[MiNT] MiNTs direction.

[Sven Karlsson <svenka@it.kth.se>]

Hi Frank,

> Oh, your totally forgot the BSD variants: traditionally BSD 4.4 and the
> modern variants NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD (especially the FreeBSD guys do
> very interesting things); Linux and at least you can get the Solaris 8
> Source now too from Sun.

Not at all. None of these are strictly speaking AT&T UNIX although I
believe the BSD crowd made some kind of deal with AT&T some time ago
regarding exchange of source code. I don't have the details but I belive
McKusick mentions all that in his seminar series which is on video tape.

Still you cannot look at the original UNIX code without the UNIX
licence, you can only look at some others' interpretation of UNIX
although Solaris should be very close to UNIX sys V.

Nevermind, this isn't very important. The point I'm trying to make is
that UNIX is not as open as people might think and the fact that it
might be difficult to get the source code shouldn't stop anyone from
stealing or borrowing good ideas from other systems or applications as
long as copyright and patent laws aren't violated. BSD would never have
gotten this far without looking over the fence from time to time.

A valid question is the intention of FreeMiNT in particular. As far as I
have gathered from Eric his original intention was never to turn TOS
into a UNIX but rather make it possible to compile and use UNIX
applications on TOS in cooperation with TOS applications. And that is
exactly what I find interesting with MiNT. The freedom of not being a
strict UNIX but rather incoporate the best ideas from other systems to
make TOS better.

Frank and Konrad, what are your intentions? Are there others working on
the kernel? What are their intentions?

Regards
 Sven