OS costs

[Rich Salz]

In <hart.653741863 at blackjack> hart at blackjack.dt.navy.mil (Michael Hart) writes:
>Do I read the above correctly re: BSD licenses?  Can anyone (or almost anyone)
>get a BSD license for source code?  I thought it was much more restrictive.
>
>Anyone have the straight poop on this, and care to share it???

Much of the BSD code is derived from ATT code, and much of it is not; at
this point it's about 60/40 or 40/60, depending on how you count things
(by line, by executable name, by filename, etc.)

Up until roughly three years ago, the BSD folks did not have the
time/resources/desire to cleanly mark the split.  They treated everything
as if it were derived from ATT code, so that in order to legally have a
copy of the BSD code, you had to prove that you were allowed to have a
copy of ATT code.  Proving you're allowed meant having a source license.
An ATT source license costs a few thousand (educational discounts for some
versions) up to nearly a hundred thousand (commercial redistribution for
recent SystemV releases) dollars.  A BSD license, once you get the right
ATT license, costs around a grand.

The code base BSD used is called "Unix 32/V" an old pre-SysV predecessor,
which is basically Version7 ported to a 32-bit virtual memory computer.  I
don't think ATT will sell you a license for anything other than SystemV
these days.

About two years BSD took a chunk of their software that was free of ATT
code and made it available; copies are available on uunet.uu.net, in the
directory ~/bsd-sources.  You'll find lots of utilities, a few random
kernel files, such as all the networking code.

Times, resources, and attitudes have changed greatly in the past few
years.  Nowadays, many major Unix (and Unix-like) software developers are
very interested in making distributable versions of their source
available.  BSD has been leading the way; for 4.4 they will be selling a
"detoxified" (no code from ATT in New Jersey) tape.  It will be a long way
from being a full system, but it's more than you'll find elsewhere, and
the cost is cheap.

The MACH folks will be stripping out ATT code (and perhaps BSD code,
although that is probably just because they're not sure of which code is
free and which is based on ATT's work) from their project and making it
available.  It will almost certainly have the pure MACH kernel, and
probably some utilities, and perhaps the some version of the Unix
emulation server.  Again, this is not a full system.  I don't know what
term MACH uses for their redistributable release.

FSF, as they re-invent the wheel, is making everything available.  They
will eventually have a complete system, using code from other places
wherever they can.  Most of the utilities you need to do software
development are available; all they're missing now is a kernel, more or
less.  FSF uses the term "freed" software to mean anything that you can
pass around to someone else (that would cover most of what I'm describing
here.)  The contract they use is called the copyleft; it is as much an
attempted agent of social change as it is a copyright.

The Open Software Foundation is spending lots of time tracking these sorts
of issues (I know, I get lots of calls from the person doing it :-).  They
are keeping track of the other work, more or less, and actively encouraging
it by giving money and resources to the other three groups, as well as doing
their own work.  The term they use is "unencumbered," as in not bound by ATT
licensing restrictions.

Hope this helps.
	/r$
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