More interesting comments from Dave Hitz, founder and executive vice president of NetApp. I found these comments yesterday, 3/16/2005 on Toasters.

Dave Hitz writes:

Although NetApp’s OS looks nothing like BSD (it has no user space for instance, and a very different internal structure from any UNIX kernel), we certainly did use a good bit of code from the Net/2 and BSD-lite releases, back when that was being mostly funded by Berkeley and DARPA.

As Luke says, we used the TCP/IP stack. Also the boot and locore code for both Intel and Alpha. And although we don’t have a user space for commands to run in, we did take chunks of user space code in commands like “ping” and “ifconfig” and massage them into kernel code. I don’t know the specifics, but I’d be surprised if we hadn’t found more stuff to borrow over the years.

I confess that we haven’t made any dollar contributions, although if you look at the code contributions I think you’ll find that Guy Harris (also of NetApp) and myself were both early contributors. For instance, I contributed cp(1). (When I was done, “cp -R” was a good bit faster than the AT&T version. Instead of doing the copy for a directory in a single pass, I scanned the directory twice, doing files on the first pass and directories on the second. This optimized for the fact that in FFS files in a directory tend to end up in the same cylindar group, so doing the files all together reduces disk seeks.)

So at the time, we figured that we gave some code, and took some code —
call it even-Steven. 🙂

Not that I would object if we found a way to make a corporate contribution. We have made some source contributions to Linux, and I’ve personally made some contributions to Mozilla, so we are definitely fans of the open source movement.

Dave Hitz