CSRG archives

[RJack]

A couple of years ago I purchased a set of four CD-Roms called the CSRG
Archives:

"What's The Greatest Software Ever Written? In an article on August 14,
2006, Charles Babcock of InformationWeek concludes ``The single Greatest
Piece of Software Ever, with the broadest impact on the world, was BSD
4.3. Other Unixes were bigger commercial successes. But as the
cumulative accomplishment of the BSD systems, 4.3 represented an
unmatched peak of innovation. BSD 4.3 represents the single biggest
theoretical undergirder of the Internet. Moreover, the passion that
surrounds Linux and open source code is a direct offshoot of the ideas
that created BSD: a love for the power of computing and a belief that it
should be a freely available extension of man's intellectual powers--a
force that changes his place in the universe.''"
http://www.mckusick.com/csrg/

It is the complete set of distributions from the Computer Systems
Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley. The
compilation rights to these CD's belongs to Marshall Kirk McKusick, one
of the original BSD developers who shared an office with Bill Joy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Kirk_McKusick

"McKusick started with BSD by virtue of the fact that he shared an
office at Berkeley with Bill Joy, who in essence spearheaded the
beginnings of the BSD system. . . The well-known daemon image, often
used to identify BSD, is copyrighted by Marshall Kirk McKusick"

Before anyone starts filing copyright infringement claims concerning
the vast quntity of unix and posix-like  source code modules out there
in cyberspace they  should run a utility like Eric Raymond's code
comparator against the CSRG code. It may open some eyes concerning
the true original creators of source modules in things unix-like.
BusyBox code included.

Sincerely,
RJack :)