Re: Ken Thompson interview in IEEE Computer magazine (fwd)

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Wed, 5 May 1999 13:56:51 +0100 (BST)


> AT&T's lawsuit that delayed the release of 4.4BSD certainly gave
> Linux an opportunity to compete more seriously against free BSD
> UNIX derivatives. If a BSD for Intel systems had existed sooner
> then even Linus admitted that Linux would probably not exist now.

Your chronology is wrong there

The history was

Berkeley OS lab gets closed
Lots of people go to BSDI (but not all)
386BSD 0.1 is released - almost uncompilable, needing an FPU but
with patches a hacker could sort of make it work.
Alan orders his 386 PC
Linus released first Linux in vaguely usable form (again you needed some
hair to build it)
Alan's PC arrived
Linux 0.12 needed no FPU, 386BSD needed an FPU
I ran Linux cos I couldnt afford an FPU

The lawsuit was some time after this. About 0.96 if I remember
rightly - It and the legal view that the BSD advertising clause and GPL
were not compliant stopped us using the BSD stack although someone did
indeed do a BSD stack port to Linux (Matthias Urlich from memory).

Microsoft and the overchargning Unix vendors certainly created the climate for
Linux, but I think backlash is way inaccurate. Sadly it and "religion" are
becoming a little too accurate nowdays.

Alan

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