On 17 Jan, James Howard wrote:
> I was sitting here reading the histories of FreeBSD and NetBSD and trying
> to make sense of it all.  Both split off from 386BSD in 1993.  That much
> everyone seems to agree on.  As near as I can tell, FreeBSD split in
> mid-1993 and NetBSD in earler 1993.  But why didn't the FreeBSD group just
> become a 385-militant wing of the NetBSD development effort?  Why was a
> different project needed?
> 
Actually at that time NetBSD was the militant wing.
386BSD, and I believe I was the last hold out for it, biggest problem
was the authors themselves. While the are extremely talented people
the times were filled with much mistrust.

Some facts:

An offical patch-kit run by many of the members of FreeBSD was the
pre-cursor to both FreeBSD and NetBSD, as well as OpenBSD.
At one time everyone worked on 386BSD, but again, as you'll
find on many history articles the authors were very un-responsive.

When NetBSD broke off it was considered militant. The was partly
because Chris Demitrious did not get along with people. Other people
were upset becuase their patches (submissions to the patchkit effort)
were not accept. There was much ill feelings. Chris is now a different
person, I think he learned things. Those other peoples are now
the core team at NetBSD.

Theo de Raadt was the most militant, hence the hard-line at OpenBSD.
NetBSD people, as they tell it, just want Theo to not yell at people.
He considered it censorship (see recent DDJ article).

Many other fact worked their way in. Aside from the stuff I've 
mentioned, there is still lots of ill feelings towards the authors
of 386BSD. Another factor is BSDi. Many individual (most not now
at BSDi) actually started rumors and incited mis-trust. 
AT&T also added pressure at the time by claiming Unix was a
National (treasure??) and therefore should be consider un-exportable.
This in a similar way as we have controls over munitions.
This notion was defeated in the courts, but by an out-of-court
settlement. Part of the settlement did not allow anyone
to talk about it.

AT&T sold Unix to Novell for $1 Billion dollars in the middle
of this and in reallity it was Novell that settled. BTW, this
$1B almost bankrupted(sp?) Novell.

There is more to this story, but let's wait for the denials
to come in first. :-)

				Jessem.