"Our strangest dreams sometimes take on a reality of
their own. In January, Caldera , the latest owners of the
"official" Unix source code, decided to release some of the older
versions (up to "V7" and "32V") under an open source license. While
not as significant as it would have been, say, ten years ago, it is
nice that everyone now has access to the code that first made Unix
popular, and that led to the development of the 4BSD system that
underlies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Apple's Darwin (which in
turn underlies Mac OS X). Since I was active in the computer field
through almost all the years of Unix's development, I'd like to
comment briefly on the Caldera announcement in its full context.
"Free Unix source code" was a strange dream for many of us in
the late 1970s and early 1980s, and even the subject of an April
Fools joke in there someplace on USENET. But then there was Minix,
and it seemed less like a strange dream. Around the same time, John
Gilmore was working on a project he called "Radio Free Berkeley,"
to replace all the encumbered source code in BSD Unix so that it
could be free. And many of us worked on small pieces of it; this is
why and when I wrote the file command that is on your Linux or BSD
system.
While this was happening, BSD was encountering major success in
powering the growing Internet (small by today's standards, but
nontrivial). There were many, many university and research VAXen
running 4BSD, the first mainstream Unix release to ship with a
TCP/IP implementation (around 1983). DEC's (since swallowed by
Compaq) ULTRIX, Sun's SunOS 3.5 and 4, and Unixes from a variety of
smaller, long-dot-gone companies powered the Internet. And they
were BSD Unix."
