From: joe@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk (Joe Sharkey)
Subject: Re: ENOUGH! Re: BSDI/USL Lawsuit -- More Bad News for Human Beings...
Organization: Individual Network (UK)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 22:27:08 GMT

In article <MIKE.93Jan22144301@cuba.vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at> mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at (Michael Gschwind) writes:

>Wait a moment! Who copied design, algorithms, data structures,... from
>whom? UCB from ATT/USL? Or ATT/USL from ATT? I would think the latter
                                         UCB?
>was the case rather than the fromer!!! Unix as we know it today is a
>UCB product

Sorry..

>SO what we like about UNIX (just some features - some of them 
>are pretty outdated and we don't like them any more (eg vi), but 
>they were at the time a MAJOR step!):
>
> * written in C				ATT

    Aren't IBM OS's mainly PL/I?  VMS mainly BLISS?

> * Paging				BSD

    Written many times by many people.

> * Fast File System 			BSD

    Don't have it.

> * Job control				BSD

    Don't use it - wasn't in V7!

> * csh (just a personal plug ;)		BSD 

    Don't use it - wasn't in V7!

> * IPC/networking/sockets		BSD 

    SysV has it's own version - different.

> * vi (eek - but better than ed)	BSD

    Better than EMACS, and more common. ed (or sed), of course, is usable
    in command files.

> * curses 				?BSD?

    BSD, I think.

> * lex,yacc				ATT
> * sendmail 				BSD

    Ranks with RSX/OS-360/MS-DOS: "user-hostile but can be made to work"

> * dbx 					?BSD?

    sdb is ok by me!  Hey, I *never* need it ;)

> * termcap 				BSD

>AT&T Unix was a good thing, but for its time - much of the
>improvement, ie. that which made it into a `product' did not come from
>AT&T (Unix got wuite a bit bigger and less elegant in the process - I
>doubt that the inventors would want to be associated with the
>cancerous beast that UNIX is today - for that reason the started out
>anew with Plan9 if I understand things) - and the point where the
>input of AT&T code stopped is easily discernable with the last source
>license UCB took for UNIX - which is way back when, if I understand
>things correctly...

Eh?

BSD grew and grew, taking ideas from wherever: VM, paging, resources...

Plan9 is not based on V.* - also *not* on BSD 4.*.

From my limited knowledge, BSD (you know, "sockets" and all that) were
rewriting SysV "streams" for BSD 4.4...

>So the people who are writting PD unixes - oops, UNIX is TM - who are
>writting POSIX conformant operating systems are ripping USL off? Isn't
>it more the case that USL is ripping the CS community off by selling a
>system of which they very lttle wrote/invented?

Maybe, maybe not.

It's easier to "clone" a product than to come up with the original idea.

Compare and contrast:

   USL has had some original ideas in the last 20 years.

   FSF/GNU are copying a de-facto (proprietary) standard



 
>
>mike
>
>--
>
>Michael Gschwind, Vienna University of Technology
>mike@vlsivie.tuwien.ac.at	(*) BOZO is a registered 
>(back in Vienna)                    trademark of Bush/Quayle 92
>                                (*) UNIX is a registered 
>                                    trademark of AT&T
>     


-- 
Joe Sharkey      joe@jshark.inet-uk.co.uk      ...!uunet!ibmpcug!jshark!joe
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