|
The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin - Ch. 21, by Dr. Peter Salus |
|
Friday, November 11 2005 @ 09:32 AM EST
|
Here's the next installment of The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, Chapter 21, "Daemonology," by Dr. Peter Salus. Earlier chapters can be found here. Savor this chapter, because after one more chapter, Dr. Salus will be on hiatus for about a month, after which he will start anew.
***************************************
The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin
~ by Dr. Peter H. Salus
Chapter 21: Daemonology
The daemon image, what Kirk McKusick calls the "beastie," dates
from 1976. Created by comic artist Phil Foglio and first used by
Mike O'Brien, here's the story as told by Mike:
I was a bonded locksmith. Phil's roommate had unexpectedly split town, and he
was the only one who knew the combination to the wall safe in their apartment.
This apartment was the only one I'd ever seen that had a wall safe, but it sure
did have one, and Phil had stuff locked in there. I didn't hold out much hope,
since safes were far beyond my competence, but I figured "no guts, no glory''
and told Phil that I'd give it a whack. In return, I requested T-shirt art.
Phil readily agreed.
Wonder of wonders, this safe was vulnerable to the same algorithm to which
Master locks used to be susceptible. I opened it after about 15 minutes of
manipulation. It was my greatest moment as a locksmith and Phil was overjoyed.
I went down to my lab and shot some Polaroid snaps of the PDP-11 system on
which I was running UNIX, and gave them to Phil with some descriptions of
the visual puns I wanted: pipes, demons with forks running along the pipes,
a "bit bucket" named /dev/null, all that.
What Phil came up with is the artwork that graced the first decade's worth
of "UNIX T-shirts", which were made by a Ma-and-Pa operation in a Chicago
suburb. They turned out transfer art using a 3M color copier in their
basement. Hence, the PDP-11 is reversed (the tape drives are backward),
but since Phil left off the front panel, this error was hard to detect.
His trademark signature was photo-reversed, but was recopied by the
T-shirt people and "re-forwardized"-- which is why it looks a little funny
compared to his real signature.
The art was used on the USENIX Tenth Anniversary shirt in 1985 (I
still have one). McKusick comments: "About 1 year after Usenix produced
the Portland conference T-shirts, they paid Phil for the artwork. Thus,
Usenix currently holds title to the copyright." I was the individual who
actually paid Phil.
As I said earlier,
NET 1 was a subset of the then-current Berkeley system. It was
quite similar to 4.3-Tahoe, including source code and documentation
for the networking portions of the kernel, the C library and utility
programs. It was available without evidence of any prior license
(AT&T or Berkeley), and was (re)distributed via anonymous FTP. The
source carried a Berkeley copyright notice and a legend that
allowed redistribution with attribution.
In June 1991, at the USENIX Conference in Nashville, BSD
Networking Release 2 was available. NET 2 contained far more
than just networking code and, like NET 1, was available with
no prior license. The new features included a new virtual
memory system (derived from Carnegie-Mellon's Mach system, which
had been ported at the University of Utah) and a port to the
Intel 386/486.
But all was not happy in Eden. While BSDI's version of the
release was complete by the end of 1991, it was only released
to the public on April 10, 1993 as 1.0, the long delay being the
consequence of USL's filing suit to prevent BSDI from shipping its product.
BSDI had distributed pre-production releases of BSD/386 (Beta
version). It now began international distribution. Full source
was priced at $1000. (In the January/February 1994 ;login:,
Lou Katz wrote: "It works! It works!").
On Friday, February 4, 1994, Novell and the University of California
agreed to drop all relevant suits and countersuits. BSDI immediately
announced the availability of a release based on "4.4BSD-Lite."
In the meantime, several groups of coders had begun work on other
releases (daemons multiplying nearly as rapidly as penguins). The
earliest of these was 386BSD, by Lynne and Bill Jolitz, though others
have proven to be of greater importance.
William Jolitz had had considerable experience with prior BSD releases
while at Berkeley (2.8BSD, 2.9BSD) and he and Lynne Jolitz contributed code
to Berkeley developed at Symmetric Computer Systems during the 1980s.
The public 386BSD releases beginning in 1992 were based on portions of the
NET 2 release plus with additional code written by the Jolitzes.
FreeBSD derived from the 386BSD 0.1 release. It was the first free
software organization founded on BSD.
Initial development of FreeBSD was started in 1993, taking its source
from 386BSD. As a consequence of concerns about the legality of some
of the code, NetBSD, like FreeBSD, was derived from 4.3BSD via NET 2 and 386BSD.
The project began as a response to the FreeBSD unified patchkit and
386BSD, with its slow development process and focus on the i386 platform.
The four founders of the project, Chris Demetriou, Theo de Raadt, Adam Glass
and Charles Hannum, felt that a more BSD-like development focus would be more
beneficial to the project.
de Raadt suggested the name "NetBSD" and it was readily accepted by the other
founders. Although Demetriou inadvertently made a premature release of the code,
NetBSD 0.8 was the first official release in May 1993.
In 1994, one of the founders, Theo de Raadt, was forced out of the project.
He later founded a new project, OpenBSD, from a forked version of NET 1.
The first release of OpenBSD was in October 1995.
The current release of NetBSD is version 2.1 (October 2005).
I had dinner with Poul-Henning Kamp in Copenhagen and asked him about his
work on FreeBSD.
"I've been involved with FreeBSD from before it existed," he told me.
You know, the basic BSD kernel suffers from a number of Ph.D. theses. I
see the split as between the academic (OpenBSD) and the practical (FreeBSD).
Chris Demetriou is towards the more academic side.
I love having choice. Diversity in OSes is as important as is
diversity in crops.
Dr. Salus is the author of "A Quarter Century of UNIX" and several other books, including "HPL: Little Languages and Tools", "Big Book of Ipv6 Addressing Rfcs", "Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Imperative Programming Languages", "Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond", and "The Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Functional, Concurrent and Logic Programming Languages". There is an interview with him, audio and video,"codebytes: A History of UNIX and UNIX Licences" which was done in 2001 at a USENIX conference. Dr. Salus has served as Executive Director of the USENIX Association. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view
a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way,
Stanford, California 94305, USA.
|
|
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 09:47 AM EST |
Guess this book is gonna go on my "what to buy me for Xmas" list :-) [ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 09:52 AM EST |
anyone know why Theo de Raadt was pushed out of netBSD? (decides not to
interject theories based on Mr de Raadt's writings)
Oninoshiko[ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
Authored by: Cyberdog on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 10:29 AM EST |
I'll start with hiatus -> holiday.
Hiatus seems to mean gap or missing, probably not what was intended here:
Dr. Salus will be on hiatus for about a month
I suppose you can *have* a hiatus, but it sounds odd to be *on* hiatus.[ Reply to This | # ]
|
- hiatus->holday??!! - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 10:44 AM EST
- Corrections - Authored by: ine on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 07:45 PM EST
- Corrections - Authored by: stevem on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 08:23 PM EST
- Corrections - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 12 2005 @ 12:04 PM EST
|
Authored by: seanlynch on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 10:48 AM EST |
Here and here are some famous
images of daemons throughout their Unix history. [ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
Authored by: red floyd on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 11:14 AM EST |
DDJ also ran a year-long series by the Jolitzes on 386BSD.
---
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a *CITIZEN* of the United
States of America.
[ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
Authored by: tiger99 on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 11:36 AM EST |
And please remember to make clickable links where they might be useful. I will
start off with one here. Sony are in
the news again, this time the BBC, because of the continuing problem of the
rootkit, which seems to have now been exploited by virus writers. [ Reply to This | # ]
|
- Reminder: Library of Congress DMCA exemption review -Written comments due by December 1, 2005 - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 11:59 AM EST
- From the USCoC article... - Authored by: Dan M on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 12:03 PM EST
- Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it? - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 12:46 PM EST
- SONY feels the heat - Will temporarily stop producing CDs with rootkit - Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 02:33 PM EST
- Masterlock Algorithm - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 02:34 PM EST
- Sony DRM includes LGPL violation - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 04:21 PM EST
- Interesting OT article about NES Patents - Authored by: koa on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 05:59 PM EST
- Microsoft's conflict of interests. - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 09:57 PM EST
- "Microsoft in deal with Korean portal" - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 10:57 PM EST
- "SAP slams open source 'socialism'" - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 11:04 PM EST
- "Blu-ray is about set to become Hollywood's preferred standard" - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 11:42 PM EST
- I have been contact by SCO - Authored by: eamacnaghten on Saturday, November 12 2005 @ 01:15 AM EST
- I have been contact by SCO - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 12 2005 @ 01:44 AM EST
- Not me - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 12 2005 @ 08:15 PM EST
- The tune has changed - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 12 2005 @ 09:29 PM EST
|
Authored by: Nick_UK on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 12:21 PM EST |
Did Microsoft ever manufacture safes in those days?
Nick ;-) [ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
Authored by: pmk on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 12:44 PM EST |
In the story "I was a bonded locksmith...", just who is speaking
with in the first person? Salus? O'Brien? McKusick? Darl? A mysterious
anonymous cartoon subsidizer? [ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
Authored by: John Hasler on Friday, November 11 2005 @ 10:27 PM EST |
But all was not happy in Eden. While BSDI's version of the release
was complete by the end of 1991, it was only released to the public on April 10,
1993 as 1.0, the long delay being the consequence of USL's filing suit to
prevent BSDI from shipping its product.
BSDI had
distributed pre-production releases of BSD/386 (Beta version). It now began
international distribution. Full source was priced at $1000. (In the
January/February 1994 ;login:, Lou Katz wrote: "It works! It works!").
I was one of the beta testers. The deal was $1000 for full
source and support through the beta period and for a year after the release.
Support was excellent during the beta period but vanished as soon as 1.0 came
out. I switched to Slackware.
--- Licensed under the GNU General
Public License [ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 12 2005 @ 03:33 AM EST |
Not usually mentioned in accounts of Theo's split from NetBSD is his departure
gift. I was told that he cracked into the CVS server (using one of the many
security holes he had been trying to get patched) and backed out every change
he'd made from before his access was revoked. This was a symbolic act, of
course, and easily remedied, but reveals the degree of spite involved.
This sort of thing, and the personal conflicts that led up to it, seem sadly
typical of the BSDs. It's an example of what may have contributed as much to
Linux's greater success as Linus's personal leadership, its one year head start
in forming a truly public community, and its more-appealing license. [ Reply to This | # ]
|
|
|
|
|