BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code (2000) | Hacker News Reader

BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code (2000)

salon.com

82 pointsvezzy-fnord16 comments

Great read. I think the biggest takeaway is how they organize and run their operation. There's a tiny amount of high talent and dedication people that really control the process. They're open for contributions by whoever wants to try. They internally filter the wheat from the chaff to find those who contributions are truly useful. They give them extra power in both what ends up in the distro and helping the filtering/discovery process. The rest are still allowed to attempt whatever contributions they can. The model seems to hit an optimal point to bring in more good than bad.

Might be worth copying in other projects. Supporting this is the other, highly-successful organizations that use a similar model. Far as Linux, there's always exceptions to the rule and lets not forget it depends on GNU work done differently. That hybrid, immensely popular development doesn't compare apples to apples with about anything. I treat it like its own category.

Kirk McKusick is still an important person in BSD.

This story omits the role of NetBSD in opening up development in the BSDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#History

In that sense, it also omits the part where OpenBSD truly opened development by enabling read access to the CVS repo (log/diff/annotate) to everyone.

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-paper.pdf

http://www.openbsd.org/papers/anoncvs-slides.pdf

Before that, they could arbitrary cut off your access: http://www.theos.com/deraadt/coremail.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=NetBSD&type=revis...

> And how many Linux distributions are there? asks McKusick, rolling his eyes. Fifteen, 20?

How quaint ;)

I would love to hear what he thinks about that statement and the state of distros today:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Dis... =)

Interesting read, thanks for posting. Brings a bit of relevant historical perspective given that I recently switched to OpenBSD for a project I'm working on.

It is funny how USL vs BSDi hurt BSD at first, but then SCO targeted Linux not BSD for a reason. Terry Lambert has a lot of posts on the backstory behind the settlement BTW (clue: you can thank Ray Noorda).

In case you like obscure references, USL vs BSDi was tragedy, SCO vs Linux and Rationality was farce.

It really is interesting how little the SCO cases actually amounted to.

If it wasn't for USL vs BSDi, we probably wouldn't have Linux today, and BSD would be ruling the world.

Who knows.

Maybe BSD would just be yet another UNIX, and everyone would still be deploying Aix, HP-UX, Solaris, Tru64, DG/UX, among many other UNIX variants.

We know. The culture in Unix was always sharing source and user collaboration. When AT&T finally tried to exert control there was a large movement within the community to go free of AT&T code. GNU and BSD were both a reaction to that.

The rise of x86 and the availability of free Unix (in the form of BSD or GNU) was destined to destroy the proprietary Unix market. In 1991 neither BSD nor GNU had kernels booting on x86, leading Linus to eventually release Linux in August.

Linux had the luxury of being the only readily available Unix-like kernel on x86 for several years.

The USL v BSDi lawsuit slowed BSD efforts for nearly two years while Linux gained mindshare and features (specifically x86 features & drivers). Once the suit was settled out of court development took a long time to regain momentum.

Net/2 was released in June of 1991 (before Linux!), so if the USL lawsuit hadn't happened, we might all be running that instead.

That is just playing futurology. We will never know.

Just like some of us would have liked that Apple would be just as successful with BeOS instead of NeXT, but we will also never know.

In 1993, I learned UNIX on Xenix system. Coherent being the other option.

Linux only became production quality when the likes of Intel, IBM and others started supporting its development. As far as I am aware they never supported BSD like that.

Tragedy for BSD's dominance, I mean.

I quite like Linux, personally, but people who prefer BSD probably view it as tragedy.

I'm a huge fan of BSD. This was a good read.

Very perceptive observation by Bill Joy:

   The really nasty bugs are found by a couple
   of really smart people who just kill themselves.
   Most people looking at the code won’t see anything

How many people looked at heartbleed and didn't see anything? How many people looked at goto fail; goto fail; and didn't see anything? And those were relatively simple. I wonder how many "really nasty" security bugs are still out there?

> Most people looking at the code won’t see anything

Sadly, most people don't look at the code at all. They buy products marketed as making them safer, or trust central authority figures.

Great story, thanks for posting it. Really well written. The section on Gage at the end reminds me of All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace:

https://vimeo.com/groups/96331/videos/80799353

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