History Question

[Edward Glowacki]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2000, Tim Schmidt wrote:
> Read the folowing statement in a news snippet here:
> 
> http://www.home-networking.org/stories/20000311152900.html
> 
> ----
> The BSD operating system, which was developed between 1979 and 1992 by the 
> Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley, 
> makes up the core of most Unix and Unix-based operating systems, including 
> Linux.
> ----
> 
> This is far from true, correct?
> Either way, I'ld appreciate some history on the intertwinings of the BSD and 
> Linux communities...  I am relatively familiar with the differences in 
> liscencing, but not politics/shared code.


IIRC, BSD is *not* Unix, as "Unix" is trademarked (?) by AT&T.
When BSD finally purged the last of the borrowed code (in 4.4BSD
I believe), they lost the ability to refer to it as "Unix".  Linux
is also not Unix, and in fact doesn't officially have a place in
the "Unix family tree" (BSD does because it was derived from AT&T,
even though all the AT&T code is gone now), because Linux was
developed entirely independently, with the goal of course to be
"Unix-like".   There's more to the story, some of which I know but
most of which I don't. ;)  Anyways, at one point we had a "History
of 'Unix'" presentation at a GLLUG meeting that talked about a
bunch of stuff.  Someone at some other point mentioned wanting to
know about the differences between Linux and BSD (FreeBSD specifically
IIRC), so that might make a good future topic for a meeting.  =)

-- 
Edward Glowacki			glowack2@msu.edu
Network Services		
Michigan State University