Why is Fedora not a Free GNU/Linux distributions?

[Les Mikesell]

Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
>> 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 doesn't make much sense until the completion of the standalone BSD 
that I thought happened a lot later.  Originally you had to have an AT&T 
license to run the BSD additions. And at these prices it's pretty easy 
to see why everyone was running Windows a few years later - I still 
blame AT&T for that.

> 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.

Sensible pricing could have changed everything.  Dell had one of the 
least expensive versions of SysVr4 that was still around $1k per box and 
it was one of the few that would adapt to generic SCSI drives instead of 
being limited to the vendor's set compiled into the kernel (like AT&T's 
own retail version).  It mysteriously disappeared right when Windows95 
came out.  Of course after the court revelations about Microsoft's 
anti-competitive practices, it wasn't so mysterious.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com