To Free or Not to Free the Code in Question
|
Part III - Mighty BSD: seeding and ceding 1979 - 1989 - 1992 .. The 70s closed with BSD-Unix spawning a digitally connected culture. "Usenet came into being in late 1979, shortly after the release of V7 Unix with UUCP." Usenix conferences began in January 1980. [faqs.org]. "Usenet was the first peer-to-peer technology. Originally developed just to share files between computers, it evolved into a natural net-wide hierarchy of eight major categories plus a wild card" [Usenet History, Living Internet]. 1979: At this moment, the value of the Unix title itself began changing. "In the late 1970's, a few companies started to develop products based on the AT&T Unix code. In 1979, AT&T announced that they intended to commercialize Unix themselves, and established Unix System Laboratories (USL) to develop a supportable product." [Unix - Wars, Living Internet]. December 1979 saw release of "3BSD, the first VAX distribution from Berkeley. The final release from Bell Laboratories was 32/V; thereafter all Unix releases from AT&T, initially System III and later System V, were managed by a different group that emphasized stable commercial releases. With the commercialization of Unix, the researchers at Bell Laboratories were no longer able to act as a clearing-house for the ongoing Unix research. As the research community continued to modify the Unix system, it found that it needed an organization that could produce research releases. Because of its early involvement in Unix and its history of releasing Unix-based tools, Berkeley quickly stepped into the role previously provided by the Labs." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable Marshall Kirk McKusick in "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" O'Reilly Jan99]. On the strength of 3BSD, Bob Fabry met with "DARPA image processing and VLSI contractors, plus representatives from Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, the developers of the ARPAnet", winning the DARPA network OS unification contract "to add features needed by the DARPA contractors. ..Fabry managed to coordinate with Bob Guffy at AT&T and lawyers at the University of California to formally release Unix under terms agreeable to all." The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) was formed in April 1980, producing 4BSD in October with licensing "on a per-institution basis". [Ibid.]. 4.1BSD followed in June 1981: "The original intent had been to call it the 5BSD release; however, there were objections from AT&T that there would be customer confusion between their commercial Unix release, System V, and a Berkeley release named 5BSD. So, to resolve the issue, Berkeley agreed to change the naming scheme for future releases to stay at 4BSD and just increment the minor number." [Ibid.] In August 1983, system 4.1c was released as 4.2BSD. "Most of the Unix vendors shipped a 4.2BSD system rather than the commercial System V from AT&T. The reason was that System V had neither networking nor the Berkley Fast filesystem. The BSD release of Unix only held its dominant commercial position for a few years before returning to its roots. As networking and other 4.2BSD improvements were integrated into the system V release, the vendors usually switched back to it. However, later BSD developments continued to be incorporated into System V.. 4.3BSD system was finally released in June 1986.. Although most of the vendors had started the switch back to System V, large parts of 4.3BSD were carried over into their systems, particularly the networking subsystem." [Ibid.] "Its main changes were to improve the performance of many of the new contributions of 4.2BSD that had not been as heavily tuned as the 4.1BSD code. Prior to the release, BSD's implementation of TCP/IP had diverged considerably from BBN's official implementation. After several months of testing, DARPA determined that the 4.2BSD version was superior and would remain in 4.3BSD. After 4.3BSD, it was determined that BSD would move away from the aging VAX platform. The Power 6/32 platform (codenamed 'Tahoe') developed by Computer Consoles, Incorporated seemed promising at the time, but was abandoned by its developers shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, the 4.3BSD-Tahoe port (June 1988) proved valuable as it led to a separation of machine-dependent and machine-independent code in BSD which would improve the system's future portability." [BSD Wikipedia]. "Up through the release of 4.3BSD-Tahoe, all recipients of BSD had to first get an AT&T source license. That was because the BSD systems were never released by Berkeley in a binary-only format; the distributions always contained the complete source to every part of the system. The history of the Unix system and the BSD system in particular had shown the power of making the source available to the users. Instead of passively using the system, they actively worked to fix bugs, improve performance and functionality, and even add completely new features." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. 1989: "With the increasing cost of the AT&T source licenses, vendors that wanted to build standalone TCP/IP-based networking products for the PC market using the BSD code found the per-binary costs prohibitive. So, they requested that Berkeley break out the networking code and utilities and provide them under licensing terms that did not require an AT&T source license. The TCP/IP networking code clearly did not exist in 32/V and thus had been developed entirely by Berkeley and its contributors. The BSD originated networking code and supporting utilities were released in June 1989 as Networking Release 1, the first freely-redistributable code from Berkeley." [Ibid.] A decade after AT&T's commercialisation of Unix, Berkeley had innovated their own distribution model. "Until this point, all versions of BSD had incorporated proprietary AT&T Unix code and therefore required licenses from AT&T for their use. Source code licenses had become very expensive by this point, and several outside parties had expressed interest in a separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led to Networking Release 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the permissive BSD license. It was released in June 1989." [BSD Wikipedia]. "The licensing terms were liberal. A licensee could release the code modified or unmodified in source or binary form with no accounting or royalties to Berkeley. The only requirements were that the copyright notices in the source file be left intact and that products that incorporated the code indicate in their documentation that the product contained code from the University of California and its contributors. Although Berkeley charged a $1,000 fee to get a tape, anyone was free to get a copy from anyone who already had received it. Indeed, several large sites put it up for anonymous ftp shortly after it was released. Given that it was so easily available, the CSRG was pleased that several hundred organizations purchased copies, since their fees helped fund further development." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. "After Net/1, BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more non-AT&T sections of the BSD system be released under the same license of Net/1. To this extent, he started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using the AT&T code. For example, vi, which had been based on the original Unix version of ed, was rewritten as nvi (new vi). Within eighteen months, all the AT&T utilities had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 release of Net/2, a nearly complete operating system that was freely redistributable." [BSD Wikipedia]. "Bostic pioneered the technique of doing a mass net-based development effort.. Our initial thought was to come up with a whole new name for our second freely-redistributable release. However, we viewed getting a whole new license written and approved by the University lawyers as an unnecessary waste of resources and time delay. So, we decided to call the new release Networking Release 2 since we could just do a revision of the approved Networking Release 1 license agreement. Thus, our second greatly expanded freely-redistributable release began shipping in June 1991. The redistribution terms and cost were the same as the terms and cost of the first networking release. As before, several hundred individuals and organizations paid the $1,000 fee to get the distribution from Berkeley." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. |
"Closing the gap from the Networking Release 2 distribution to a fully functioning system did not take long. Within six months of the release, Bill Jolitz had written replacements for the six missing files. He promptly released a fully compiled and bootable system for the 386-based PC architecture which he called 386/BSD. Jolitz's 386/BSD distribution was done almost entirely on the Net. He simply put it up for anonymous FTP and let anyone who wanted it download it for free. Within weeks he had a huge following." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. "Net/2 was the basis for two separate ports of BSD to the Intel 80386 architecture: the free 386BSD by William Jolitz and the proprietary BSD/OS by Berkeley Software Design [Inc. January 1992] (BSDi). 386BSD itself was short-lived, but became the initial code base of the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects that were started shortly thereafter." [BSD Wikipedia]. 1992: AT&T-U$L vs BSDi "BSDi soon found itself in legal trouble with AT&T's UNIX Systems Laboratories subsidiary, then the owners of the System V copyright and the Unix trademark. The USL v. BSDi lawsuit was filed in 1992 and led to an injunction on the distribution of Net/2 until the validity of USL's copyright claims on the source could be determined." [BSD Wikipedia]. "Like the other groups, they started by adding the six missing files that Bill Jolitz had written for his 386/BSD release. BSDI began selling their system including both source and binaries in January 1992 for $995. They began running advertisements touting their 99% discount over the price charged for System V source plus binary systems. Interested readers were told to call 1-800-ITS-Unix." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. "Shortly after BSDI began their sales campaign, they received a letter from Unix System Laboratories (USL) (a mostly-owned subsidiary of AT&T spun off to develop and sell Unix). The letter demanded that they stop promoting their product as Unix and in particular that they stop using the deceptive phone number. Although the phone number was promptly dropped and the advertisements changed to explain that the product was not Unix, USL was still unhappy and filed suit to enjoin BSDI from selling their product. The suit alleged that the BSDI product contained proprietary USL code and trade secrets. USL sought to get an injunction to halt BSDI's sales until the lawsuit was resolved, claiming that they would suffer irreparable harm from the loss of their trade secrets if the BSDI distributions continued." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. "At the preliminary hearing for the injunction, BSDI contended that they were simply using the sources being freely distributed by the University of California plus six additional files. They were willing to discuss the content of any of the six added files, but did not believe that they should be held responsible for the files being distributed by the University of California. The judge agreed with BSDI's argument and told USL that they would have to restate their complaint based solely on the six files or he would dismiss it. Recognizing that they would have a hard time making a case from just the six files, USL decided to refile the suit against both BSDI and the University of California. As before, USL requested an injunction on the shipping of Networking Release 2 from the University and on the BSDI products." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. "The University's suit claimed that USL had failed in their obligation to provide due credit to the University for the use of BSD code in System V as required by the license that they had signed with the University. If the claim were found to be valid, the University asked that USL be forced to reprint all their documentation with the appropriate due credit added, to notify all their licensees of their oversight, and to run full-page advertisements in major publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine notifying the business world of their inadvertent oversight." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. "Soon after the filing in state court, USL was bought from AT&T by Novell. The CEO of Novell, Ray Noorda, stated publicly that he would rather compete in the marketplace than in court. By the summer of 1993, settlement talks had started. Unfortunately, the two sides had dug in so deep that the talks proceed slowly. With some further prodding by Ray Noorda on the USL side, many of the sticking points were removed and a settlement was finally reached in January 1994. The result was that three files were removed from the 18,000 that made up Networking Release 2, and a number of minor changes were made to other files. In addition, the University agreed to add USL copyrights to about 70 files, although those files continued to be freely redistributed." [Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix McKusick]. "The lawsuit slowed development of the free-software descendants of BSD for nearly two years while their legal status was in question, and as a result systems based on the Linux kernel, which did not have such legal ambiguity, gained greater support. Linux and 386BSD began development at about the same time, and Linus Torvalds has said that if there had been a free Unix-like operating system on the 386 at the time, he likely would not have created Linux. Although it is debatable exactly what effect that would have had on the software landscape since, there is little doubt that it would have been substantial." [BSD Wikipedia]. "The lawsuit was settled in January 1994, largely in Berkeley's favor. Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only 3 had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the Berkeley-owned code in the upcoming 4.4BSD release". [BSD Wikipedia]. "In June 1994, 4.4BSD was released in two forms: the freely redistributable 4.4BSD-Lite contained no AT&T source, whereas 4.4BSD-Encumbered was available, as earlier releases had been, only to AT&T licensees." [BSD Wikipedia]. "The final release from Berkeley was 1995's 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2, after which the CSRG was dissolved and development of BSD at Berkeley ceased. Since then, several distributions based on 4.4BSD (such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD) have been maintained." [BSD Wikipedia]. "In addition, the permissive nature of the BSD license has allowed many other operating systems, both free and proprietary, to incorporate BSD code. For example, Microsoft Windows has used BSD-derived code in its implementation of TCP/IP and bundles recompiled versions of BSD's command line networking tools with its current releases." [BSD Wikipedia]. As a public domain license of free release requiring attribution only - of Berkeley's and followers' input - the BSD license was most influential on *nix, and on the Internet to this day. It was the open character of this step that created the precondition for Linux to emerge - on a less wide open license model, designed to perpetuate community accumulation of coding assets, in the form of the GNU GPL from 1984 (see Part V). BSD licensing specifically fosters development of proprietary code business, from the research product it supplies. And objection to the GNU licensing tools remains common, including from BSD-accustomed scientists: "The BSD-license is closer to the traditional notion of open dissemination of scientific results than the GPL." [Why Researchers Should use a BSD-style License Instead of the GPL (and why you should use a BSD-style license for your Open Source Project) Bruce Montague 2003, Conclusion]. [Trouble had begun when AT&T decided it would start charging the universities for their UNIX licenses.?] [Draft 10Jul05 - to be cont'd..] |