UNIX History in Detail

I just finished reading the primary two parts of an advocacy piece called Elements of Operating System and Internet History: A FreeBSD Rationale. It appears to be self-published by the author, Bruce Montague. Dru Lavigne made me aware of this work in her blog. The first 64 pages are divided between a 22 page "FreeBSD Executive Summary" and 42 pages on "Unix History, Open Source, and FreeBSD." The third section, which I plan to browse later, consists of 74 pages of various bits of UNIX and Internet trivia.

I found the sections describing UNIX history to be very informative and detailed. The author makes the point that the BSD license supports technological transfer of software from the university to the commercial space, while the GPL was explicitly designed to inhibit technology transfer (pp 14, 18). I was surprised to learn that early hardware vendors encouraged users to write their own software, and in many cases sold user-developed software. Even more shocking was the revelation that the US government, now infected by Microsoft, mandated UNIX for all federal OS purchases in 1986!

The first 64 pages form a coherent whole, but I stopped reading when they ended. The next pages are a collection of trivia. For example, the author claims that the UNIX 'dd' command is so named because its parameters (like 'if=/dev/zero') take the form of IBM JCL 'DD' commands (p 70). These and other tidbits are best read during free moments, perhaps waiting for something to compile on a slow machine.

I think this work could be expanded to a full book if the author explained FreeBSD history beyond the launch of 386BSD. At lot has happened since the 1991 Dr Dobb's Journal articles cited by Montague. I would welcome seeing him describe the launch of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, as well as more recent innovations like Mac OS X, Darwin, and DragonFly. I would also like to see him analyze the publication of the The 1994 USL-Regents of UCal Settlement Agreement published by Groklaw.

Bruce Montague's work is available through Trifusil Publishing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more