Talk:386BSD

Untitled

I think this page is a little inaccurate; my sources (which I'm too lazy to quote right now) seem to indicate that 386BSD was developed in parallel with BSD/386 (and even came a little bit after it, as it was developed by an ex- BSDi employee). The common ancestor was the NET2 tape itself from Berkeley.

If anyone knows any better, I'd love to hear about it.

Jhf 02:58, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I also think 386BSD was written by William Jolitz (ex-BSDI employee, and former contributer to the BSD project at Berkeley University).

Here's a time-capsule with interesting information...

http://ftp.svbug.com/ftp/pub/386BSD/386bsd-patchkits/386bsd.faq

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You guys are right. Since I did quite some research for the German article on 386BSD, I thought I'd share my findings here and gave this article quite a make over. Please correct for English. But before you correct for contents please do read the various web-links I included. Two mistakes which were there before :

• 386BSD or rather the Jolitzes did not seem to care much about the law suit. So, the reason for the slow down was not the law suit, but their personal style of developing (which was very controversial). Remember : their release was July 1992, and it took about a year for the users to get frustrated and released NetBSD/FreeBSD, which was BEFORE the law suit was settled.
• BSD/386 is indeed not developped off 386BSD. See the current text, and again the various weblinks. The first release of BSD/386 was EARLY 1992, and it was that release that caught AT&T's attention. 386BSD was released AFTER BSDi started selling their product.

--134.100.120.75 10:25, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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Actually, this page has long been factually incorrect, and should be either editted or removed. Among the inaccuracies are when 386BSD started (1989), the fact that it was in use for years at Berkeley, Los Alamos, and other research facilities, the fact it was written about extensively in Dr. Dobbs Journal magazine during the creation of the Networking II release, the fact that William Jolitz never did become an employee of BSDi, the fact that BSDi's use of BSD386 was allowed by William Jolitz as a graceful gesture at a BSDi board meeting with Mcusick et al. The authors of 386BSD considers this page to be misleading and inaccurate for unknown reasons.

Also, the mention of 386BSD "encumbered code" in the Wikipedia entry. Specifically:

"Due to a lawsuit by AT&T, USL v. BSDi, some potentially so-called encumbered sources which existed within 386BSD were to be removed from all the derived systems, and the distribution of 386BSD was to be stopped."

This is completely untrue. Neither Jolitz or 386BSD were a party to any lawsuit or settlement, nor was there any demand for any code in 386BSD to be removed, nor were 386BSD distributions stopped - [note the CDROM continued selling well during this time, not based on anything in the 4.4 lite release].

And most importantly, there was no claim filed by AT&T, USL, or other party which expressed any concern for any code done by Jolitz for 386BSD or Berkeley distributions. All Jolitz work was documented thoroughly and published in a well-established industry journal and above-board in all respects.

The implication that there was tainted code done by Jolitz by other groups that had to be removed was concocted as a way to steal documented work without maintaining attribution, a basic tenant of the Berkeley Unix license agreement. However, claiming something is encumbered to try to get around a license agreement doesn't make it so.

There were disputes over the incorporation of code not in 386BSD releases which could be considered proprietary. The refusal to incorporate "tainted" code into 386BSD led to the creation of freebsd and netbsd, not the other way around.

http://www.386bsd.org/faq

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.7.75.190 (talk • contribs) 23:48, 9 March 2005

POV

A series of edits were made to this article (and to the talk page) last year by an anonymous user which I suspect is either Bill or Lynne Jolitz (based on that user's contributions to other pages, including William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz).

Some of these edits were perfectly fine, fleshing out the history of 386BSD, but there are some I find objectionable. In particular, important factual information (such as the fact that NetBSD and FreeBSD both shipped complete releases before 386BSD) was removed, and the description of certain events (such as the cause of the falling-out that led to the creation of the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects) was changed to place the Jolitzes in a much more favorable light. Needless to say, the previous version is much closer to how the NetBSD and FreeBSD communities perceived those events.

To me, this article now reads more like a press release than an encyclopedia article. I have therefore marked it as POV.

DES 15:56, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Re-added POV. The article presents only one side of the dispute between 386BSD and the other BSDs, and has been edited by participants in the dispute to remove factual information favorable to the other side.

DES 06:24, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Hmmm. I checked the history and, while there was some blatant pro-Jolitz POV when you made your comments, it seemed later settled to me. However, you're welcome to add information from the other side, so we can perhaps solve the dispute. --Cyclopia 12:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

It's been some months since the last NPOV entry on the talk page, so it seems like it's now safe to remove the NPOV tag. CSWarren 01:33, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

Lucid Emacs

The 386BSD disagreement between Jolizes and FreeBSD looks similar to the Lucid Emacs disagreement between it and RMS. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.110.28.240 (talk • contribs) 23:01, 17 June 2007

Ownership

"All rights with respect to 386BSD and JOLIX are now held exclusively by William Jolitz and Lynne Jolitz."

I find that very hard to believe. Most of the OS should be copyright The Regents of the University of California, with probably pieces owned by others (wasn't there a lot of GNU code in 4.4BSD?), unless the Jolitzes decided to rewrite the whole thing. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 17:00, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

List of DDJ articles

In section "Further reading", we have 2 DDJ articles dated Apr/1991 and no articles dated Dec/1991 and Jan/1992. Is this an error?
--Black Walnut (talk) 01:23, 29 December 2019 (UTC)

License BSD license?

The infobox says the license of 386BSD is a BSD licence.

I've been looking at the project's Github repository.

• Version 0.0: I couldn't find a global license file for this version, but init_main.c has a 4 clause BSD License crediting the Regents of the University of California.
• Version 0.1: has a 4 clause BSD License in the COPYRIGHT file crediting William F. Jolitz, TeleMuse
• Versions 1.0 & 2.0: have a COPYRIGHT file consisting of the 4 clause license from 0.1 with 4 additional clauses forbidding commercial distribution, and non-commercial distribution of modified source or binaries.

The version 1.0/2.0 license is clearly derived from the 4 clause BSD license, but with the additions it appears to fail to meet the Open Source Initiative's The Open Source Definition, specifically sections 3. Derived Works, 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor and 7. Distribution of License.

My gut feel was to update the infobox to say 0.0 + 0.1 are BSD Licensed and 1.0 + 2.0 are proprietary but then I decided I really don't know enough about licenses to accurately categorise the 1.0 + 2.0 license.

Help! Kiore (talk) 05:18, 11 April 2024 (UTC)