分类： BSD
2008-09-10 09:01:18
OpenBSD 4.4 CD2 track 2 is an uncompressed copy of this song. 3:05 minutes 
Nearly 10 years ago Kirk McKusick wrote a history of the Berkeley Unix distributions for the . We recommend you read his story, entitled first, to see how Kirk remembers how we got here. Sadly, since it showed up in book form originally, this text has probably not been read by enough people. The USL(AT&T) vs BSDI/UCB court case settlement documents were not public until recently; their disclosure has made the facts more clear. But the story of how three people decided to free the BSD codebase of corporate pollution -- and release it freely -- is more interesting than the lawsuit which followed. Sure, a stupid lawsuit happened which hindered the acceptance of the BSD code during a critical period. But how did a bunch of guys go through the effort of replacing so much AT&T code in the first place? After all, companies had lots of really evil lawyers back then too -- were they not afraid? After a decade of development, most of the AT&T code had already been replaced by university researchers and their associates. So Keith Bostic, Mike Karels and Kirk McKusick (the main UCB CSRG group) started going through the 4.3BSD codebase to cleanse the rest. Keith, in particular, built a ragtag team (in those days, USENIX conferences were a gold mine for such team building) and led these rebels to rewrite and replace all the Imperial AT&T code, piece by piece, starting with the libraries and userland programs. Anyone who helped only got credit as a Contributor -- people like Chris Torek and a cast of .. hundreds more. Then Mike and Kirk purified the kernel. After a bit more careful checking, this led to the release of a clean tree called Net/2 which was given to the world in June 1991 -- the largest dump of free source code the world had ever received (for those days -- not modern monsters like OpenOffice). Some of these ragtags formed a company (BSDi) to sell a production system based on this free code base, and a year later Unix System Laboratories (basically AT&T) sued BSDi and UCB. Eventually AT&T lost and after a few trifling fixes (described in the lawsuit documents) the codebase was free. A few newer developments (and more free code) were added, and released in June 1994 as 4.4BSD-Lite. Just over 14 years later OpenBSD is releasing its own 4.4 release (and for a lot less than ). The OpenBSD 4.4 release is dedicated to Keith Bostic, Mike Karels, Kirk McKusick, and all of those who contributed to making Net/2 and 4.4BSD-Lite free. |
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Source Wars Episode IV Trial of the BSD Knights Not so very long ago and not so far away AT&T made system code and gave some bits away Some Berkeley geeks rebuilt it better, faster, more diverse This open thing was wonderful for everyone on Earth And then the roaring 90's came The Empire changed its mind And good old greed was back again The geeks were in a legal bind The Empire's Unix Lab sued BSDi from above The code is free but only we can sell it bub! The University came calling in full protective mode and proved the source in Net/2 didn't use the Empire's code Then Bostic brought the Empire's books n' slammed them dandys down And showed the giant chunks of BSD code all around They didn't even give an ounce of credit front to back This broke the license USL was using to attack The case was thrown out by the judge and "settled" out of court And UCB was big enough to take it like a sport And to this day the geekfolk say Now did we win or lose? They shoulda made 'em reprint every book with proper dues And take out ads in major rags apologetically And maybe now it wouldn't be the same monopoly The Empire might have tumbled down if everybody saw How greed became so big they couldn't see that glaring flaw But only one community the one that makes it tick Is there to fight for everyone exposing hypocrites And OpenBSD is here to tell the story right Once again the fight is fought and kept in shining light And may the source be with you May the Empire fall apart Ya like that's gonna happen! But we gotta keep heart! |
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