4 ms·

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

by 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
  - samatman 3y ago
    > 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. This is a strange counterfactual to propose, given that Microsoft at one time sold the most installed Unix on the market: Xenix. Which it later abandoned. Given that they were licensing System 7 from AT&T, why would a tweak to BSD licensing result in them "eating" it?
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Sometimes I wonder how much they repent themselves of having sold Xenix, and later on not holding on to a better POSIX support on NT, having to ship a Linux VM in the end. I for one only bothered with Linux initially after having learned UNIX on Xenix at the technical school, and using DG/UX on university campus, because POSIX support on Windows NT was so flanky, and later on it was more practical to deal with dual boot than SUA.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      Microsoft's biggest existential risk in the 80s was not having a "real OS"[0]. They had DOS, which they bought from SCP[1] to fix a problem IBM was having, and they had XENIX, which they had to license from AT&T. DOS was technically unsound - it almost sort of worked for personal computing but nobody was going to build workstations out of IBM PCs running DOS. They wanted to build a "real OS" on top of XENIX, going as far as to add porting aids between DOS 2 and XENIX in what they dubbed "XEDOS". Then Bell Labs started selling System V directly in 1983 and Microsoft chickened out of UNIX. In this environment, Microsoft wound up writing several attempts at home-grown "real OS" projects: Multitasking DOS 4, and ADOS, which then became OS/2. None of these succeeded. OS/2 got close, but Microsoft really didn't like working with IBM, and Windows 3[2] was selling way better. Microsoft ultimately got itself out of this dilemma with NT and Windows 95, both of which used a slightly modified Win32 API that was "real OS" compatible. However, that was almost a decade during which any number of companies could have easily upended, if not killed the company. BSD didn't start separating itself from AT&T owned code until 1989. Had they done so earlier, Microsoft could have pivoted to a BSD-based XENIX and saved themselves the cost of an AT&T license (which drastically increased with SysV). Microsoft could have shipped Windows on top of that instead of, say, the hackery that was WIN-OS/2 or waiting for Dave Cutler to design and build NT. [0] Virtual memory, apps run in protected mode ring 3, and preemptive multitasking. [1] Seattle Computer Products, not the SCP Foundation [2] Which is not a "real OS" in the sense that it's technically near identical to the Macintosh's system software.
- arp242 3y ago
  Most Android phones are already so locked down and partly proprietary that it's a right pain to meaningfully modify anything without jumping through tons of hoops. In short, I don't think it would have made much of a difference. "GPL vs BSD" is an old debate that's been done a million times, and I never seen any convincing argument one way or the other. Plus there's long been copyleft (GPL, CDDL) parts to many BSD systems, both in userspace and kernel.
actionfromafar 3y ago
I feel a bit of history is slipping away. Linux forced a lot of companies and individuals to keep stuff together in a way that uniquely unified industry against Windows and custom embedded software stacks. Without the Linux kernel we’d have a bunch of competing proprietary forks bickering at every turn. You could have forgotten video drivers from major vendors like NVidia. Even with Linux it was an anomaly.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Instead of UNIX wars, we now have Linux wars.
- bluGill 3y ago
  Huh? We have many competing forks - debian, redhat, ubutntu, arch... Sure there is mostly on kernel, but there is a lot more to an OS than a kernel. Linux didn't force anyone to keep stuff together. It just is to your advantage to work together most of the time. Anyone who didn't work together soon paid a price as something you want couldn't easily be brought to you.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    I may not make my point clearly - but I have seen from the inside how companies reluctantly use the Linux kernel because it's the industry standard and the board support package comes with Linux. If BSDs had won, there would have been very little incentive to upstream patches or provide source code to customers, but a lot of incentive to pitch the vendors proprietary additions as something special. Every company selling a solution would have been tempted to close off the source and not give anything back. Back then, it was a knee-jerk reaction to keep as much as possible in-house. Everything begins with hardware support. The standard distributions also all used glibc and GNU utilities which is also GPL. For the longest time all standard distributions were based on either RedHat or Debian. I think Linux shaped the industry in very special ways which would not have come naturally in a non-GPL world. Things today are by-and-large extremely open, with github etc being almost a force of nature, but my hunch is that this outcome was not a given which would have just have happened in some kind of manifest-destiny way. I think the world could easily have tipped into a much more proprieraty path without GNU and Linux.
wbl 3y ago
No there would have been some big differences. The first is that threads would have a kernel representation unlike in Linux where the kernel just knows about processes. This mistake caries over to tools like strace that grab one thread by default because they don't know the others. Secondly with integrated user space and kernel packaging and distribution would not be a necessity. That would change a lot of things. Microsoft had taken the TCP implementation from BSD for Windows as shown in the copyright notice. The relationship would be different. We would not have alternate libcs. Containerization would be built around slightly more heavyweight jails which look like real systems as more software would be assuming that environment. With systemd there is a real need, but I would hope the solution is better.
- betaby 3y ago
  > Microsoft had taken the TCP implementation from BSD for Windows as shown in the copyright notice. No. Windows has never had TCP from BSD. This myth was very popular in 200x on some *nix forums however. The copyright in question is related to the command line 'ftp' client.
- arp242 3y ago
  You're assuming that BSD systems would have evolved the same way over the last 35 years. I don't think that's a given. People like to tinker and would have created alternative ${anything}s for BSD systems. And even with a bundled userspace and kernel you still have distros; e.g. PC-BSD did the whole "fat packages" thing 20 years ago, and there have been tons of "distros" based on various BSD systems. Jails weren't created until around the late 90s (1998 or 1999 IIRC), and who knows what that would have looked like if (Free)BSD had massively taken off in the same way Linux did, and who knows if "FreeBSD cgroups" wouldn't be a thing in addition to jails? Or: all the people that worked on those Linux things wouldn't have worked in a completely different field: they would have worked on BSD, presumably with (roughly) the same interests, and (roughly) the same opinions. Of course it wouldn't be exactly the same, but roughly, from a high level? It would probably be very similar.
  - Gud 3y ago
    From a high enough level, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux already are very similar?
freeremote 3y ago
I was a BSD admin for 4 years back in the early 00s after running Sun Solaris DNS servers for a well known domain registrar. Ran Web servers, and later firewalls using FreeBSD. While I really like BSD for a server, I've had terrible times with it on laptops. I've tried them all: Free, Net, Open, Ghost, and others that are no longer being developed. I've standardized on Debian over the years because it just works. I buy refurb Lenovo laptops from eBay for about $120. I would like to see BSD grow and become more popular on the desktop. For now, Debian is just super stable and good enough.

by arp242 3y ago

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
- samatman 3y ago
  > 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. This is a strange counterfactual to propose, given that Microsoft at one time sold the most installed Unix on the market: Xenix. Which it later abandoned. Given that they were licensing System 7 from AT&T, why would a tweak to BSD licensing result in them "eating" it?
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Sometimes I wonder how much they repent themselves of having sold Xenix, and later on not holding on to a better POSIX support on NT, having to ship a Linux VM in the end. I for one only bothered with Linux initially after having learned UNIX on Xenix at the technical school, and using DG/UX on university campus, because POSIX support on Windows NT was so flanky, and later on it was more practical to deal with dual boot than SUA.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Microsoft's biggest existential risk in the 80s was not having a "real OS"[0]. They had DOS, which they bought from SCP[1] to fix a problem IBM was having, and they had XENIX, which they had to license from AT&T. DOS was technically unsound - it almost sort of worked for personal computing but nobody was going to build workstations out of IBM PCs running DOS. They wanted to build a "real OS" on top of XENIX, going as far as to add porting aids between DOS 2 and XENIX in what they dubbed "XEDOS". Then Bell Labs started selling System V directly in 1983 and Microsoft chickened out of UNIX. In this environment, Microsoft wound up writing several attempts at home-grown "real OS" projects: Multitasking DOS 4, and ADOS, which then became OS/2. None of these succeeded. OS/2 got close, but Microsoft really didn't like working with IBM, and Windows 3[2] was selling way better. Microsoft ultimately got itself out of this dilemma with NT and Windows 95, both of which used a slightly modified Win32 API that was "real OS" compatible. However, that was almost a decade during which any number of companies could have easily upended, if not killed the company. BSD didn't start separating itself from AT&T owned code until 1989. Had they done so earlier, Microsoft could have pivoted to a BSD-based XENIX and saved themselves the cost of an AT&T license (which drastically increased with SysV). Microsoft could have shipped Windows on top of that instead of, say, the hackery that was WIN-OS/2 or waiting for Dave Cutler to design and build NT. [0] Virtual memory, apps run in protected mode ring 3, and preemptive multitasking. [1] Seattle Computer Products, not the SCP Foundation [2] Which is not a "real OS" in the sense that it's technically near identical to the Macintosh's system software.
arp242 3y ago
Most Android phones are already so locked down and partly proprietary that it's a right pain to meaningfully modify anything without jumping through tons of hoops. In short, I don't think it would have made much of a difference. "GPL vs BSD" is an old debate that's been done a million times, and I never seen any convincing argument one way or the other. Plus there's long been copyleft (GPL, CDDL) parts to many BSD systems, both in userspace and kernel.

actionfromafar 3y ago

I feel a bit of history is slipping away. Linux forced a lot of companies and individuals to keep stuff together in a way that uniquely unified industry against Windows and custom embedded software stacks. Without the Linux kernel we’d have a bunch of competing proprietary forks bickering at every turn. You could have forgotten video drivers from major vendors like NVidia. Even with Linux it was an anomaly.

pjmlp 3y ago
Instead of UNIX wars, we now have Linux wars.
bluGill 3y ago
Huh? We have many competing forks - debian, redhat, ubutntu, arch... Sure there is mostly on kernel, but there is a lot more to an OS than a kernel. Linux didn't force anyone to keep stuff together. It just is to your advantage to work together most of the time. Anyone who didn't work together soon paid a price as something you want couldn't easily be brought to you.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  I may not make my point clearly - but I have seen from the inside how companies reluctantly use the Linux kernel because it's the industry standard and the board support package comes with Linux. If BSDs had won, there would have been very little incentive to upstream patches or provide source code to customers, but a lot of incentive to pitch the vendors proprietary additions as something special. Every company selling a solution would have been tempted to close off the source and not give anything back. Back then, it was a knee-jerk reaction to keep as much as possible in-house. Everything begins with hardware support. The standard distributions also all used glibc and GNU utilities which is also GPL. For the longest time all standard distributions were based on either RedHat or Debian. I think Linux shaped the industry in very special ways which would not have come naturally in a non-GPL world. Things today are by-and-large extremely open, with github etc being almost a force of nature, but my hunch is that this outcome was not a given which would have just have happened in some kind of manifest-destiny way. I think the world could easily have tipped into a much more proprieraty path without GNU and Linux.

wbl 3y ago

No there would have been some big differences. The first is that threads would have a kernel representation unlike in Linux where the kernel just knows about processes. This mistake caries over to tools like strace that grab one thread by default because they don't know the others. Secondly with integrated user space and kernel packaging and distribution would not be a necessity. That would change a lot of things. Microsoft had taken the TCP implementation from BSD for Windows as shown in the copyright notice. The relationship would be different. We would not have alternate libcs. Containerization would be built around slightly more heavyweight jails which look like real systems as more software would be assuming that environment. With systemd there is a real need, but I would hope the solution is better.

betaby 3y ago
> Microsoft had taken the TCP implementation from BSD for Windows as shown in the copyright notice. No. Windows has never had TCP from BSD. This myth was very popular in 200x on some *nix forums however. The copyright in question is related to the command line 'ftp' client.
arp242 3y ago
You're assuming that BSD systems would have evolved the same way over the last 35 years. I don't think that's a given. People like to tinker and would have created alternative ${anything}s for BSD systems. And even with a bundled userspace and kernel you still have distros; e.g. PC-BSD did the whole "fat packages" thing 20 years ago, and there have been tons of "distros" based on various BSD systems. Jails weren't created until around the late 90s (1998 or 1999 IIRC), and who knows what that would have looked like if (Free)BSD had massively taken off in the same way Linux did, and who knows if "FreeBSD cgroups" wouldn't be a thing in addition to jails? Or: all the people that worked on those Linux things wouldn't have worked in a completely different field: they would have worked on BSD, presumably with (roughly) the same interests, and (roughly) the same opinions. Of course it wouldn't be exactly the same, but roughly, from a high level? It would probably be very similar.
- Gud 3y ago
  From a high enough level, FreeBSD and GNU/Linux already are very similar?

freeremote 3y ago

I was a BSD admin for 4 years back in the early 00s after running Sun Solaris DNS servers for a well known domain registrar. Ran Web servers, and later firewalls using FreeBSD. While I really like BSD for a server, I've had terrible times with it on laptops. I've tried them all: Free, Net, Open, Ghost, and others that are no longer being developed. I've standardized on Debian over the years because it just works. I buy refurb Lenovo laptops from eBay for about $120. I would like to see BSD grow and become more popular on the desktop. For now, Debian is just super stable and good enough.