Category: 386BSD & Unix

Another paper handed to me, this one on “open source governance” (isn’t that a bit of a oxymoron?), with the usual “Isn’t this wrong about 386BSD?” attached to the email. With the John Adams philosophy that “facts are stubborn things” firmly in place, I perused it, leaving errors outside of 386BSD for others to find.

Oh, boy. I found it to contain serious inaccuracies with respect to the history of 386BSD – which is absolutely amazing for an academic paper since 386BSD was extensively written about in one of the lead trade magazines of the time – Dr. Dobbs Journal – in a 17-part series Porting Unix to the 386 documenting it’s evolution, and also distributed through the magazine, and had multiple releases via the net per standard Berkeley Software Distribution methods. So it’s not as if one can’t find lots of source material from the authors. But this paper is riddled with errors with respect to release governance, intentions and motivations, and control – and that pretty much covers everything in “governance”, doesn’t it? So here’s the real story…

Well, Red Hat put lots of time and money into creating a professional developer version of Linux, put it on the market at $2,500 per “computer”, and in two weeks a clone of it called CentOS done by a squad of open source developers was put on the net for free. It’s hard to compete with “free”.

According to Stephen Shankland of Cnet “It’s clear, however, that many Red Hat clone users aren’t likely to embrace the original anytime soon. ‘I don’t pay for Linux, and I have absolutely no need for a Red Hat-style subscription (for) support,’ said Collins Richey, a Denver Linux enthusiast who uses CentOS on his personal computers to keep them compatible with work machines. ‘I’m considering recommending CentOS for limited use as a trial project…at work’.”

Red Hat tries to put a positive spin on it, saying “If they try versions that are not supported or supported inadequately, they will get a hint of the value propositions that are available for Linux and ultimately turn to a company that can support their businesses,” (Leigh Day, Red Hat spokeswoman). Some most assuredly will. But if my bit of experience in this area is any indicator, I believe that customers will wait until it is hacked, cudgeled, and otherwise moulded until it becomes good enough to be supported in-house. And still remains free. It may not be profitable to Red Hat, but it is “free enterprise” at its finest.

BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) has had a long and somewhat checkered history full of avarice and heartbreak. While revered (and still used) by many, BSD releases have been 1) obviated by “better” proprietary systems (e.g. SunOS to Solaris), 2) licensed to death (AT&T / USL / whoever), 3) unlicensed and released to great acclaim and even great expectations (386BSD), and 4) once some flaw is found, dispised, derived, hacked, and then poorly marketed against juggernaut Linux and Microsoft (NetBSD, FreeBSD, YourNameHereBSD,…). Unlike 386BSD, which stayed focussed on the BSD research goals and writings which are Berkeley’s best quality (see 386BSD Release 1.0 Reference CD-ROM: Essays on Kernel Design), 386BSD‘s many “commercial” derivations never achieved the kind of monetary success expected after The Fun with 386BSD we all had.

Why was this? Perhaps William Jolitz chatting with Tom Foremski of SiliconValleyWatcher (see How I learned to love Linux and profit from it — Wind River turns from Linux basher to religious zealot) may provide a bit of insight as to why the Curse of Commercial BSD continues: “Back in 2001, met with Wind River’s co-founder and board member Jerry Fiddler, along with John Fogelin at their office in Alameda, about the BSD purchase. It wasn’t a confident feel in the room, and they had no interest in putting any more “wood behind the arrow”. Just then, several B-25 Liberators flew overhead, commemorating Jimmy Dolittle’s raid on Tokyo. As they rumbled past, I recall thinking that the bomb Jerry bought was going to be bigger than the ones Jimmy dropped. Ironically, I was an executive at a Japanese company at the time. But such has been the BSD karma. You can’t say it doesn’t have its humorous side!”

Matt Marshall mentioned an old defunct company that I was rather fond of – Miniscribe. Now, Miniscribe in the 1980’s went from nothing to making and selling quite reliable 85 MByte drives (full size) at what was then a really great price (around $850 in quantity). It was the most common disk drive we shipped in our Symmetric 375 computer running the Symmetrix operating system (Berkeley Unix 4.2 derivative) from Symmetric Computer Systems.

Of course, having bought, installed, and supported so many, I just couldn’t resist putting in my two cents with Matt as well: “Ah, Miniscribe. I recall their 85MB drives well – we shipped many Symmetric 375‘s with those drives. They were quite cheap and quite good. But I also remember how they tried to claim we signed for a pallet never delivered. Turned out the signature was an obvious fake, and Miniscribe dropped the claim. We never did get those bricks…. We did however have one of their drives catch fire in testing – came into the office to the smell of phenols and a “squeek, squeek” sound of a slowly (for a disk drive) turning disk. I bet the engineers at Miniscribe spent a lot of time on that RMA!”

That Miniscribe disk drive failure was about as memorable as the time we tried a new “under the chip” capacitor on several 375 motherboards (I still have a few around if you’d like to see them). The motherboards were very tightly designed, and the majority of boardspace was taken up by DRAM. They were really cool – until one caught fire under the chip! Of course, surface mount technology caused much of this stuff to fade into obsolescence.

Every now and then I get handed a paper and asked for feedback. Most of the time, these papers have long boring titles and lots of funny charts with red error bars on them. I’ve even written a few of them myself, so I guess that’s why I get handed more and more. But go ahead – I enjoy another article on clustering (Gordon Bell handed me one a while back) or TOE’s (that was one of the SiliconTCP boys). I’ll even look at the “let’s drop TCP and make it fast” papers, because sometimes the authors are actually pinpointing a real-world problem even if I don’t agree with their proposed solution.

But I was recently referred to a paper “Open Innovation: The Paradox of Firm Investment in Open Source Software” by Gallagher and West precisely because it related to the evolution of open source, and since I’m often referred to as a “Pioneer of Open Source” with 386BSD, this is another topic on which I get requests for feedback. So I read the paper discussed, and found their discussion of proprietary work quite good. However, I also found that their isolation of time in studies (1998 onwards) actually missed the primary evolution of every single open source model cited in the paper, which misses the point of the exercise, likely due to ignorance of the topic. So perhaps an examination of Berkeley’s influence in this regard would be a valuable addition.

Well, Matt Marshall thinks the reason Google hired Mark Lucovsky is all that talk about the “Google OS”. But he also was working on web services, and I think that’s what they want out of him. As I told Matt “Web services are just a component of the new Internet OS. Don’t get hung up on implementation – the secret’s in the architecture”. See Issues in Deployment of Wireless Web Services and the corresponding article Web Services and Datacenter Environments in the Web Services issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal (April 1993). I’m sure these guys have already done their homework. Have you?

Got around to reading Bill Gurley’s MMPORG article and enjoyed the walk down the Unix role playing game lanes. When I talk to the LA crowd about MMP (Massive Multiplayer) gaming, they always love the connection to Rogue, Adventure, and Zork. In fact, on the Symmetic 375 we have the best versions of rogue, and since the kids now own the machines (20 years old, NS32000 BSD Unix, and work perfectly – I have PCs that have failed in 2 years), they prefer the 375 versions to the “enhanced” ones today (see A Wandering through the Vintage Computer Faire).

I remember telling Jim Anderson (Adventure) years ago about how I was inspired by his invincible thief, so when I was asked to create an arcade game (PackRat) that would appeal to girls in 1982 for Atari Coin-Op, I put in a character of an invicible rat who would pick up the valuables and walk off (the graphic artist took it further and she put the rat in a leather jacket – he was very cool).

Doug Millison of SiliconValleyWatcher reminisces about the HomeBrew Computer Club. Now, I wasn’t a member, but my husband William Jolitz used to show up now and then at SLAC for the meetings when he could get away from Berkeley and BSD work. So he added a little to the collective memory.

From William’s comments: “It’s great to see some of the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletters online – in fact, I’ve still got a coupon for the Byte Store that fell out of one when I was showing it to my kids. Think anyone will honor it?”

“Seriously, we’re also old DDJ (Dr. Dobbs Journal) fans – I remember the first issues of DDJ and the “running light” slogan well. That’s why 386BSD a decade later had so many HCC and DDJ references, including Tiny 386BSD (see From 386BSD to OSPREY: The Evolution of an Operating System), an entire Berkeley Unix system on a single floppy that old-style Unix guys said “couldn’t be done” (just like how Tom Pittman’s Tiny BASIC from itty bitty machines tipped the old BASIC monopoly in the 1970’s).”

“The slogan Running Light with 386BSD appearing in DDJ after a 17-part series on “Porting Unix to the 386”, completing a project begun in 1989 with “386BSD: A Modest Proposal” for Berkeley and DDJ, and ending with the 386BSD 1.0 Reference CDROM from DDJ (1994-1997), along with books and videos running to this day.”

“386BSD was intentionally biased towards the DDJ hobbyist / reader – not the old-style Unix guru. We don’t regret it – we really had a blast, just like the old HCC days. William Jolitz.”

Alas, apparently that silly press release last week has totally confused the writing fraternity into thinking the 1990’s were actually the 1980’s (see Fun Friday – Homer’s Illiad to be “Improved” for Silicon Valley). Aside from the fact that Clinton and Reagan were both absolutely adored by the American people, I don’t think the 1980’s were really enough like the 1990’s to easily confuse the two decades, do you?

In this piece in cnet, “Unix got its start at AT&T, but Sun co-founder Bill Joy was instrumental in an open-source variant developed at the University of California at Berkeley. For half the company’s history, Sun used this BSD version of Unix in a product called SunOS”. I wonder what they’ve been drinking today?

Back in the 1980’s, BSD required an AT&T source license to obtain source code – a considerable expense for a company. SunOS required an AT&T license as well. At Symmetric Computer Systems, to sell our BSD-based Symmetrix 375 computer required an AT&T license and we only used BSD – not System V! Afraid it was true for everyone. But that’s not all.

Well, given the egos in Silicon Valley, it comes as no surprise that a press release like this would appear. It was so inaccurate that the Wall Street Journal got fooled and then had to reverse themselves and say Bill Joy is not a “venture partner” after all. Steve Lohr of the NY Times commented “yes, I was amused by the selective and heroic description of Bill and open source.” Of course, the NY Times wasn’t taken in like the WSJ, were they (press gloating allowed).

What next? Perhaps a new version of Homer’s Illiad, but with Bill Joy as “Achilles” (now why is he sulking in his tent this time? did he finish that book yet?), Michael Moritz as “Zeus” of course (since he makes even Steve Jobs tremble, and that isn’t easy), and of course the beauteous and coveted “Helen” played by Bill Gates, with Larry Ellison as his ambitious and calculating understudy “Eve” (oh, how did “All About Larry” get into the script?). Umm, maybe I’ll skip the premiere.

My personal favorite is how Bill Joy invented the open source OS way back in 1982. Now, I may be a bit hazy about this – I was at Berkeley then after all – but I’m pretty sure I’m married to the Bill who invented the BSD open source OS and my Bill isn’t the Bill who also worked on BSD sockets at Berkeley (and that Bill isn’t nearly as sexy as my Bill).

I’m also pretty sure everyone had to sign source license agreements and follow all that other nasty compliance rigamorole, plus pay a lot to AT&T / Bell Labs (prior – Western Electric) for the privilege of working on a commercial BSD Unix like we had to pay at Symmetric Computer Systems in the 1980’s. In fact, didn’t Sun only get out from under those nasty AT&T / USL royalties in the mid-90’s (with a buyout)? Gee, I don’t know why anybody cared about Linux or 386BSD in the 1990’s if BSD was already open, and why Sun and everybody else signed those nasty license agreements with AT&T in the 1980’s, or why AT&T / USL sued Berkeley in 1992. Do you?

But it got me to thinking – who did really invent the open source OS? We’ve got a lot of choices, ranging from Andy Tanenbaum to Dennis Ritchie, so go ahead and choose right now Who is the Father of the Open Source OS?