OS costs

[Melinda Shore]

In article <70400021 at m.cs.uiuc.edu> carroll at m.cs.uiuc.edu writes:
> Written  4:19 pm  Sep  7, 1990 by cgwst at unix.cis.pitt.edu in m.cs.uiuc.edu:comp.unix.i386 
>>[ ... ] MACH is going to become freeware.
>I find this difficult to believe, since currently MACH requires both a 
>Berkeley and an AT&T source license. (At least, that's the word from the CMU
>MACH people).

This is a very widely held misconception.  The Mach 3.0 microkernel
will be free of AT&T code, but it can't become available without a
license until it's been certified (don't ask).  The process is
apparently somewhat expensive and certainly time-consuming, so no
one is going to start until the code is finished.

Also, only the kernel is going to be free.  Most utility programs,
shells, compilers, and so on are probably going to be available
through the FSF or freeware, but you'll still need to get drivers,
filesystems, etc. from some place.  It's not a small job.

Back to licensing:  for a Mach 2.5 source distribution you need
AT&T, Berkeley, Sun NFS, IBM, and Ultrix licenses, among others.
We've packaged things up so that you can get all your licenses except
the AT&T SysVr2 license through us.
-- 
Melinda Shore                                 shore at mtxinu.com
mt Xinu                              ..!uunet!mtxinu.com!shore