History of FOSS and stuff (was: The Silent Woman)

[Tom Buskey]

On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 12:06 AM, Greg Rundlett <greg.rundlett at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> >   Several thousand BSD users would beg to differ.
>

I knew about BSD before Linux.  Dr. Dobbs had a nice series of articles by
the Jolitzes (sp?) work on porting the 4.3 (4.4?) BSD code to the 386.  This
was about the time BSDi came out with a commercial BSD.  One was BSD386 and
the other was 386BSD.

I downloaded 0.1 of Jolitz on 30-40 5.25" floppies and it wouldn't boot on
my system.  OS/2 wouldn't either.  Then I got Linux and it booted and ran.
If FreeBSD had cleaned up the Jolitz version sooner, Linux might not have
gained its foothold.


> A quick note on the subject of what Dr. Stallman has done for all of
> us... Everyone generally thinks of the GPL, or the GCC or emacs.  I
> always think of the "ell-ess' command.  If you read the man / info
> page, you'll see
>
> AUTHOR
>       Written by Richard Stallman and David MacKenzie.
>
> Where would we be without an ls command?
>

echo *
or
echo * | sort | tr ' ' '
'

Stallman wrote just about everything needed for a developer and skipped what
wasn't "needed".  He left documentation to TeX, graphics to X11 and the
kernel for later.  As time went on, people added to that base.  I remember
Ghostscript as one of the early ones.

I think many of the GNU tools ended up in the various BSDs.  gcc is the most
prevelent.  OpenBSD has been working on getting GNU out of their
distribution but gcc is still there.
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