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From: g...@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: Ok, how about 4.3BSD for a 386
Message-ID: <7797@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 29 Jun 89 05:04:47 GMT
References: <42960@oliveb.olivetti.com> <14461@watdragon.waterloo.edu> 
<2119@husc6.harvard.edu>
Organization: Grasshopper Group in San Francisco
Lines: 26
Posted: Thu Jun 29 06:04:47 1989

There is interest at UC Berkeley in producing a 386 version of BSD Unix.
If you are interested in contributing effort toward the project, and
are a qualified Unix systems programmer, email Keith Bostic
<bos...@okeeffe.berkeley.edu>.  The hard part would have been a compiler,
but BSD is adopting GCC, which is free and already compiles for the 386.

A Berkeley "product" would only be a source tape, of course; they aren't
in the commercial Unix business.  But any school with a BSD license would
be able to run it on all their 386 boxes; and any company with a Unix
license could get it from Berkeley and make a binary product out of it.

Something like 40% of BSD Unix is now freely redistributable.  Anybody can
get the source modules that aren't AT&T derived, from uunet, by uucp or
anonymous FTP.  Berkeley and the GNU project are collaborating to raise
that 40% up to 100% -- a complete BSD-Unix-like system, full source, free.
Sort of like it was at schools before Unix became a commercial product.

Of course, anyone will be able to pick it up and provide support
for it (like Mt. Xinu does for today's BSD Unix and Mach) for people
who want to pay somebody for stability and bugfixing.  But the fertile
hacker community can improve it at will, and pass the improvements around.
The best of both worlds...
-- 
John Gilmore      {sun,pacbell,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu      g...@toad.com
Love your country but never trust its government.
		     -- from a hand-painted road sign in central Pennsylvania