At  4:12 3/19/94 -0500, Keenan Brock wrote:
>While the subject of Mach is in the air.
>
>Don't forget that MachMac is being distributed for the mac.  You have to
>have 5 licenses to get it but you get the source and all..  I don't have
>the money to get those licenses but Im sure NetBSD and Mach have found a
>way to use non ATT code.
>
>just a thought
>
>Keenan Brock
>(Planning on getting PPC MachTen)

One can read the following from one of these MacMach files:
===========
MacMach is available for immediate distribution to anyone holding a current
BSD4.3 Unix license, for "personal use only".  Apple Computer Inc. reserves
all commercial rights to MacMach.  Carnegie Mellon University is distributing
MacMach via the Internet free of charge.  Send e-mail to "MACH@CS.CMU.EDU" to
request license forms and installation instructions for MacMach. A brief
description of the installation instructions can be FTP'ed from mach.cs.cmu.edu
as the file FAQ/MacMach_install.doc as user anonymous.

MacMach is currently unsupported.  There is a mailing list for discussion fo
technical issues relating to MacMach, "MACMACH@CS.CMU.EDU".  Send add/delete
requests to "MACMACH-REQUEST@CS.CMU.EDU".

PLEASE NOTE:
The "Unix" part of MacMach is BSD4.3 and requires the appropriate $license$.
This effectively limits recipients to associates of corporations and/or
universities who have BSD licenses and the prerequisite AT&T/USL Unix source
license.  If you are an individual who can not be covered by such a license,
you are out of luck.  CMU can not do binary-only distributions of Unix derived
code due to the conditions of our Educational Unix license.  The MacMach
license can be considered a site license.  Local administrators are allowed
to make multiple copies (under the contraints of your Unix license) after the
initial download from CMU.
===========

These damn BSD source licenses seem to be a real problem. It is in my
opinion especially vicious to bias in such a way against interested
individuals (who are in need of free software).

Is there any point for the Alice group to maybe try porting Mach3.0 to the
Mac and to run NetBSD on top of that ? It also seems that the whole GNU
project is really going for a Mach kernel, so it might be very advantageous
to stick as closely to that as possible.

How similar are the internals of the various operating systems when it gets
right down to the device dependent hardware-drivers ? For example, could
the SCSI driver or the console support that writes pixels into video RAM be
cleaved off from the NetBSD stuff and glued below the Mach kernel in a
fairly clean manner, or is all this a terrible mess ? (Obviously these
questions must come from a Greenhorn that has never peeked into kernel
sources. I apologize.)


Greetings
Markus Krummenacker



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