MACH kernel - source become pd?
Chris Torek
chris at mimsy.umd.edu
Sat Oct 13 23:49:08 AEST 1990
In article <450 at dill.UUCP> tilley at ukfca1 (Jonathan Tilley) writes:
>[An] article said that once the MACH kernel was completely free of
>ATT stuff and was stable, it was going to be available free.
This is the plan. As the old saying goes, `Don't count your chickens
before they hatch.' (Things look good; CMU already gives away Mach
for free. The problem is that you must first show your AT&T source
license.)
>I know that the kernel is now stable - NeXT has it as their operating
>system,
(a) CMU Mach != NeXT Mach; (b) just because NeXT ships it does not mean
it is `stable'.% Neither of these is really important, though:
>so does anyone know if or when MACH will become free?
It already is freely available. The problem is that the Mach kernel
is also useless *by itself*. The Mach kernel is a *kernel*, NOT an
Operating System; it is more like what IBM sometimes calls a `nucleus'.
It does not provide a file system, for instance. No file system ==
no files on disks == no place to keep data. You can use it with the
AT&T and/or Berkeley file systems, of course, but you have to pay money
for those. It also does not come with little things like a shell,
login program, ....
(Note that Berkeley CSRG are working on a free 4BSD as well. The same
set of caveats above apply, except that the 4BSD `kernel' is pretty much
the whole O/S, not just the bits that cannot be paged.)
-----
% See the lyrics to `There Must Be 50 Ways to Crash Your NeXT Box' :-)
--
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 405 2750)
Domain: chris at cs.umd.edu Path: uunet!mimsy!chris
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