:sendmail.net: An Interview with Kirk McKusick [Part One]
sendmail.net: An Interview with Kirk McKusick [Part One] Oct 21, 1999, 14 :30 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (2542 reads)
"If, as Tim O'Reilly says, "BSD is one of the great
mothers of the Open Source movement," then
Kirk McKusick must be its godfather. As a core
member of the Berkeley Computer Systems
Research Group (CSRG), he was a key figure in
the development of Berkeley UNIX, overseeing
the release of 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD, and is still a
powerful guiding force in the BSD community
today. We sat down with him to ask a few
questions..."
"How does the current buzz about Open
Source strike you, as someone who
contributed so much to making it possible?
How does it compare to what you at
Berkeley were trying to accomplish?"
"Open Source has been of great interest to me,
obviously, for twenty years. The big debate, for
instance, over Richard Stallman's emphasis on
the "free" in "free software." The way it was
characterized politically, you had copyright,
which is what the big companies use to lock
everything up; you had copyleft, which is free
software's way of making sure they can't lock it
up; and then Berkeley had what we called
"copycenter," which is "take it down to the copy
center and make as many copies as you want."
You want to go off and do proprietary things
with it? Fine, you can do that. You want to keep
it out in the Open Source domain? You're
welcome to do that as well. In fact, in the end,
Richard Stallman had to agree that we had a less
restrictive license than he did, although it took
pulling some teeth to get him to admit that."
