Messages in this thread |  | | | Date | Sat, 16 May 1998 11:22:27 +0200 | | From | Martin von Loewis <> | | Subject | Re: OffTopic: Linux History (Re: Linux on-line bookstore) |
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> One correspondent has questioned whether this is accurate and I will > include the gist of our discussion below. From what John implies, BSD > was already free and public, but if this is the case, then why release > Linux at all? More importantly, if BSD was more 'free' than GPL, why > did the community embrace Linux?
One issue is the exact timeline, which would be interesting to reconstruct. As far as I recall, 386BSD 0.0 was released about the same time as early Linux kernels. 386BSD was a complete system in the sense that it had all tools (which Linux didn't, originally), but the PC port was very flaky. For example, 386BSD 0.0 required a math coprocessor to work. FreeBSD and NetBSD appeared months later.
Another issue is why Linus made Linux and why he released it. The first answer is well known: Linus was playing with 386-based scheduling (task state segment and so on), and the first accomplishment were two tasks that wrote out 'A's and 'B's concurrently. So Linus started this system not because he was disgruntled by something, but because he wanted to learn something.
When he originally released it, there was a much stricter license on it than GPL: Free for private use only. The change to GPL was made on user's request. The BSD ownership was not very clear at that time, AT&T was claiming that significant parts of BSD were owned by USL, so you technically had to have a Unix source license to use 386BSD. This was settled years later with 4.4BSD Lite, so today's BSD derivatives don't have this problem.
Martin
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