First open source OS

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Jerry Feldman wrote:
| I should probably get Clem Cole in on this one. The AT&T suit was not so much proprietary code
| as it was Unix itself. Had AT&T prevailed, it would have affected Linux as well. I think that Linux
| benefitted from the misconception that the AT&T suit was based on copyright violations, which it
| was not.

Interesting.  By that time, the POSIX standard was  well  under  way,
right? After AT&T let the Sys/V spec be rubber-stamped as an official
standard, I'd think that copyright was about the only tool  they  had
left if they wanted to gain control over competitors' products. I did
note that from the beginning, linux was always described as  being  a
POSIX-compliant system, not a version of unix.

| I'm not sure which is a "better" system, Linux or BSD. Much depends on the distribution people
| use mostly WRT tools, utilities and applications.

Considering how much each has taken from the other, I'm not sure that
it  makes  much sense to even try to distinguish them any more.  I've
been noticing recently that I've often copied binaries  between  this
FreeBSD machine and my home linux box, and in all cases, they seem to
run without any problems at all. And they recompile without problems.
So what's the practical difference?

The one remaining holdout:  This FreeBSD system lacks a  /dev/inittab
file. The Sys/V (POSIX) init is a tool that the BSD crowd could adopt
to their benefit.   It  has  some  uses  that  are  difficult  to  do
otherwise.   It's  hard  to  come  up with good examples in the other
direction, since the linux community  has  pretty  much  appropriated
everything  of  major  value  from the BSD branch.  (Or have I missed
something good?)