8 ms·

There's an alternate universe, almost identical to our own, where BSD 4.4 was released slightly earlier, its legal status was not ambiguous, it got ported to th

by retrac 3y ago

There's an alternate universe, almost identical to our own, where BSD 4.4 was released slightly earlier, its legal status was not ambiguous, it got ported to the 386 in '90, Linus never bothered to write Linux, and every machine from smartphone to server runs some version of BSD.

panick21_ 3y ago
There is an alternative universe where Scott G. McNealy has a backbone and doesn't stop participating in BSD development. Sun almost up-streamed NeWS, and they did a ton of other stuff that should have continue to go into BSD. Driven by Sun as the primary BSD advocate, BSD would have dominated being both open and with a powerful backer. Sun really had the largest unix mind-share and most application were targeted at Sun workstations. Eventually this resulted in the Unix wars because lots of people were afraid of Sun/AT&T. Sun could have avoid that and simply made itself and BSD the standard. If that standard was open, there wouldn't have formed a powerful alliance against them. AT&T would still have tried but non-open alliance lead by AT&T wouldn't work out well. But because of a bunch of lawyers and eventually one bad quarter, Sun went full out proprietary and joined itself to AT&T.
jeff_vader 3y ago
And we're all happy CVS users.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Unlikely. Sun had NSElite in the 80s. BitKeeper and Teamware were available in the 90s. Somebody would make an open source version at some point.
- jmcqk6 3y ago
  I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure there is no universe where that is true.
  - drewg123 3y ago
    We'd all be happy perforce users :) (For a long time, before git and subversion, even though the official freebsd repo was in CVS, a lot of development happened in perforce)
    - bch 3y ago
      > a lot of development happened in perforce Interesting - that I didn’t know. Based on my personal p4 experience, I’m sorry anybody else had to use it. That said - nobody has mentioned that git (and hg) was preceded and directly inspired by Larry McVoys BitKeeper[0]. Indeed, I’ve heard rumor that both “git” and “mercurial” were named after people’s perceptions of others personalities during the Linux/BitKeeper breakup/debacle. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper
      - drewg123 3y ago
        It was a lot better than the alternatives at the time, which were CVS and SCCS.. :)
        dmm10 3y ago
        Add RCS to that list.
    - bhasi 3y ago
      Still is, in some hardware companies.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  My understanding is that git and mercurial were created independently around the same time, so in a world where Torvalds didn't create git we'd probably all use hg. Although, it isn't super hard to imagine him still working in system software and eventually creating git under almost the same circumstances, just that it would be used on a BSD rather than Linux.
  - ndiddy 3y ago
    Mercurial was also created by a Linux kernel developer, and started development a few days after Git (the reason was that Linux had previously been using BitKeeper for version control but BitKeeper stopped offering free licenses).
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      Oh, I hadn't realized they shared that history as well! Thanks for the correction
  - walteweiss 3y ago
    I studied CS in the university and there was that guy who was a computer geek (out of very little among my fellow students), but actually was just your average gamer with close to zero knowledge of anything computer beyond double-clicking the shortcut to CS / Half-Life / WarCraft / Dota / whatever else was popular back then. I met him 15 years later. We had some casual chat about this and that. And at some point he said— Well, I have to give you a bit more of the context. He was a junior front-end (React, ofc) developer at that point. Yes, 15 years later! He just arrived into the profession due to his wild incompetence. Although he sold himself as a senior to the company! Still, he was very incompetent, and I had those wild eyes of wondering how on Earth some company would even hire such a guy, not to say giving him a senior role! He was talking about this front-end thing. That there’s that other OS, Ubuntu, and he thinks he’ll try it instead of Windows. As drumroll for some reason (for some reason!) this git thing works better on Ubuntu than it works on Windows. My first try of Linux was like 15 to 20 years before the talk, so I was like spilling my coffee on him with laughing. And here is your comment, casually pretending everyone on HN is aware of that history of git. And that it’s that git guy is somehow related to this Ubuntu thing, you know.
arp242 3y ago
That BSD would most likely be similar to what Linux is today. There's this idea that this alternative universe would have one of the BSD variants as they exist today be dominant, but colour me skeptical on that. RedHat would have been a "BSD company", systemd would have been a "BSD thing", Hans Reiser would still have written ReiserFS, but for BSD, Steve Balmer would have ranted that "BSD is cancer", etc. There would be some technical differences of course, but I suspect many of them would be relatively small and not all that interesting. So basically it would have been "Linux, but with fewer Penguins and more Satanism".
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  The key difference would be if they kept permissive licensing or if there would be copyleft BSD derivatives. For example, without GPL forcing the kernel to stay open source, Android phones would be a lot harder to modify
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    To be clear, the only GPL source in Android is the kernel. Google took great pains[0] to avoid shipping copyleft code. This is why they were able to make most of Honeycomb proprietary[1]. They can't withhold source on the kernel, but most of what makes Android Android isn't part of Linux and thus the GPL does not apply[2]. From https://source.android.com/docs/setup/contribute/licenses https://source.android.com/docs/setup/contribute/licenses: > For userspace (nonkernel) software, Google prefer Apache 2.0 (and similar licenses such as BSD and MIT) over other licenses such as the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Android is already permissively licensed and that's half of why Google can legally lock things down[3] so easily. The other half being that Google requires a CLA from outside contributors, which is just plain silly for a permissively licensed project. Then again, GNU did the same thing at one point. In the alternate world where BSD was unambiguously legal and RMS was the Ted Nelson[4] of Free Software, I don't think they would have independently invented copyleft. A lot of the BSD people had very reactionary opinions to the concept, and while some of it might be motivated by their personal disdain for RMS, it's hard to separate RMS and copyleft. Given all that, a legally unambiguous BSD almost certainly would have wound up being eaten by Microsoft rather than AT&T and the UNIX Wars. All the anger from early 2000s Microsoft about Linux was solely because the GPL prevented them from just writing a better version of Linux or GNU that other people couldn't have. Microsoft was very good at taking open standards and extending them with the goal of making their implementation replace the standard. The GPL copyleft was the perfect thorn in the foot of a Microsoft that liked to cheat the norms of standards bodies. [0] At least on early versions of Android, this went as far as changing all the system paths. GNU and Android can technically coexist under the same Android/Linux kernel. [1] Even the FOSS release of Ice Cream Sandwich deliberately omitted all the Honeycomb-related tags to frustrate attempts to use Honeycomb under the FOSS terms of the later AOSP release. [2] Linux is commonly stated to be GPLv2, but it additionally has an exception stating that user-mode code never trips the GPL copyleft, as a "just in case" sort of thing. This is the reason why Nvidia is allowed to have kernel modules, and also the reason why Linus explicitly refused GPLv3. The v3 anti-TiVo clause forbids you from shipping an application on the same consumer electronics system as GPL software, if the application refuses to run if the GPL software is modified. This is perfectly reasonable for GNU but flies in the face of the whole "user mode APIs are not copylefted" thing. [3] Android ain't done 'till Termux won't run. [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu
lproven 3y ago
It may have come closer than you realise. « My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today. RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI. So RMS said to himself, "Mach is a working kernel, 4.4-Lite is only partial, we will go with Mach." It was a decision which I strongly opposed. But ultimately it was not my decision to make, and I made the best go I could at working with Mach and doing something new from that standpoint. This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so. » http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530
- justin66 3y ago
  > Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. As a VP of the Free Software Foundation, the author of the quote you've shared is not well-positioned to recognize the reason a person might not enthusiastically cooperate with Richard Stallman: a fairly large percentage of the people who deal with him find him supremely annoying.
  - lproven 3y ago
    :-) That is an entirely fair point. I've never met the man. I did consider hosting him when he was visiting London about 15 years back, and now, I wish I had done. OTOH, I do think his intransigence was integral to getting the Free Software movement off the ground.
    - rbanffy 3y ago
      > I do think his intransigence was integral to getting the Free Software movement off the ground. I'm not sure a Linux-like ecosystem would be possible on BSD licenses. With GPL, company A is free to contribute code without the fear competitor B will take it, make some improvement, and pack it with their proprietary product to undercut company A. This is an important selling point of licensing your tech as a commodity that cannot be exploited to gain a competitive edge on you. > I wish I had done. A friend of mine who hosted him says "it was an honor, but not a pleasure".
microtherion 3y ago
In fact, one of the two major smartphone platforms IS running some version of BSD.
- dboreham 3y ago
  Not really. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU and https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
  - bch 3y ago
    Wow! Amazed to see Apple is still committing to the repo (albeit a huge code dump, latest of which was ~5 months ago)!
    - ManuelKiessling 3y ago
      Well, they don’t really have a choice, do they? My uninformed understanding is: Darwin is Open Source, so when they improve/extend/modify it for their own needs (Darwin still is the foundation for macOS, iOS etc.), they must make those changes available.
      - wbl 3y ago
        Not the kernel: that's BSD licensed
      - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
        No; open source encompasses copyleft, which broadly requires derivative works to be under the same or similar license, and permissive licenses, which generally don't care and are happy to let you incorporate the code in differently licensed derivatives up to and including producing completely proprietary programs using permissively licensed open source code. Darwin largely uses permissive license code, in particular from the BSDs, which means that it's under very little obligation to share. (IANAL and this is somewhat oversimplified, but that's the gist)
      - 3y ago

by retrac 3y ago

panick21_ 3y ago

There is an alternative universe where Scott G. McNealy has a backbone and doesn't stop participating in BSD development. Sun almost up-streamed NeWS, and they did a ton of other stuff that should have continue to go into BSD. Driven by Sun as the primary BSD advocate, BSD would have dominated being both open and with a powerful backer. Sun really had the largest unix mind-share and most application were targeted at Sun workstations. Eventually this resulted in the Unix wars because lots of people were afraid of Sun/AT&T. Sun could have avoid that and simply made itself and BSD the standard. If that standard was open, there wouldn't have formed a powerful alliance against them. AT&T would still have tried but non-open alliance lead by AT&T wouldn't work out well. But because of a bunch of lawyers and eventually one bad quarter, Sun went full out proprietary and joined itself to AT&T.

jeff_vader 3y ago

And we're all happy CVS users.

panick21_ 3y ago
Unlikely. Sun had NSElite in the 80s. BitKeeper and Teamware were available in the 90s. Somebody would make an open source version at some point.
jmcqk6 3y ago
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure there is no universe where that is true.
- drewg123 3y ago
  We'd all be happy perforce users :) (For a long time, before git and subversion, even though the official freebsd repo was in CVS, a lot of development happened in perforce)
  - bch 3y ago
    > a lot of development happened in perforce Interesting - that I didn’t know. Based on my personal p4 experience, I’m sorry anybody else had to use it. That said - nobody has mentioned that git (and hg) was preceded and directly inspired by Larry McVoys BitKeeper[0]. Indeed, I’ve heard rumor that both “git” and “mercurial” were named after people’s perceptions of others personalities during the Linux/BitKeeper breakup/debacle. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper
    - drewg123 3y ago
      It was a lot better than the alternatives at the time, which were CVS and SCCS.. :)
      - dmm10 3y ago
        Add RCS to that list.
  - bhasi 3y ago
    Still is, in some hardware companies.
yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
My understanding is that git and mercurial were created independently around the same time, so in a world where Torvalds didn't create git we'd probably all use hg. Although, it isn't super hard to imagine him still working in system software and eventually creating git under almost the same circumstances, just that it would be used on a BSD rather than Linux.
- ndiddy 3y ago
  Mercurial was also created by a Linux kernel developer, and started development a few days after Git (the reason was that Linux had previously been using BitKeeper for version control but BitKeeper stopped offering free licenses).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
    Oh, I hadn't realized they shared that history as well! Thanks for the correction
- walteweiss 3y ago
  I studied CS in the university and there was that guy who was a computer geek (out of very little among my fellow students), but actually was just your average gamer with close to zero knowledge of anything computer beyond double-clicking the shortcut to CS / Half-Life / WarCraft / Dota / whatever else was popular back then. I met him 15 years later. We had some casual chat about this and that. And at some point he said— Well, I have to give you a bit more of the context. He was a junior front-end (React, ofc) developer at that point. Yes, 15 years later! He just arrived into the profession due to his wild incompetence. Although he sold himself as a senior to the company! Still, he was very incompetent, and I had those wild eyes of wondering how on Earth some company would even hire such a guy, not to say giving him a senior role! He was talking about this front-end thing. That there’s that other OS, Ubuntu, and he thinks he’ll try it instead of Windows. As drumroll for some reason (for some reason!) this git thing works better on Ubuntu than it works on Windows. My first try of Linux was like 15 to 20 years before the talk, so I was like spilling my coffee on him with laughing. And here is your comment, casually pretending everyone on HN is aware of that history of git. And that it’s that git guy is somehow related to this Ubuntu thing, you know.

arp242 3y ago

That BSD would most likely be similar to what Linux is today. There's this idea that this alternative universe would have one of the BSD variants as they exist today be dominant, but colour me skeptical on that. RedHat would have been a "BSD company", systemd would have been a "BSD thing", Hans Reiser would still have written ReiserFS, but for BSD, Steve Balmer would have ranted that "BSD is cancer", etc. There would be some technical differences of course, but I suspect many of them would be relatively small and not all that interesting. So basically it would have been "Linux, but with fewer Penguins and more Satanism".

yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
The key difference would be if they kept permissive licensing or if there would be copyleft BSD derivatives. For example, without GPL forcing the kernel to stay open source, Android phones would be a lot harder to modify
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  To be clear, the only GPL source in Android is the kernel. Google took great pains[0] to avoid shipping copyleft code. This is why they were able to make most of Honeycomb proprietary[1]. They can't withhold source on the kernel, but most of what makes Android Android isn't part of Linux and thus the GPL does not apply[2]. From https://source.android.com/docs/setup/contribute/licenses https://source.android.com/docs/setup/contribute/licenses: > For userspace (nonkernel) software, Google prefer Apache 2.0 (and similar licenses such as BSD and MIT) over other licenses such as the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Android is already permissively licensed and that's half of why Google can legally lock things down[3] so easily. The other half being that Google requires a CLA from outside contributors, which is just plain silly for a permissively licensed project. Then again, GNU did the same thing at one point. In the alternate world where BSD was unambiguously legal and RMS was the Ted Nelson[4] of Free Software, I don't think they would have independently invented copyleft. A lot of the BSD people had very reactionary opinions to the concept, and while some of it might be motivated by their personal disdain for RMS, it's hard to separate RMS and copyleft. Given all that, a legally unambiguous BSD almost certainly would have wound up being eaten by Microsoft rather than AT&T and the UNIX Wars. All the anger from early 2000s Microsoft about Linux was solely because the GPL prevented them from just writing a better version of Linux or GNU that other people couldn't have. Microsoft was very good at taking open standards and extending them with the goal of making their implementation replace the standard. The GPL copyleft was the perfect thorn in the foot of a Microsoft that liked to cheat the norms of standards bodies. [0] At least on early versions of Android, this went as far as changing all the system paths. GNU and Android can technically coexist under the same Android/Linux kernel. [1] Even the FOSS release of Ice Cream Sandwich deliberately omitted all the Honeycomb-related tags to frustrate attempts to use Honeycomb under the FOSS terms of the later AOSP release. [2] Linux is commonly stated to be GPLv2, but it additionally has an exception stating that user-mode code never trips the GPL copyleft, as a "just in case" sort of thing. This is the reason why Nvidia is allowed to have kernel modules, and also the reason why Linus explicitly refused GPLv3. The v3 anti-TiVo clause forbids you from shipping an application on the same consumer electronics system as GPL software, if the application refuses to run if the GPL software is modified. This is perfectly reasonable for GNU but flies in the face of the whole "user mode APIs are not copylefted" thing. [3] Android ain't done 'till Termux won't run. [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu

lproven 3y ago

It may have come closer than you realise. « My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today. RMS wanted to work together with people from Berkeley on such an effort. Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. A GNU based on 4.4-Lite would undercut BSDI. So RMS said to himself, "Mach is a working kernel, 4.4-Lite is only partial, we will go with Mach." It was a decision which I strongly opposed. But ultimately it was not my decision to make, and I made the best go I could at working with Mach and doing something new from that standpoint. This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so. » http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530

justin66 3y ago
> Some of them were interested, but some seem to have been deliberately dragging their feet: and the reason now seems to be that they had the goal of spinning off BSDI. As a VP of the Free Software Foundation, the author of the quote you've shared is not well-positioned to recognize the reason a person might not enthusiastically cooperate with Richard Stallman: a fairly large percentage of the people who deal with him find him supremely annoying.
- lproven 3y ago
  :-) That is an entirely fair point. I've never met the man. I did consider hosting him when he was visiting London about 15 years back, and now, I wish I had done. OTOH, I do think his intransigence was integral to getting the Free Software movement off the ground.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    > I do think his intransigence was integral to getting the Free Software movement off the ground. I'm not sure a Linux-like ecosystem would be possible on BSD licenses. With GPL, company A is free to contribute code without the fear competitor B will take it, make some improvement, and pack it with their proprietary product to undercut company A. This is an important selling point of licensing your tech as a commodity that cannot be exploited to gain a competitive edge on you. > I wish I had done. A friend of mine who hosted him says "it was an honor, but not a pleasure".

microtherion 3y ago

In fact, one of the two major smartphone platforms IS running some version of BSD.

dboreham 3y ago
Not really. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU and https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
- bch 3y ago
  Wow! Amazed to see Apple is still committing to the repo (albeit a huge code dump, latest of which was ~5 months ago)!
  - ManuelKiessling 3y ago
    Well, they don’t really have a choice, do they? My uninformed understanding is: Darwin is Open Source, so when they improve/extend/modify it for their own needs (Darwin still is the foundation for macOS, iOS etc.), they must make those changes available.
    - wbl 3y ago
      Not the kernel: that's BSD licensed
    - yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      No; open source encompasses copyleft, which broadly requires derivative works to be under the same or similar license, and permissive licenses, which generally don't care and are happy to let you incorporate the code in differently licensed derivatives up to and including producing completely proprietary programs using permissively licensed open source code. Darwin largely uses permissive license code, in particular from the BSDs, which means that it's under very little obligation to share. (IANAL and this is somewhat oversimplified, but that's the gist)
    - 3y ago