Re: Updating files

On Mon, 01 Mar 2004 13:10:42 -0300 Pedro Fernandes Macedo <webmaster(a)margo.bijoux.nom.br&gt; wrote: we'll forgive you (i have clients using both openbsd and various flavors of linux, myself, and so run both on my own network.) what follows veers between ontopic and offtopic, some of what follows may help illuminate some of the underlying issues in the SCO lawsuit family, insofar as the settlement between AT&T's USL and the UCB CSRG is alluded to. technically, Unix is a trademark belonging to an industry association, and neither the modern *BSD family nor Linux are authorized to use that trademark, so you should probably avoid calling them Unix systems. the BSD family predates Linux by some years; they derive from the development work at the UCB Computer Systems Research Group, which was responsible for the very important 4.x BSD series of Unix releases beginning in the early 80s. i remember installing 4.1BSD on the RPI Computer Science Department VAX 11/780 back in 1982... one of the important descendents of this Unix line is the original SunOS, which forked from BSD Unix tree shortly before 4.2BSD was cut. the last development in this series was SunOS 4.x. Solaris 2 (Solaris 2.8->Solaris 8, Solaris 2.9->Solaris 9), a somewhat complex merger of Sys V with SunOS, replaced SunOS 4.x (aka "Solaris 1"). as the CSRG's unix effort wound down, one of the last things they did was prepare an x86 release with no proprietary AT&T code (previous versions derived from v7 (32v) AT&T releases of Unix, and a license from AT&T was a prerequisite if you wanted to use one of the BSD's which derived from AT&T code.) 4.4Lite was about to be released when AT&T's Unix Systems Lab hit UCB with a lawsuit intended to prevent release of 4.4Lite. the lawsuit was eventually settled out of court, but not before AT&T tooks some serious licks. the result was that 4.4Lite needed only minor modifications to make it to release, but it was also delayed a year. some argue that this one year delay is the reason why Linux is the best known open source system of its type today, rather than one of the *BSDs. today, there are three main flavors of *BSD, and a number of minor ones. the main ones are the original NetBSD, and the two NetBSD spinoofs FreeBSD and OpenBSD. NetBSD focuses on stability across a wide variety of architectures. FreeBSD focuses on the x86 platform with lots of software ports. OpenBSD runs on a smaller set of architecture than NetBSD, and focuses on security as well as stability. there is considerable cross polination; useful code advances in one of the *BSDs often move sideways into the others fairly quickly. there is one other notable BSD derivative, Mac OS X. the derivation is somewhat involved; Next built an OS, NextStep, which used a Mach micro-kernel with a significant amount of FreeBSD code. Mac bought Next Computers and inherited NextStep, and chose to use it as the basis for OS X. richard -- Richard Welty rwelty(a)averillpark.net Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592 Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security