[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[John Day]

Taxpayer money is free.
So much for good old American capitalism.
State Socialism is much more effective  ;-)

> On Apr 23, 2026, at 17:31, Brian E Carpenter via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
>> Second, TCP/IP was free of cost.
> 
> This needs to be underlined. OSI packages were of course available but at eye-watering cost. I can't recall the exact numbers, but I remember looking into OSI/CLNP for Motorola 68000 microprocessors running the RMS68K operating system, and a site license was tens of kilodollars from some company in Santa Monica. They never had a chance. (I think that was in 1983.)
> 
> Regards/Ngā mihi
>   Brian Carpenter
> 
> On 24-Apr-26 08:54, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
>> Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>    	     	 		  	 I recall for example seeing a
>>> huge semi-truck filled with Sun workstations delivering to a Wall
>>> Street investment house.  The computer industry figured out that new
>>> characteristic of their marketplace, TCP became the effective
>>> Standard, regardless of what the official bodies said.
>> I was at Sun for a number of early years.  It was a bit obvious how Sun
>> standardized on TCP/IP.  First, TCP/IP was built into Berkeley UNIX,
>> which was the origin of SunOS.  It was there and it worked, and so we used
>> it in-house too ("eating our own dogfood" to ensure that it kept working
>> well).
>> Second, TCP/IP was free of cost.(*) Sun customers could buy third-party
>> products (some even resold by Sun) that implemented DECnet, SNA, X.25,
>> OSI, etc.  But they were all extra-cost products, and they typically
>> cost the customer hundreds or thousands of dollars for EVERY
>> WORKSTATION.  The percentage of customers who would pay that toll was
>> very small.
>> DARPA's contract to pay Berkeley to embed a working TCP/IP into the
>> freely available(*) Berkeley UNIX 4.3BSD distribution was certainly good
>> for driving TCP/IP acceptance among their academic research partners.
>> It had the perhaps unanticipated follow-on effect of driving the
>> acceptance of TCP/IP in the much broader commercial UNIX world that came
>> a very few years later.  Indeed, that story is a classic textbook
>> example of the power of freely available software to move markets in
>> positive directions for end-user benefit.(**)
>> 	John
>> (*) BSD was free of per-copy cost if you already had an AT&T UNIX
>> license.  Academic sites got very cheap source code licenses from AT&T.
>> Commercial companies paid a "UNIX tax" per copy shipped in binary.  But
>> since that tax was built into the purchase price of the workstation, and
>> since in its early years Sun didn't "unbundle" its OS, there was no
>> further customer cost for the Berkeley-added TCP/IP.  Much later, the
>> BSD OS had all of its AT&T-licensed parts removed and replaced, becoming
>> fully both free-of-cost and free-as-in-freedom.
>> (**) The BSD+TCP example informed my later business model when founding
>> Cygnus Support.  Cygnus drove the acceptance of the GNU C and C++
>> compilers in the 1990s, by providing commercial support, customer-funded
>> improvements, and a train of increasingly reliable and capable
>> free-as-in-freedom releases.  The result was that for a few decades they
>> became and remained the default C compilers throughout the non-Microsoft
>> portions of the whole computer industry.
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