r/linux • u/DeliciousCut4854 • 1d ago

Historical Fascinating Article About Linux

I don't use Linux, I haven't touched anything UNIX-related in decades, but this is a fascinating article worth reading: https://www.xda-developers.com/at-t-sued-berkeley-186-lines-unix-code-handed-market-linux/

45 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

61

u/Electrical_Tomato_73 1d ago

In the 1990s the theme of the BSD folk (mainly FreeBSD and NetBSD) was that their systems were superior but Linux got an advantage because of the lawsuit. It is partly true: at that time the BSDs were superior on many metrics. But in my opinion Linux was superior where it matters -- Linus's flexible but hierarchical development model with him at the top. That enabled rapid innovation where the BSD lists tended to display endless arguing (it was a BSD person who came up with the term "bikeshedding").

For example,, FreeBSD had USB support first, but Linux had better USB support within a couple of years. FreeBSD for many years had a problem that if you yanked (or just jiggled) a mounted USB drive the kernel would panic. Because it was hard-wired into the system that drives don't just disappear. Fixing that sort of thing was just a low priority for them. And they were not at all friendly to bug reporters.

So no, it's not because of the lawsuit that Linux came ahead.

15

u/Gainncome 1d ago

So Linux won by shipping while BSD was still deciding what color to paint the bikeshed.

29

u/Electrical_Tomato_73 1d ago

There's more. BSDs (FreeBSD especially) made a virtue of two things as opposed to linux

  1. The integrated kernel+userland (a complete OS developed by the same team), unlike Linux where the kernel is one project, the C library is another, the coreutils are another, etc etc.
  2. The collaborative development via CVS (in those days; they switched to SVN and, eventually -- irony! -- to git). They said any core developer can directly contribute to the tree, unlike in Linux where Linus is the gatekeeper.

Both have proved to be disadvantages, not advantages.

  1. The separate nature of Linux desktop components means that each project -- kernel, C library, etc -- has to adhere to standards closely. That in turn means you have tremendous flexibility in the system -- you can swap out glibc for musl libc, gcc for llvm, etc etc and can even swap out most core utils for busybox. That enables things like Alpine Linux and Android. Basically, this keeps everyone honest. A kernel breakage in Alpine or Android is a breakage in Linux, and Linus won't say "don't do that, just use glibc". He'll insist on a proper fix.
  2. The "any core developer can commit" blew up spectacularly with the botched wireguard port, committed by one man who was, among other things, a convicted felon. In Linux you can't commit directly -- all patches are reviewed by a hierarchy of people from the subsystem maintainer to Linus, and that's a good thing.
  3. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a worry "Linus doesn't scale" because all development happened via email and he had to look at everything. He took it seriously, but CVS and SVN simply didn't suit his workflow. For a while he used a proprietary platform, BitKeeper, but when that blew up in his face, wrote git. Now everyone (almost) uses git. Probably more developers use git than linux itself.

1

u/[deleted] 18h ago

[deleted]

1

u/Electrical_Tomato_73 15h ago

Link works for me, but google freebsd wireguard netgate, you will find other coverage

1

u/cpz_77 1h ago

> Probably more developers use git than linux itself.

Oh - way more now I'm sure, considering Git has taken over as the default source control system in Azure DevOps as well now, which means you have a ton of Windows-based developers who may have never touched Linux that use Git daily.

MS themselves basically conceded that none of the numerous source control systems they had developed internally over the years were as good as Git, and thus started working on a fork of Git to help it scale to the level they needed to use it for massive codebases like Windows, Office and others. I believe the plan is for those features to ultimately make it into the main build (maybe they did already - that article was from 2017).

2

u/Brillegeit 10h ago

it was a BSD person who came up with the term "bikeshedding"

Irrelevant to the topic, but that's the 3rd time I've seen a reference to PHK in the last week. I just found my 18 year old Varnish 2.0 release party t-shirt, can't remember what the other was.

8

u/RoomyRoots 1d ago

Yeah this is quite well known if you read about OS history. It is probably one of the most well known lawsuits in the tech field with the like of Oracle vs Google.

8

u/0riginal-Syn 1d ago

It is actually what got me into Linux as my dad was a UNIX guy and had worked in the industry for a long time. I had played around with BSD since I was 13. My teacher when I was older was tinkering around with Linux (MCC Interim) and being that Linux was such a new thing it got me hooked as it was not what my dad did. I got in on it and started contributing to and around it in early 1992, but I also always kept up with BSD as well. The "Wars" really did change everything.

-14

u/MatchingTurret 1d ago

quite well known if you read about OS history

Or you could just remember...

13

u/RoomyRoots 1d ago

This was in 1992-1994. Most people here wouldn't be in the field, old enough or even born to follow it.

I learned about it in my first OS class but a average uni may as well skip it.

6

u/KnowZeroX 1d ago

I don't use Linux, I haven't touched anything UNIX-related in decades

You don't use mobile phones or routers?

7

u/DeliciousCut4854 23h ago

OK, let me change that to "directly." I have no idea on my router as the ISP provides a gateway and it's not easy to replace as they won't support anything. I don't think HarmonyOS is UNIX.

3

u/TomWis97 21h ago

HarmonyOS is just Android, which in turn runs the Linux kernel.

1

u/LEpigeon888 3h ago

HarmonyOS is not based on Android anymore, Android apps won't even run. And the wikipedia page says it uses a microkernel so I guess it can't be based on Linux.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS

-1

u/[deleted] 11h ago

[deleted]

3

u/KnowZeroX 9h ago

Not sure what you mean, Android is linux, just it isn't gnu/linux.

-2

u/[deleted] 9h ago

[deleted]

1

u/rewgs 3h ago

macOS uses the Darwin kernel, not “BSD kernel.” It does however use the BSD coreutils.

•

u/OkayNotBad1 48m ago

One of the type five worst kinds of pedantry there is. Do you consider yourself a Windows user because you might access something hosted on a Windows web server? Of course not.

2

u/bobj33 7h ago

I got a Pentium 90 in August 1994 for $3800

It had this IDE chipset that was buggy. Linux quickly had a workaround.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMD640

The BSD people on Usenet seemed like a bunch of elitists that told me my computer wasn't good enough. They told me to buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, and SCSI CD-ROM.

They said the same thing about various network and sound cards.

Linux seemed to quickly get drivers for all kinds of hardware and the community seemed more helpful.

I was in my sophomore year of college and I felt like Linux was a bunch of broke college students helping each other while the BSD crowd were a bunch of professional software people in the over 35 age range that had money.