Date: Wed, 5 Sep 2001 01:54:24 -0600 From: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> To: tlambert2@mindspring.com Cc: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com>, Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What is VT_TFS? Message-ID: <15253.55856.528797.176984@nomad.yogotech.com> In-Reply-To: <3B95D7AE.22C12A17@mindspring.com> References: <Pine.SOL.4.21.0108311559170.16476-100000@opal> <3B946708.ECB7307B@mindspring.com> <15253.6194.432852.114923@nomad.yogotech.com> <3B95D7AE.22C12A17@mindspring.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > > TRW supported a lot of the early > > > 386BSD/FreeBSD effort, back before Walnut Creek CDROM threw > > > in and had us change the version number from 0.1 to 1.0 to > > > make it a bit easier to sell. > > > > *Huh* That's revisionist history if I've ever heard it. We > > did a 1.0 release for FreeBSD because we wanted to differentiate > > ourselves from 386BSD (lot of bad blood there with the Jolitz's) > > and NetBSD (which had a 0.8 release at that time). > > FWIW: This is all archived on Minnie, thanks to Warren Toomey. Sure, and I've got archives of it as well. > I believe that Julian was the first corporately employed > person, who had at least part of his paid job as working on > the 386BSD/FreeBSD code. Yes, and the original SCSI system was Julian's, which was later replaced by CAM. > Bill Jolitz approved a 0.5 "interim release" of 386BSD And then Lynn revoked this, and posted a public message to the world stating what obnoxious fiends we were. As the person who spoke with both Bill and Lynn getting their approval (Jordan did as well), I'm *very* familiar with the process. > Some of the people who later split off NetBSD and released the > NetBSD 0.8 release had reverse engineered the patchkit format, > and built tools to do the same thing. Actually, no. It was the person who was going to take it from me (I could name him, but it wouldn't do much good). The new maintainer didn't do anything or respond to email for over 3 months, so Jordan took it over from where I left off. NetBSD was Chris Demetriou's child after he got fed up with Bill's promises never coming true. I was the third committer on what would later become the NetBSD development box, but I still naively assumed that Bill's promises would eventually come to fruition. NetBSD happened when Lynn's famous email was sent out claiming we were all evil incarnate, and that no-one understood them anymore. Soon afterward NetBSD 0.8 was released, but Adam Glass (the owner of the second account on the NetBSD development box) was a big 68K fan, so his influence (as well as Chris's) made NetBSD into a cross-platform OS. > Progress was made on the 386BSD 0.5 release under the auspices > of the patchkit maintainers, who had their position of control > because I did not distribute the patchkit patch making shell > scripts very widely, in order to ensure serialization, so that > the patches, when applied, would work, have proper dependency > tracking, and not result in conflicts. Actually, all of the patchkit maintainers (myself, Jordan, and Rod) had access to your shell software. However, it turned out that avoiding conflicts was hard, because serialization often required patches upon patches upon patches upon patches, and at some point, the creation/maintenance of the patchkit was greater than building a new release. (Plus the fact that you couldn't install the patches w/out a running system, and the running system couldn't be installed on certain hardware w/out patches, causing a catch-22). > There was an angry posting on Usenet by Lynne Jolitz; in it, > she claimed that 1/3 of the patchkit was good, 1/3 was benign > (but unnecessary), and 1/3 was crap. Then she would not say > which 1/3 was which; this pissed off more people than the > original claim that only 1/3 of the code was any good. > > After much sniping back and forth, Bill Jolitz posted, and > revoked his previous permission to use the 386BSD name (a > common law trademark belonging to him), and therefore he had > effectively scuttled the interim release under the 386BSD > name. Close, but the original posting was by Bill, and the revokation was done by Lynn. > Unwilling to throw away many months of work, it was decided to > go forward with the release, under the name FreeBSD 0.1. > > Walnut Creek CDROM suggested that the version number be changed > to "1.0", in order to make it an easier sell on CDROM. > > Check with Warren, if you don't believe this account. I was involved with the entire affair, and Warren's archive doesn't include much of what later became 'core' email. Also, it doesn't include the phone conversations with Bill and Lynn, which (obviously) aren't in the public domain. Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?15253.55856.528797.176984>