Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2001 01:47:25 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Nate Williams <nate@yogotech.com> Cc: Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What is VT_TFS? Message-ID: <3B95E69D.5E3BE11D@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> <15253.55856.528797.176984@nomad.yogotech.com>
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Nate Williams wrote: > > 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. Actually, Lynne didn't have the right to do this; the trademark was Bill's, so the revocation wasn't valid until Bill did it. > > 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. I was aware that CGD had reverse engineered it. I wasn't aware that you had given the tools to the people who later released the "1000" level patches. > 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. All of us pretty much assumed that, at the time. 8-(. > NetBSD happened when Lynn's famous email was sent out claiming we were > all evil incarnate, and that no-one understood them anymore. I talked to Lynne and Bill through much of that time; it was (unfortunately) a discussion well before the fireworks that resulted in him knowing about common law trademarks. I was still on good terms with them, well after the NetBSD 0.8 release, and we mostly "just lost touch", rather than letting the bickering come between us. One thing that was not commonly known at the time, though I guess most people know it now, is that they had had a financial setback, followed by a death in the family, and really weren't in any condition to be doing anything but picking up the pieces; the whole incident was really unfortunate. > 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). Yes. It was effectively a single author thing. I always used it by manually applying the patches and resolving any conflicts by hand, and then running a diff between the base tree and the target tree. I never really claimed it as anything other than a vehicle for distributing patches (it sure as heck was no CVS!). As for the binaries, we had a number of patched floppy images floating around (I personally couldn't boot the thing at all until I binary edited the floppy to look for 639 instead of 640 in the CMOS base memory data registers). > Close, but the original posting was by Bill, and the revokation was done > by Lynn. I remember it the other way, but would have to go to tape on it to know for sure... 8-). Originally, Lynne recommended the patchkit and FAQ -- here's an excerpt of a usenet posting of hers from 28 January 1993: | You can get a copy of 386BSD from agate.berkeley.edu (and it's mirror | sites) via anonymous ftp. It is also available on CDROM from Austin | Code Works (info@acw.com) [Note -- this is unpatched 0.1 -- you should | get the patchkit in /unofficial on agate, and also the FAQ]. > I was involved with the entire affair, and Warren's archive doesn't > include much of what later became 'core' email. Unfortunately, I cut myself out of the loop early on that, due to the impending purchase of USL by Novell, which went through in June of 1994, after off shore locations which were not Berne Convention signatories had been found to house the code in case the worst happened, so this email is not part of my personal archives. I hope someone, somewhere has saved it for posterity... > Also, it doesn't include the phone conversations with Bill and > Lynn, which (obviously) aren't in the public domain. Nor mine. Actually, in California, Utah, and Montanna, and now many more states, so long as one party to the conversation is the one doing the recording, you don't even have to have the periodic "beep" to indicate a recording... even back then. But I never even considered recording my calls, and I rather doubt that anyone else had the foresight to do it, either. It's annoying in retrospect, because I had the equipment for doing passive monitoring without violating the phone company rules on connecting equipment to their wires. 20/20 hindsight... 8-(. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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