Parentage of BPF code in Linux

Parentage of BPF code in Linux

[John Sage]

[Non-subscriber: please cc on replies]

WRT to the SCO/IBM/Linux imbroglio, there was an interesting assertion
made on the Yahoo! Finance message board for SCOX, and I wondered if
anyone could shed some light.

The assertion is this:

"...among other things, the Berkeley Packet Filter code, which was
written by an independent developer for the Missouri School District,
licensed under the BSD license terms that never was part of SysV at
any time..."

When I made reference to man 4 bpf not mentioning anything/anyone
other than Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, and LBL, I was corrected and
told that the OP was refering to the BPF code within Linux, even
though that was done without mentioning Linux specifically :-/

Is this a true assertion: that "..the BPF code [in Linux] was
written..for the Missouri School District [sic]"?


TIA..


- John
-- 
10 print "Home"
20 print "Sweet"
30 goto 10

Re: Parentage of BPF code in Linux

[Matt Mackall]

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 11:10:02AM -0700, John Sage wrote:
> [Non-subscriber: please cc on replies]
> 
> WRT to the SCO/IBM/Linux imbroglio, there was an interesting assertion
> made on the Yahoo! Finance message board for SCOX, and I wondered if
> anyone could shed some light.
> 
> The assertion is this:
> 
> "...among other things, the Berkeley Packet Filter code, which was
> written by an independent developer for the Missouri School District,
> licensed under the BSD license terms that never was part of SysV at
> any time..."

There's a from-scratch reimplementation of BPF in Linux (called Linux
Socket Filter) by Jay Schulist in net/core/filter.c. And he appears to
have worked for the _Wisconsin_ school district at the time. A Google
search on "schulist filter wisconsin" reveals:

  Jay Schulist, a senior software engineer with Pleasanton,
  California's Bivio Networks says he wrote the 500 lines of code in
  1997 as part of a volunteer project for the Stevens Point Area
  Catholic Schools in Wisconsin. "I used it for helping a local school
  district in my home town to connect their old Apple Macintosh machines
  to the Internet," he said.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.

Re: Parentage of BPF code in Linux

[John Sage]

Matt:

On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 01:43:55PM -0500, Matt Mackall wrote:
> Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 13:43:55 -0500
> From: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
> To: John Sage <jsage@finchhaven.com>
> Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, netdev@oss.sgi.com
> Subject: Re: Parentage of BPF code in Linux
> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.28i
> 
> On Thu, Jul 01, 2004 at 11:10:02AM -0700, John Sage wrote:
> > [Non-subscriber: please cc on replies]
> > 
> > WRT to the SCO/IBM/Linux imbroglio, there was an interesting
> > assertion made on the Yahoo! Finance message board for SCOX, and I
> > wondered if anyone could shed some light.
> > 
> > The assertion is this:
> > 
> > "...among other things, the Berkeley Packet Filter code, which was
> > written by an independent developer for the Missouri School
> > District, licensed under the BSD license terms that never was part
> > of SysV at any time..."
> 
> There's a from-scratch reimplementation of BPF in Linux (called
> Linux Socket Filter) by Jay Schulist in net/core/filter.c. And he
> appears to have worked for the _Wisconsin_ school district at the
> time. A Google search on "schulist filter wisconsin" reveals:
> 
>   Jay Schulist, a senior software engineer with Pleasanton,
>   California's Bivio Networks says he wrote the 500 lines of code in
>   1997 as part of a volunteer project for the Stevens Point Area
>   Catholic Schools in Wisconsin. "I used it for helping a local
>   school district in my home town to connect their old Apple
>   Macintosh machines to the Internet," he said.

Interesting.

Thank you.

And there it is:

/*
 * Linux Socket Filter - Kernel level socket filtering
 *
 * Author:
 *     Jay Schulist <jschlst@samba.org>
 *
 * Based on the design of:
 *     - The Berkeley Packet Filter

/* snip */


The only other reference I've been able to find to this "Missouri
School District/BPF" meme was in a post to a ZDNet message board back
in November, 2003...


- John
-- 
10 print "Home"
20 print "Sweet"
30 goto 10