''Tw O Years in the Trenches''

‘‘Tw o years in the trenches’’ Evolution of a free software project GregLehey President, AUUG Inc. [email protected] Member,FreeBSD Core team [email protected] ABSTRACT Free software projects have been around for overten years now, and they’ve become an important part of the UNIX community.With the example of the FreeBSD project, this paper illustrates some of the changes that have occurred in that time and attempts to guess what the future may bring. The three ages of UNIX The evolution of free UNIX UNIX® is nowathird of a century old. In this Free software has been around for ever. Until the time, the face of computing has changed dramati- end of the 60s, coincidentally the time when cally.It’sinteresting to consider the evolution of UNIX evolved, software was almost always free. UNIX in three phases of roughly 11 years each: And whynot? Most system software came with the machines and would only run on them, so • From 1969 until about 1980, UNIX was there was little incentive tocharge separately for mainly a research project, little known outside the software. Applications software was tuned to AT&T except at some universities. specific applications, so piracywas hardly worth • From 1980 until about 1991, UNIX developed worrying about. into a commercial operating system with re- By the end of the 1960s, that had changed. IBM leases likeUNIX System V (remember that?), wasfaced with competitors who built hardware XENIX, SunOS, Ultrix and friends. which was strikingly compatible with the Sys- • In the early 90s, efforts at the University of tem/360, and IBM’ssoftware ran on it. It started California in Berkeleytoproduce free UNIX to makecommercial sense for IBM to unbundle came to fruition. At pretty much exactly the its software. Over the course of the following ten same time, the Linux project started. UNIX years, more and more compatible hardware be- wasonthe way to becoming free. came available, and by 1980 just about all software cost money. Vendors had a perception that This paper looks at the last third of this history in access to the source code would give their com- more detail. petitors an advantage, so theyrestricted availabili- ty of their software to object form only.The re- sultant inflexibility was one of the reasons which led to the formation of the Free Software Founda- tion in the mid-80s. To wards the end of the 70s, the price of ‘‘real’’ computers dropped to the point where individuals • The release of the Intel 80386 processor and could own them. People started sharing programs systems based on it, gav e the average hacker for their CP/M based machines, and later for their an affordable machine with virtual memory, Microsoft-based replacements. Most software for capable of running modern UNIX without small machines continued to cost money, howev- significant compromises. er,and the machines themselves were too small to • Improvedaccess to the Internet, especially for run UNIX effectively. students, made cooperation on software pro- This changed round about 1990 with the availabil- jects more practicable. ity of machines based on the Intel 80386 proces- In those days, for most people the attraction was sor.Atthe same time, individual access to the In- the challenge of running UNIX on one’sown ternet became easier,especially for students. computer,not anycommercial intent. Indeed, These were the background for a number of free Bill Jolitz staunchly refused to commercialize his software projects which were initially completely 386BSD operating system, and in August 1991, independent of the Free Software Foundation and Linus Torvalds wrote in the original announce- its values. ment of Linux ‘‘just a hobby,won’tbebig and The early 90s professional likegnu’’. Idon’tbelieve that religious belief in ‘‘free soft- Computer hackers1 have been around as long as ware’’was a big thing at the time. The GNU pro- computers. Theyhav e probably dreamed of hav- ject had been around for a while, and both 386 ing their own computer that long, too, but it really BSD and Linux took advantage of the software, only became evenremotely possible in the butinitially there was little synergy between the mid-1970s. People started working on UNIX-like GNU project and the free OS projects. systems early: During this period, relatively fewpeople con- • In the late 1970s, a companycalled Electro- tributed to the projects. Forexample, the release labs started working on a UNIX-likesystem notes of FreeBSD 2.0, released in January 1995, called OS-2, intended to run on the Z-80 pro- mention a total of 55 contributors, including a 15 cessor.Itnev erpassed the beta stage running member core team, who really were the project. under CP/M. Most of the other contributors had only loose • In the early 1980s, Mark Williams Company links with the FreeBSD project. ported their Coherent system, a clone of the UNIX Seventh edition, to the IBM PC. With- The compromise OS out memory protection, and with the memory Along with the free operating system projects limitations of the original success, it was not a there was also a ‘‘reasonable’’operating system great success. project, BSD/386 from BerkeleySoftware Design • Andy Tanenbaum’sMinix operating system Inc., or BSDI (later BSDi). BSD/386 was derived ran on a number of processors, including the from the same code base as 386BSD, and was in Intel 8086 family. fact quite closely related. The story of that rela- tionship is interesting enough to be the topic for None of these projects became very large. The another paper.The difference was that BSD/386 hardware wasn’tuptoit, and none of them made cost money. Including complete source code, it the source code freely available, though the re- cost $1,000 US. That may seem to be a lot of strictions on Minix were relatively minor.Two money, but in those days source licenses for Sys- things changed that situation in the late 1980s and tem V cost at least $50,000, and a BSD/386 early 1990s: source license was was cheaper than a binary license for the System V implementations for the Intel platform. In addition, it was complete—no dozens of additional packages to add, each with their own activation key.Evenmore surprisingly, 1. Ahacker is, of course, somebody who can’ttell the difference between work and play with computers. See the BSD/386 was more reliable than System V. NewHacker’sDictionary (http://www.tuxedo.org/˜esr/jargon/html/entry/hacker.html ) for more details. The mid-90s In the early days, nobody had very great expecta- Social changes tions for the free operating systems. Theydidn’t expect them to be as reliable as UNIX® System Clearly the social structure of the FreeBSD pro- V. Theydidn’tevenexpect them to be as reliable ject has changed greatly in its nature in the last as Microsoft’sofferings, though theydid expect ten years. By mid-2000, the strain was beginning them to be easier to use. to show: In a fewyears, something happened that nobody • The core team was no longer the group of the had expected. Well, very fewpeople: the operat- most active comitters. Their function had ef- ing systems did become as reliable as Microsoft’s fectively become more administrative,but offerings, quite quickly in fact. One of the first theyhadn’trecognized the fact yet. results of this recognition came from the massive • The architectural direction of the project had increase in Internet usage, which created a re- become a little vague. The position of chief quirement for low-cost web servers. This wasthe architect, previously held by David Green- reason for the foundation of BSDI, who branded man, had been vacant for some time. In the their operating system ‘‘Internet Server’’, later early stages of the project, most of the work ‘‘Internet Super Server’’. Initially theywere very in the project had been to makeFreeBSD a successful. As time went on, though, enterprising stable UNIX-likeoperating system, but that startups realized that theycould save the cost of goal had nowbeen achieved. There wasmore the software by using free operating systems in- work to do, but the only clearly defined goal stead of BSD/386. Thus in 1995, when Yahoo! wastoimprove the SMP performance—the started up, it was based on FreeBSD. SMPng project, which at the time had just Linux was slower to reach reliability than the started, and which is still continuing. BSD systems: it had to be written from scratch, • Arelated problem was the attractiveness to whereas the free BSD systems were based on a end users. Likeother free operating systems, code base at least ten years old, including the FreeBSD has always been a developer-driven most mature of TCP/IP stacks. project, but the main source of project fund- By the late 1990s, though, Linux had effectively ing came from selling CD-ROMs. The sales caught up with the BSDs, and depending on of the CD-ROMs were obviously dependent which bigot you ask, either overtook the BSDs or on the perception of the purchaser,but no- neverquite made it. body in the project was overly concerned with this issue. In the mid-1990s, another thing happened: the general public became aware of the concept of • Some developers exploited the ineffectiveness free operating systems. Theywere still consid- of the core team by doing whateverthey ered very much the realm of geeks, but theywere wanted. This notably included making becoming known. changes to the system to match their viewof what was needed, possibly breaking parts of During this time, more and more people became the system (those parts which theydidn’t involved with the projects.

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