There is no warranty on GNU software. If something goes wrong, the original developer of the software
has no obligation to fix the problem. However, there are many organizations, big and small,
that offer paid support packages for the software when it is included in their Linux or other open
source software distribution. (See the ???OSI Open Source Definition??? section later in this chapter
for a more detailed definition of open source software.)
13
Starting with Linux 1
Despite its success producing thousands of UNIX utilities, the GNU Project itself failed to produce
one critical piece of code: the kernel. Its attempts to build an open source kernel with the GNU
Hurd project (www.gnu.org/software/hurd) were unsuccessful.
BSD Loses Some Steam
The one software project that had a chance of beating out Linux to be the premier open source software
project was the venerable old BSD project. By the late 1980s, BSD developers at UC Berkeley
realized that they had already rewritten most of the UNIX source code they had received a decade
earlier.
In 1989, University of California (UC) Berkeley distributed its own UNIX-like code as Net/1 and
later (in 1991) as Net/2. Just as UC Berkeley was preparing a complete, UNIX-like operating system
that was free from all AT&T code, AT&T hit them with a lawsuit in 1992.
Pages:
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118