
Concise, opinionated history of the BSD/SystemV split - akkartik
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.toybox/1890
======
dalke
Also, inaccurate. Consider just this paragraph:

> Sun customers responded by using alternatives, and the closest thing to a
> working freely downloadable compiler was an obscure project called "gcc"
> from the guy who did one of the three main emacs variants (gosmacs from the
> maintainer of java, xemacs from the maintainer of netscape, and gnu emacs).

The unbundling occurred in 1990. Gcc was hardly obscure. In this USENIX
schedule from 1989 (
[http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm](http://www.informatica.co.cr/unix/research/1989/0612.htm)
) you see Stallman gave a tutorial on "Introduction to the Internals of the
Gnu C Compiler". It's unlikely they would consider that for obscure software.

Lucid forked emacs, and released lemacs in 1992. (See
[http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.ht...](http://www.xemacs.org/Documentation/21.5/html/internals_3.html)
.) "The initial authors of Lucid Emacs were Matthieu Devin, Harlan Sexton, and
Eric Benson, and the work was later taken over by Jamie Zawinski, who became
"Mr. Lucid Emacs" for many releases."

Only later was it renamed xemacs. Zawinski writes: "When Lucid went out of
business in 1994, and I came to Netscape, I passed the torch for the
maintenance of Lucid Emacs to Chuck Thompson (at NCSA) and Ben Wing (at Sun),
who renamed it from ``Lucid Emacs'' to ``XEmacs.''"
([http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html](http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html) ).

Hence, 1) it's not true that gcc was effectively obscure in 1990, 2) there was
neither lemacs nor xemacs in 1990, only GNU emacs and Gosling emacs, and 3)
xemacs wasn't directly from one of the Netscape developers.

~~~
tytso
Whether or not gcc was "obscure" in 1990 really depends on which circles you
were in, I'm sure, but it's true that it was hardly an unknown project, and
that Sun's decision to unbundle the C compiler helped it to become much more
popular.

Also missing from the article was a nod to Cygnus Support. A lot of the
engineering work for gcc was done by the engineers at Cygnus, who basically
collected support fees that were substantially cheaper than the Sun Pro C
compiler. To be fair, I doubt Sun at that era had anticipated the rise of the
"sell support and custom engineering for free software" business model. Cygnus
was one of the first companies who was able to show that it was in fact
workable.

~~~
dalke
[http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050525231654...](http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050525231654621)

> In 1990 I became Executive Director of the Sun User Group. That December I
> headed for San Jose for SUG's Eighth Annual Conference and Exhibit. ... The
> second group was irate because Sun had "unbundled" its software. That is,
> rather than getting all of Sun's developer tools together, they had to be
> purchased separately. And of course, they cost more this way.

> But wait. Why purchase the C compiler from Sun, when you could get a better
> one for less money from the FSF? That's what a large number of Sun's users
> asked themselves. And the net result was a real jump in CD sales at the FSF.
> (Several years later, when I organized the Freely Redistributable Software
> Conference [February 1996] and then was Vice President of the FSF, I
> realized more fully just how much Sun had benefited the FSF. I'm certain
> this was not a foreseen consequence.)

I think that something a "large number of ... users" know about cannot
meaningfully be called "obscure", else my lack of knowledge about European
football/soccer teams makes it an obscure sport.

------
guelo
After his illustrious career driving Sun into the ground Ed Zander proceeded
to drive Motorola into the ground. But he's still richer than you.

~~~
xorcist
It's funny because it's true. On all three points!

------
bodyfour
Some inaccuracies in the timeline. Solaris 2 (the sysv one; the BSD SunOS 4
was after-the-fact renamed to Solaris 1) didn't ship until 1993, not the 80s.
Also he says that gcc's support for 68k was important but Solaris never ran on
that platform -- Sun made the switch from 68k->SPARC a few years before the
BSD->sysv change.

The wider point is correct, but it isn't limited to just Sun. The decision for
many UNIX vendors to charge extra for the C compiler was a big reason that gcc
caught needed momentum. If that hadn't happened the whole free *nix history
might have been very different.

~~~
johnwfinigan
Yes, that timeline error stuck out to me as well. Recently I found Solaris 2.1
physical media, and the date on it is 12/92\. My goal is to get old GCC
running on it, but first I have to get it running at all. My sun4m is a
SparcStation 20, so will probably have to find a sun4c or SS10.

Note to anyone trying to image old Sun CD-ROMs: anything below Solaris 2.4 (?)
is a CD-ROM with a partition table. If you dd out /dev/cdrom on Linux, you may
get only the first partition, in ISO9660 format. You will be missing the small
UFS boot partitions. There should be one small UFS partition for each
supported arch.

Seems like using /dev/sr0 on Linux works.

------
DanBC
> I'd link to the message in google groups, but google crippled their groups
> search functionality a couple years back so finding the message in their
> archives even when you know the message id and the exact date is
> unreasonably difficult these days.

I still don't understand why Google made searching the Usenet archive
impossible to do.

Some important bits of computing history lurk in those archives and Google
just has it all boxed up. The future people are going to shake their fists and
wonder why all that information is really hard to get to.

~~~
maxerickson
Search by group to arrive here:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.os.minix)

Search group for "linus posix". On first response, click the 'No really,
search for "linus posix" button, to discard the helpful "linux posix"
correction.

Look at 23 message subjects lines and arrive here:

[https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.minix/T9SjMGTSpXk/0C2oixEP6qQJ)

Perfect? Probably not. Difficult? No.

~~~
DanBC
That convoluted process works for that single exact message.

What if you want to search for the early appearance of some two word phrase on
Usenet? This used to be easy. It can't (as far as I can tell) be done now.

And that convoluted process is -considering Google has excellent search
engine- a fucking stupid mess.

~~~
maxerickson
Sorry about the tone, reading it now it doesn't come across well.

------
keithpeter
_" So [Torvalds] went through the Sun Workstation manuals in the university
library and started implementing each system call listed there until he got
tired of that and had his system call handler print the call number of the
next unhandled call bash tried to make, implemented that, rinse repeat until
he had bash working."_

This seems culture defining somehow. Linux seems to me to be mix and match and
the modern BSDs seem to be more planned. Excellent.

------
stox
Important point: AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the
SYSVR4 move.

~~~
cbd1984
> AT&T owned a substantial portion of SUN when they did the SYSVR4 move.

The all-caps reminds me: SUN was an acronym at one point; it stood for
Stanford University Network.

------
vezzy-fnord
For what it's worth, the same author (Rob Landley) has another opinionated
article on the SysV/BSD split which also touches today's OS X and Linux, under
the context of init systems:
[http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014](http://landley.net/notes-2014.html#04-09-2014)

An interesting read, if bound to ruffle some feathers.

~~~
tytso
That article clearly omits one of the primary failures of Ubuntu's upstart,
which was Canonical's insistence on copyright assignment. This more or less
doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions, just as Canonical's
control-freak nature over being able to re-license free software under a
proprietary license doomed many of their other initiatives.

(Some Ubuntu partisans would claim this was only a perception issue, but the
legal framework they insisted on using gave them the right to do it, and given
that they were a commercial company, and given that people saw what happened
with Sun after it was taken over by Oracle, it was extremely unlikely more
than a handful would have ever given Canonical the benefit of the doubt.)

~~~
zokier
> This more or less doomed it from being accepted by the other distributions

Didn't RHEL ship with Upstart?

~~~
the_why_of_y
It's well documented, and even Scott James Remnant, the original author of
Upstart, didn't sign the Canonical CLA after leaving Canonical.

[https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq](https://plus.google.com/+KaySievers/posts/C3chC26khpq)

------
chris_wot
Funny how he brings up the Bryan Cantrill comment. Many years later, that same
guy threatened to fire a guy he didn't even employ for reverting a gender
neutral pronoun.

------
agumonkey
Interesting to see the business side of things at Sun, it's rarely under the
spotlight compared to other companies such as Microsoft or Apple.

------
101914
"... as the project grew beyond a boot sector, he wrapped his assembly as C
inlines..."

he = Linus Torvalds project = Linux

------
thristian
To this day, I still think of Joyent's CTO as Bryan "Girl Kisser" Cantrill.

~~~
mwcampbell
Can we not forgive and forget a single, isolated mistake made many years ago?
I'm sure bcantrill has already been punished quite enough for that one
mistake.

~~~
jclulow
The Internet is not especially forgiving. This is a good case study in why
it's probably not ideal to quote (especially unattributed) snippets of popular
culture[1] to try and convey deeper feelings -- especially frustration -- when
you cannot read the room.

[1] [http://www.screeninsults.com/saturday-night-live-get-a-
life....](http://www.screeninsults.com/saturday-night-live-get-a-life.php)

