OS Vendors thank BSD with all day festival
Posted by Michael on Tuesday September 24, 2002 @04:33PM
from the what-lies-beneath dept.
Matthew writes: Major OS vendors Microsoft, Apple, Sun, and Linus Torvalds representing Linux have teamed up to celebrate Berkeley BSD Unix, the OS upon which their products are either based or borrow heavily from, with an all-day rally on the Berkeley campus. Sharing the podium, the CEOs of these most innovative OS developers paid tribute during a “free software and peace” festival style atmosphere.
Festival organizers reported that the companies just wanted to give something back to the students in thanks for the billions of dollars of revenue that their BSD based products have generated for them, and give recognition to the fact that the Internet would be a much slower and less compatible place if every competitive product hadn’t ripped off BSD code.[Continued...] Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: “We totally replaced the NT 4 TCP/IP stack with BSD’s much faster stack in Windows 2000. We also nabbed Kerberos, our new secure network logon protocol, from that OS, and used BSD code to gain enormous performance improvements in our Web server. Suffice it to say that without BSD, we’d still be hacking away on NT 4.”
NeXT/Apple CEO Steve Jobs: “We were the first to wholesale incorporate BSD when we based NeXTStep on it fifteen years ago. When we acquired Apple, we did the same thing all over again. OS X is BSD with some window dressing.”
Sun CEO Scott McNealy: “Not so fast Steve. Remember that took BSD and just renamed it SunOS years before you used it to create NeXTStep. Sun was basically the first commercial entity to realize the value of ripping off code from Berkeley students, and we’re proud of that heritage. Solaris has tons of BSD left in it.”
Linux uberguru Linus Torvalds: “Oh yeah? Well people compare Linux to BSD constantly. But there can be no comparison. Any time BSD does something better than Linux, we incorporate their code. But our performance wins can’t be ported to BSD because the GPL prevents it. The code just flows one-way baby, so there’s no real hope that BSD can remain competitive. It’s embrace and encumber cats, embrace and encumber.”