On Sun, 15 Aug 1999, Jason Thorpe wrote:

> On Sat, 14 Aug 1999 23:56:01 -0700 (PDT) 
>  "David A. Gatwood" <dgatwood@mvista.com> wrote:
> 
>  > They pretty much ripped a standard BSD license.  It's Mach, which is a BSD
>  > derivative.  They didn't have much choice, really.  Everything coded based
> 
> Mach is *not* a BSD derivative.

According to http://perso.club-internet.fr/levenez/unix/ the original Mach
was, in fact, largely derived from 4.2 BSD.  However, derivative is a bit
of an oversimplification.

The BSD and Mach development is closely intertwined.  For example,
NetBSD's old VM was, AFAIK, Mach VM, and last I knew, FreeBSD still used
Mach VM.

OSFMach's device driver interface is, IIRC, a derivative of that of the
BSD unices (though they have diverged greatly since), and OSF Mach is even
more closely interrelated, in that the PowerMac port contains more code
ripped from NetBSD and FreeBSD than actually written by OSF or Apple.

None of the device driver stuff, is technically part of the Mach Kernel,
though, but part of a device server, if I'm remembering correctly.  So,
technically, a better wording would be that the device handling layer that
most frequently sits on top of Mach, and that which MkLinux uses, is
BSD-derived. :-)


Here's a good description, from  http://www.rit.edu/~kjk2135/MACH.html

   About the time Rashid was looking to create MACH, the US Department of
   Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was looking for a
   distributed operating system. The first version of MACH was created in
   1986 on a VAX 11/784 processor (a four CPU processor). The MACH
   project intentionally became compatible with Berkeley UNIX by
   combining MACH and 4.2BSD. Subsequently MACH was placed in the hands
   of the Open Software Foundation, a consortium of companies including
   IBM, DEC, and Hewlett Packard, with the release of MACH 2.5. In
   response to the fact that the MACH kernel was large and unwieldy, the
   MACH kernel was detached from the BSD code in 1989. What remained was
   a kernel of pure MACH called version 3.0. It is this version upon
   which future OSF releases were made.


So yes, and no.  :-)


David