc ... to what end? Only to attempt to destroy
>AT&T/USL UNIX as a commercial product. At best the debate has
>cost more than a million wasted man-hours that could have been more
>productively used to advance the art with a new design. Their actions
>have been WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

I assume you are talking about the act of the production of the BSD/386
and 386BSD operating systems, rather than UCB's longstanding record of
coming up with ideas and highly trained personnel such as Bill and Lynne
Jolitz, other individuals with long standing records of accomplishment
at CSRG and now working at BSDI, or other individuals elsewhere in the
industry.  Certainly we can argue that UCB's training of Bill Joy was
in at least a large portion of the UNIX industries best interest (can
you say "Sun Microsystems"?), and the fact that large portions of the
Berkeley research have been incorporated into SVR4 (...say virtual
memory?).

Your targets are unlikely guilty of either "forethought and malace" (or
"malice aforethought", as the rest of us call it) in the charges leveled
against them, unless you are suggesting that the current litigation was
factored into their risk analysis before release.

>They should have followed the example of other university research
>teams and done some REAL research to give us a guiding example of
>what OS's should look like in the next century instead of perpetuating
>the mistakes and frail framework of UNIX's 1960/70's design.

1)	Nearly 2/3's of the code files  in SVR4 have statements in their
	headers progclaiming their Berkeley origin.

2)	386BSD is not involved in the current litigation.

3)	Source code accessability is to software engineering what a
	microscope is to a microbiologist.  Thus any release of source
	code aids research into the topic covered by the source code.

4)	Linux impacts SVR4 in exactly the same way as 386BSD;
	neither are being litigate by USL at this time.

5)	CMU (I assume this to be one of the models being held out as
	an ideal) was using Net/2 as a code base for their server
	before litigation started against UCB.  The MACH "shell"
	was to be "BNR2SS" -- Basic Networking Release 2 Single Server.
	Thus your argument is flawed by your "tainted" ideal.  CMU is
	currently considering or has begun using Linux instead (I don't
	keep up with *all* research, although I'd like to).

[ ...Unfounded assumptions about why people are in the programming field... ]

[ ...Unfounded association between Bell Labs and USL... ]

[ ...Unfounded assumption that OS research is dead... ]

[ ...Another mispelling of "Jolitz"... ]
[ ...Unfounded trashing of research based on an unfounded association
     between 386BSD and SVR4 (probably the result of an incorrect
     assumption that 386BSD is being litigated: a falsehood)... ]

[ ...Personal opinions of 386BSD based on the false assumption that it
     is entirely/primarily based on the 1974 UNIX design -- oh yeah,
     an a confusion of historical fact by attributing the genesis of
     the 1974 design to the 1960's instead of the 1970's... ]

A lot of your assumptions (and the resulting conclusions) are farcical
and logically flawed.  I will not waste time discussing more than the
characterization of them I have already provided here unless you make
it impossible to avoid.

>I LOVE UNIX and have been a wild supporter for 17 years ... but it
>has it limits, and just as MS-DOS, those limits are preventing
>us from moving forward to better technologies.

Let me provide you with a favorite quote:

	"I don't know what language I'll be frogramming in 50 years, but
	 I know it will be FORTRAN".

The point being that you can not characterize current technology by it's
origins.  This is equivalent to arguing against the use of the English
language because you dislike the language Chaucer wrote in.

>It's time we get out of the herd mentality and view the USL vs BSDI
>lawsuit as it really is ... a botched attempt by BSDI & Joltz to
>plagiarize UNIX. Let's not make folk heros of them over their petty
>actions. Lets focus instead on the other teams that are bringing us
>our future.

A personal note:

It's too late; many of the people involved in BSDI, 386BSD, and USL  are
already folk heroes.  If you are any good at your job, you probably own
books written by these people.  Your fallacy lies in thinking that these
people have been elevated to "folk hero" status as a result of the recent
litigation rather than as a result of their past record.


I would love to spend 2-3 hours ripping your posting apart bit-by-bit,
but that is emotional on my part and will serve no useful purpose above
and beyond pointing out that you don't know what you are talking about,
and I have already done this.


					Terry Lambert
					terry@icarus.weber.edu
					terry_lambert@novell.com
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.
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