4.4: "Trial of the BSD Knights"

[Order OpenBSD 4.4 or other items]
OpenBSD 4.4 CD2 track 2 is an
uncompressed copy of this song.
3:05 minutes
(MP3 5.6MB)
(OGG 4.4MB)

Nearly 10 years ago Kirk McKusick wrote a history of
the Berkeley Unix distributions for the
O'Reilly book "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution".
We recommend you read his story, entitled
"Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix
From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable"
first, to see how Kirk remembers how we got here.
Sadly, since it showed up in book form originally, this text has
probably not been read by enough people.
The USL(AT&T) vs BSDI/UCB court case settlement documents were
not public until recently; their disclosure has made the facts more clear.
But the story of how three people decided to free the BSD codebase
of corporate pollution -- and release it freely -- is more interesting
than the lawsuit which followed.  Sure, a stupid lawsuit happened which
hindered the acceptance of the BSD code during a critical period.
But how did a bunch of guys go through the effort of replacing so
much AT&T code in the first place? After all, companies had
lots of really evil lawyers back then too -- were they not afraid?
After a decade of development, most of the AT&T code had
already been replaced by university researchers and their associates.
So Keith Bostic, Mike Karels and Kirk McKusick (the main UCB CSRG group)
started going through the 4.3BSD codebase to cleanse the rest.
Keith, in particular, built a ragtag team (in those days, USENIX
conferences were a gold mine for such team building) and led these
rebels to rewrite and replace all the Imperial AT&T code, piece by
piece, starting with the libraries and userland programs.
Anyone who helped only got credit as a Contributor -- people like
Chris Torek and a cast of .. hundreds more.
Then Mike and Kirk purified the kernel. After a bit more careful
checking, this led to the release of a clean tree called Net/2 which
was given to the world in June 1991 -- the largest dump of free source
code the world had ever received (for those days -- not modern monsters like OpenOffice).
Some of these ragtags formed a company (BSDi) to sell a production system
based on this free code base, and a year later Unix System Laboratories

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