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Historic "Free Unix" white paper by Larry McVoy
greg writes "This is a white paper written by Larry McVoy at Sun Microsystems discussing free Unix software, *.BSD, Linux, GNU and FSF and competition with Microsoft. In the paper Larry proposes the opensourcing and standardizing of Unix in gerneral and Solaris in particular. Whats truly impressive is that it was written in 1993 and is still quite relevant and its predictions regarding Linux were very accurate. Here is the link:
" Currently only available in Postscript... HTML is coming.
Both KDE and GNOME are important efforts at improving all Unix desktops, not just GNU/Linux. Have you ever tried to use CDE?
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Open mind, insert foot.
At the time Berkeley had sold all commercial rights to BSD Unix to BSDI and thereby gotten embroiled in a lawsuit with USL (Unix System Laboratories), the semi-autonomous AT&T division (sold to Novell sometime in that time period) which owned the rights to Unix. In addition, a Republican administration in California was busily dismantling their educational system with yearly budget cuts for all public universities, to the point where UCB barely had the money to engage in normal instructional and research activities, much less stuff like PostGres or BSD. And finally Sun had dumped BSD-inspired SunOS in favor of the "merged BSD/SysV" that they had spent much money working on with USL, which was released as System V.4 for mere mortals and as Solaris for Sun customers and which looked suspiciously like System V.3 with a BSD compatibility bag slapped on the side (I know, I know, there were considerable kernel improvements between V.3 and V.4, but from an API standpoint V.4 was much closer to V.3 than to BSD). Given the politics, BSD obviously would not have been a good place for Sun to dump source code upon at that time, despite Sun's close connections to UCB (hey, Bill Joy wrote 'vi' while he was a grad student there, for cryin out loud!).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
BeOS is nice, but it's not a server platform. It seems to me more like the Amiga done right. For the children out there who know of the Amiga only as some dusty box in their father's closet, it was the first mass-produced consumer microcomputer sold in the United States with a message-passing microkernel and multi-tasking operating system, ten years before Be... except Commodore didn't know they had a graphics workstation rather than a game machine on their hands, couldn't figure out how to market it, never got the OS completed, and went belly up eventually.
The "In the US" part is important, because the Sinclair ?QL? was being sold in Europe with much the same feature set, except it had some kind of weird tape-ish type drives instead of "real" drives and had chicklet keys (Sir Clive did not believe in having a real keyboard!). Linus attributes much of his interest in computers to hacking on his uncle's QL while a child.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I'm not exactly sure how things played out after that document. I know that Novell sold the Unix stuff to SCO sometime around then - maybe SCO offered more than Sun? I do know that a few years back Sun spent something like $80M to buy permanent (or 20 years I or something) licenses for some Unix/System-V stuff. Kinda funny how things turn out.
There have been noises from Sun (mostly late last year, early this year) about opening up the source to Solaris. (in that, everyone can get it, not just developers with money, or people in education). They said the biggest problem is licensing issues - Sun don't own everything in Solaris. Looks like things haven't changed much... BTW Java, Jini, designs for the SPARC and Java chips, are not that only thing Sun have put under their "community source license" recently. Actually, it seems for quite a few products/tools, when they announced new versions they also annouced that it would be out under their "community source license" too. If/when Solaris does go this way, it'll probably be first with Solaris 8 (which is expected early 2000), and might not be back-ported.
I don't really know what happened after this, but I guess Novell couldn't be pursuaded to go along - they sold their IP rights to SCO...
To my knowledge, Sun have not (yet) announced or commited to releasing the source to Solaris. Last I heard was just thinking, strongly, about it. Do you have any references?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Okay guys, goofed earlier and posted a half-butchered version of the PS document. Didn't notice the damn thing until AFTER I'd gone back to read a couple more articles.
This version has been formatted in the attempt at readability. Any errors in readability are a combination of my fault, goofs with Ghostscript's conversion, and original grammatical mistakes in the document.
P.S.: NO. I did NOT have anything better to do tonight! I'm a geek remember?
The Sourceware Operating System Proposal
Revision 1.8
Larry McVoy
and a cast of thousands, see acknowledgments
lm@sun.com
+14153367627
Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation 1
ABSTRACT
This document describes a proposal to provide a source form, royalty free Unix as an evolution of the COSE ffort, as a means of unifying the Unix desktop market, and as an application deployment platform, with a focus on running all applications, including those from other operating systems, such as DOS and Windows 3.1. This effort is intended to provide substance to the many Unix unification and standard agreements that exist today.Significant effort has been made to address the concerns of the major Unix vendors, the Unix customer base, the DOS customer base, the Windows 3.1 customer base, the educational and research community,and the development community.
This document is an assessment of the condition of Unix, and a proposal to improve the condition of Unix on the desktop. To get a quick reading, the reader may scan for the highlighted bars; they are a summary of the key points of each section.
The organization of the document is background on the state of Unix, background on the efforts to fix Unix, a digression on why bother with fixing Unix, a suggestion for how to start Unix on the path to healthiness, more details on the health plan, details on managing the resulting system, alternatives to this plan, questions and answers, and finally,acknowledgments.
Neither Larry McVoy nor the views in this document are necessarily representing the views of Sun Microsystems or Sun'saffiliates. Sun's tolerance in this matter is gratefully acknowledged.
©1993 Larry McVoy 9 November 1993
Unix needs our help because Unix is dieing. Unix is no longer even close to competitive.
Licensing ranges from $20 to $100 per seat, with vendor mark up for their costly "value add" resulting in customer seat costs of $600 $3000. Microsoft sells Windows/NT for about $150.
Unix has ceased to be the platform of choice for the development and deployment of innovative technology. A great deal of the early development of Unix was done by researchers because of Unix's ready accessibility. As time has gone on, it has become more and more difficult for research organizations to acquire source. Microsoft is planning on releasing Windows/NT to universities in an attempt to leverage from the same sources of innovation.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The html version of this paper can be viewed at Larry's site here.
It was Yet Another Research Operating System that didn't go anywhere. Very OO design, meant to be "distributed". All system interfaces were written in a specialized interface definition language.
:)
Sun's pages on it seem to have disappeared, although they still turn up in search engines and links from other sites.
BTW--- I think "royalty-free" in this context meant just from Sun's perspective, in that it was written from scratch internally. Shouldn't be taken as a suggestion that it was free software.