www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index.html -> dir.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index.html
If the 21-year-old programming wunderkind had glanced at the headlines blasting out of the local alternative weeklies, he might have wondered just what kind of insane mess he had gotten himself into. In San Francisco, Patty Hearst was on trial for a bank robbery committed while the newspaper heiress was toting machine guns for the Symbionese Liberation Army. In Oakland, the Weather Underground botched a bombing of a Defense Department building. Even the reliable bugaboo of CIA recruitment on the University of California's Berkeley campus failed to generate more than a token protest. Berkeley was burned out, its radical energy wasting away in infantile terrorism, conspiracy theorizing and drug overdoses. The 44 Free Speech Movement that had galvanized the university in the '60s belonged to another geological age. Ken Thompson, co-creator of the Unix operating system, graduated from Berkeley in 1966 with a degree in electrical engineering. He returned to the university from Bell Labs for a sabbatical in 1975. But the campus on which he had once walked to class through clouds of tear gas had changed. During his seven years at Berkeley, Joy and a few other graduate students and staff researchers spearheaded an intensive software development effort that culminated, most famously, in a radically improved version of AT&T's Unix, known simply as Berkeley Unix or, more commonly, as BSD, 46 * for Berkeley Software Distribution. Berkeley Unix worked so well that DARPA 47 * chose it to be the preferred "universal computing environment" linking together Arpanet 48 * research nodes, thus setting in place an essential piece of infrastructure for the later growth of the Internet. An entire generation of computer scientists cut their teeth on Berkeley Unix. Without it, the Net might well have evolved into a shape similar to what it is today, but with it, the Net exploded. How did the small group of Berkeley programmers pull off such a feat? Well, for one thing, there was Joy, a programmer around whom legends accrue like so many iron filings stuck to a magnet. Berkeley's most important contribution was not software; At Berkeley, a small core group -- never more than four people at any one time -- coordinated the contributions of an ever-growing network of far-flung, mostly volunteer programmers into progressive releases of steadily improving software. Joy sold it, with the University of California's blessing, at a nominal cost only to people or institutions that had already purchased licenses permitting them access to the source code of AT&T Unix (although, in practice, Joy's efforts to verify whether would-be buyers really did own licenses may not have been overly vigorous). But in spirit, Berkeley Unix was indeed free: As Dennis Ritchie, Thompson's collaborator in creating Unix, observes, anyone who wanted to hack on Unix usually had access to the source code, one way or another. And if those hackers sent their modifications to Berkeley, and they were deemed good enough, they became part of a code base maintained by programmers who wanted nothing more than for their software to be widely used, for as low a cost as possible. Berkeley Unix has morphed through multiple phase shifts since its inception some 20 years ago, from the Joy-dominated era of the late '70s and early '80s to the more collaborative period that began after Joy's departure to Sun in 1982. But in the early '90s, after a bitter confrontation with AT&T, BSD finally did 51 become "freely redistributable," and descendants of BSD -- led by FreeBSD, 52 * but also including OpenBSD 53 * and NetBSD 54 * -- are vigorous participants in the contemporary battle for operating-system supremacy. Yahoo, arguably the world's busiest Web site, runs on FreeBSD. And yet, despite its proud heritage, BSD's current status doesn't quite match up to its early fame. A victim of schisms within its own developer community, bruised by the battle with AT&T and wounded by the defection of Joy to Sun, BSD is currently a small player, especially as compared with Linux. Linux-based operating systems have seized the public imagination. BSD patriots argue that the battle is far from over, that BSD is technically superior and will therefore win in the end. Even if, by 1975, Berkeley's Free Speech Movement was a relic belonging to a fast-fading generation, on the fourth floor of Evans Hall, where Joy shared an office, the free-software movement was just beginning. The connection between the two movements is clear, if not direct. By demonstrating the power of cooperative software development, and by strengthening the software backbone of the Internet so it could further nurture such development, BSD helped enable the creation of a medium that will do more to spread free speech than anything hitherto constructed.
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