Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Rick Stevens]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
>>
>>> Yup.  But IIRC back then BSD was still largely encumbered by AT&T UNIX
>>> code.  Otherwise GNU might have never been started as such: BSD could
>>> have been the Free operating system of choice.
>>
>> Technically BSD was built at the University of California, Berkeley from
>> UNIX System 7 source from Bell Labs (then part of AT&T).  Since they
>> made changes and such, the Regents of University of California held
>> copyright over what was then called "Berkeley Standard Distribution" or
>> BSD.  Note that anyone using BSD could NOT call their OS "Unix" as they
>> did NOT have permission from AT&T.
> 
> The history is really much more complex than this.  Wikipedia has a nice 
> graphic of how the open/commercial parts developed at 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix.  But basically since the 
> government-regulated monopoly (AT&T) that did the initial work could not 
> sell it directly, they licensed it for research purposes to universities 
> where the original BSD additions were components that had to be 
> installed on top of the AT&T code.

I've known Wikipedia stuff to be wrong and part of this is.  In the old
days, you couldn't call it "Unix" unless you had a source code license
from Bell Labs (not AT&T).  I know, I was involved in the negotiations
our company had with BL to get System V source.  They wanted, IIRC, $50K
in 1982.  We said "too much, guys."

You could, however, get a license for BSD for a LOT less ($5k, I think),
and that's what a LOT of people did (including Sun, DEC, IBM, Data
General, Silicon Graphics and others too many to name).

>> This is what gave rise to SunOS,
>> Solaris, Ultrix, Irix, AIX, and damned near every other thing that
>> sounded vaguely like Unix and had an "x" in it.  They're all BSD
>> derivatives and carried a license from the Regents.
> 
> When the AT&T monopoly was sensibly split up, it was then able to 
> license directly to the other commercial vendors and developed its own 
> retail version.  Subsequently the BSD contributions were incorporated 
> into AT&T's SysVr4 which became the base for most of the commercially 
> licensed versions and simultaneously the *bsd side rewrote the original 
> AT&T portions to have a freely distributable version.  An AT&T lawsuit 
> against BSDI over this failed, but greatly hampered acceptance and use 
> of this free code at precisely the time that Linux became available and 
> almost worked.  You probably know the rest.

Yes.  And SVR4.2 was the multi-processor basecode for much commercial 
stuff.  I don't think you could use "Unix" since the copyright was still
held by Bell Labs.  It was later sold to another entity (can't recall
the name offhand--something like "Unix System Labs") and they were just
about as persnickety as you could get.  Virtually no one bought their
attitude and so the name Unix sorta fell out of style.

Many companies DID use SVR4.2 as the base for later versions of their
OSes.  Sun's Solaris (SunOS 5.x) is SVR4.2-based, whereas the original
SunOS (SunOS 4.x) was BSD-based.  They renamed it Solaris to
differentiate it from the BSD-based earlier OS.  DG's later versions of
their DG/UX was SVR4.2-based.  The first PC-esque SVR4.2 I used was on a
(blast from the past) Amiga 2000 (Motorola 68020), followed by "E-NIX"
(from Everex Computers) on actual i386 hardware.

DEC got so pissed off at the Unix title owner that they went to OSF/1
(Mach-based) for the Alpha products (eventually called "Tru64") and
dropped BSD and SVR4.2 completely.
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- Rick Stevens, Systems Engineer                       rps2 at nerd.com -
- Hosting Consulting, Inc.                                           -
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-        Brain:  The organ with which we think that we think.        -
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