From andreww591 at gmail.com Wed Jul 7 15:19:37 2021 From: andreww591 at gmail.com (Andrew Warkentin) Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2021 23:19:37 -0600 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view In-Reply-To: <20210707025244.GO10781@mcvoy.com> References: <06737C14-1122-4832-BCAA-A37B242F69E4@me.com> <20210707025244.GO10781@mcvoy.com> Message-ID: On 06/07/2021, Larry McVoy wrote: > > http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0106.2/0405.html > > I wasn't completely right 20 years ago but I was close. I'm tired, > if you want to know where I'm wrong, ask and I'll tell you how I > tried to get Linus to fix it. > > In general, Rob was on point. He usually is. > I've never been a fan of clone(). It always strikes me as something that seems like an elegant simplification at first, but the practical realization (on Linux that is) requires several rather ugly library-level hacks to make it work right for typical use cases. UX/RT will use the "processes are containers for threads" model rather than rfork()/clone() since that's the model the seL4 kernel basically uses (in a very generalized form with address spaces , capability spaces, and threads being separate objects and each thread being associated with a capability space and address space), and it would also be slightly easier to create the helper threads that will be required in certain parts of the IPC transport layer. The base process creation primitive (efork(), for "empty/eviscerated fork") will create a completely blank non-runnable child process with no memory mappings or file descriptors, and return a context FD that the parent can use to manipulate the state of the child with normal APIs, including copying FDs and memory mappings. To actually start the child the parent will perform an exec*() within the child context (either a regular exec*() to make the child run a different program, or a new eexec() function that takes an entry point rather than a command line to run the process with whatever memory mappings were set up), after which point the parent will no longer be able to manipulate the child's state. This will eliminate the overhead of fork() for spawning processes running other programs, but will still allow for a library-level fork() implementation that has comparable overhead to traditional implementations. Also, it will do what Plan 9 never did and make the process/memory APIs file-oriented (I still don't get why Plan 9 went with a rather limited anonymous memory API rather than using memory-mapped files for everything). Also, we're straying a bit from historical Unix here and should have probably moved to COFF several messages ago. From clemc at ccc.com Thu Jul 15 01:01:58 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 11:01:58 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <213a4c11-3ab2-4b4a-8d6b-b52105a19711@localhost> Message-ID: Sigh ... Warren I am going to ask for your indulgence once here on TUHS as I try to get any *new* discussion moved to COFF, but I guess it's time to renew this history as enough people have joined the list since the last time this was all discussed ... I'll do this once -- please take any other discussion off this list. It has been argued too many times. Many of the actors in this drama are part of the list. Sadly we have lost a few, sometimes because of the silliness of the argument/trying to give people credit or not/person preferences, etc. If you want to comment, please go back and read both the TUHS and COFF archives and I suspect your point may have already been made. *If you really do have something new, please move to COFF.* On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 4:21 AM Angus Robinson wrote: > Looking at a few online sources, Linus actually said when "386BSD came > out, Linux was already in a usable state, that I never really thought about > switching. If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux > would probably never had happened". > A number of us, such as Larry and I have discussed this a bunch both online and in person. What would become 386BSD was actually available as early as 1988, but you needed to know the public FTP address of where to get it at UCB (which the UCB licensees had access to that FTP server). Bostic was still working on what would become the 'NET' release, but this tarball offered a bootable system and did have things in it that later AT&T would require UCB to remove. In fact, this system would have X10 ported to it and was a reasonably complete 'distro' in today's terms. By formal definition, the tarball and the rest of UNIX from Research is and always has been, '*Open Source*' in the sources were available. *But they were licensed*. This was fairly typical of much early software BTW. The binary nature only came about with the minicomputers. The tarball in question was fairly easy to find in the wild but to use the sources as a system, you technically needed an AT&T license. An practically you needed access to a BSD box to rebuild them, which took a license - although by then SunOS was probably close enough - although I do not know anyone that tried it. The sources in the tarball were not '*Free and Open Source*' -- which becomes the crux of the issue. [Sadly the OSS folks have confused this over the years and that important detail is lost]. Many people, such as myself, when the AT&T suite began got worried and started hacking on Linux at that point as the not nearly as mature but sort of works version without networking or graphics had appeared [386BSD had both and a real installer - more in a minute] FWIW: Linus could have had access to the BSD for a 386 tarball if we had asked in the right place. But as he has said later in time, he wanted to write his own OS and did not both ask the right folks at his University, or try to get permission. Although he has said he access to Sun3 and has said that was his impetus for his work. This is an important point that Larry reminds us of, many institutions kept the sources locked away like his U of Wis. Other places were like liberal about access. IIRC Larry sometimes refers to it as the "UNIX Club." In my own case, I was running what would become 386BSD on my Wyse 32:16 box at home and on an NCR 386 based system in Clemson as I was consulting for them at the time. I also helped Bill with the PC/AT disk driver[WD1003 and later WD7000/SCSI controllers], as I had access to the docs from WD which Bill did not. I think I still have a photocopy of them. What basically happened is as BSDi forked and that begets a number of things, from hurt feelings to a famous law suite. A number of us, thought the latter was about copyright (we were wrong it was about trade secret). We were worried that the AT&T copyright would cause UNIX for an inexpensive processor to disappear. We >>thought<< (incorrectly) that the copyright that Linux was using, the GPL, would save us. Turns out >>legally<< it would not have, if AT&T had won, at least in the USA and most NATO Allies - the trade secret applied to all implementations of Ken, Dennis, and the rest of the BTL folk's ideas. All of the Unix-like systems were in violation at this point. BSDi/UCB was where AT&T started. The problem is that while the court found that AT&T did create and own the >>ideas<< (note ideas are not the source code implementation of the ideas), they could not call the UNIX 'IP', trade secrets since the AT&T people published them all both academically in books like Maury Bach's, much less they had been forced by the 1956 consent decree to make the license available, they had taught an industry. BTW: It's not just software, the transistor 'gets out' of AT&T under the same type of rules. In reality, like PGP, since there was lots of UNIX-based IP in other places, it hard to see in practice how AT&T could have enforced the trade secret. But again -- remember Charlie Brown (AT&T CEO) wants to go after IBM, thinking the big money in computers in the mainframe. So they did believe that they could exert pressure on UNIX-like systems for the higher end, and they might have been able to enforce that. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tytso at mit.edu Thu Jul 15 03:40:53 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 13:40:53 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <213a4c11-3ab2-4b4a-8d6b-b52105a19711@localhost> Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 11:01:58AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > By formal definition, the tarball and the rest of UNIX from Research is and > always has been, '*Open Source*' in the sources were available. *But they > were licensed*. This was fairly typical of much early software BTW. The > binary nature only came about with the minicomputers. It may have been "Open Source" by your definition, but there is a very specific definition of "Open Source(tm)" and it has always been, from the beginning, defined to mean code licensed under terms which meet the Open Source Definition[1] (OSD). The AT&T license, for better or for worse does not mean the terms of the OSD. [1] https://opensource.org/osd > The sources in the tarball were not '*Free and Open Source*' -- which > becomes the crux of the issue. [Sadly the OSS folks have confused this > over the years and that important detail is lost]. Hardly. "Free and Open Source" (FOSS) is a term which developed *after* the the term "Open Source" was coined and trademarked. That term was not created by the "OSS folks", but by people who were trying the solve a political problem. The GPL meets the definition of the Open Source Definition, so GPL-licensed software is "Open Source(tm)". But Stallman objected to that usage, preferring his terminology "Free Software" on the grounds that it came first. So FOSS was a compromise to keep the FSF partisan happy. But to take this back to TUHS, sorry, no code which falls under AT&T License can be called "Open Source(tm)". If AT&T were still trying to sell Unix under its original terms including the AT&T Unpublished Trade Secret "all your student's minds belong to us" license, and tried to claim that Unix was "Open Source", the Open Source Initiative could sue AT&T for trademark infringement. If you must, you could try to claim that AT&T was "Source Available" --- which is a terminology I've seen some used. But I think your assumptions of how easily the AT&T License could be obtained, and how "anyone who wanted it could get it" may be looking at the past with rose-colored classes. Cheers, - Ted From lm at mcvoy.com Thu Jul 15 03:50:53 2021 From: lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 10:50:53 -0700 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <213a4c11-3ab2-4b4a-8d6b-b52105a19711@localhost> Message-ID: <20210714175053.GC15842@mcvoy.com> On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 01:40:53PM -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > If you must, you could try to claim that AT&T was "Source Available" > --- which is a terminology I've seen some used. But I think your > assumptions of how easily the AT&T License could be obtained, and how > "anyone who wanted it could get it" may be looking at the past with > rose-colored classes. Clem was in "the club". I do remember those times, barely, I was a bit too young to have a clear view of things. But it certainly seemed like some Universities made the source pretty available. UW Madison was not one of those, I had to beg and plead to get access to the source. So Clem's memory is fine, his experience was you could get the source. But that wasn't the universal experience at all, and I agree with Ted that just getting access to the source doesn't make it remotely open source. From clemc at ccc.com Thu Jul 15 04:28:37 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 14:28:37 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <213a4c11-3ab2-4b4a-8d6b-b52105a19711@localhost> Message-ID: On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 1:40 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 11:01:58AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > By formal definition, the tarball and the rest of UNIX from Research is > and > > always has been, '*Open Source*' in the sources were available. *But > they > > were licensed*. This was fairly typical of much early software BTW. The > > binary nature only came about with the minicomputers. > Please don't go here (again). Yes, it has been trademarked, but the official trademarked term is different from reality --> just like the guy that got a copyright for email and claims to have invented it. People were 'open sourcing' software before you and I were born. They just did not have a name for it - thank you. The real 'father' of Open Source as we think of it today was Prof Don Pederson and his Industrial Liaison Office (ILO) of the EE Dept of UCB in the late 1960s -- long before rms, et al. As 'dop' used to say, I give everything away because then I go in the back door, not the front door like a salesman. MIT/CMU/Stanford et al we often licensing their work. In many ways, CMU and Stanford were two of the worst. The ILO gave away all its products. We would not have the current electronics industry without the work dop and his students produced. As I have also pointed in other email tapes like the original, '1BSD' was managed and distributed by the ILO because dop had set of the infrastructure 10-15 years earlier to send out mag tapes and other IP to 'interested parties.' Yes, computer networks changed the distribution and access medium, but please refrain from trying to rewrite history. The GNU project and FOSS movement that was created took the idea and advanced it, making use of better ways of communicating the ideas, removing the academic clubiness as Larry suggested. Larry is right, if you were a peer organization or maybe a patron of same, getting source was possible. As rms noted, at some point the sources to things go harder and harder to get access. ITS, WAITS, and even CTSS were all written at a time when you go from IBM and DEC their sources - typically on 7 or 9 track mag-tape and were usually available on microfiche. You also got the circuit schematics too. Local modifications to both HW and SW were normal. But starting with the Minis this began to change and it started to get harder and harder. SW started being a revenue source for those companies -- DEC in particular, so they started to be hold back the sources. The rest is history... Folks like rms objected because the behavior they were used to had changed and he and people like him, could do nothing about it. So he created the Gnu project to compete with those commercial products. But just like have been getting 'email' since the late 1960s/early 1970s on my computers, it was not named. Someone body claimed the name later. But the function was old. The same is for sharing software written and given away, now we have a name and a way to describe the behavior. Cheers Clem ᐧ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cowan at ccil.org Thu Jul 15 06:03:48 2021 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:03:48 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <213a4c11-3ab2-4b4a-8d6b-b52105a19711@localhost> Message-ID: [-TUHS] On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 1:41 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > If AT&T were still trying to > sell Unix under its original terms including the AT&T Unpublished > Trade Secret "all your student's minds belong to us" license, and > tried to claim that Unix was "Open Source", the Open Source Initiative > could sue AT&T for trademark infringement. > "Open Source" has never been an OSI trademark, possibly because "open source" is a technical term for intelligence whose source is publicly available, such as books, newspapers, and magazines. OSI's trademarks are "OSI", "Open Source Initiative", and the green logo. "Open Source" was applied for by Software in the Public Interest as a certification mark signifying compliance with the OSD in 1998, but was abandoned the following year. The term is also an (irrelevant because non-conflicting) trademark for an Irish company for "research and consultancy services in the field of sustainable food and drink product development" and "whey protein for use as an emulsifier or binding agent in food", and for a New York company for "muzzle brakes that screw onto a rifle barrel". > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From michael at kjorling.se Thu Jul 15 16:33:14 2021 From: michael at kjorling.se (Michael =?utf-8?B?S2rDtnJsaW5n?=) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 06:33:14 +0000 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <7wtukxtgag.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On 14 Jul 2021 22:21 -0400, from douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy): > IBM provided source code for the Fortran II compiler. More recently than that, for the original IBM PC anyone could get (I believe) the complete schematics, detailed technical information, and a commented ROM BIOS source code listing just by purchasing their Technical Reference for, what, $50 or thereabouts? It certainly wasn't open source according to the Open Source Definition, but it certainly was _available_ to anyone who wanted a copy. What kind of company does that today, in a similar market segment? -- Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?” From clemc at ccc.com Fri Jul 16 01:07:10 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 11:07:10 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thank you, Doug. On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 10:22 PM Douglas McIlroy < douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote: > The open source movement was a revival of the old days of SHARE and other > user groups. > Amen, my basic point, although I was also trying to pointing at that these user groups got started b*ecause the vendors gave the sources to their products out.* We SHARED patches and features. DECUS started out the same way. For instance, many/most PDP-10 OS's used the DEC compilers and often even found a way to run TOPS-10 binaries by emulating the UUOs. The IBM/360 world worked pretty much the same way. My own experience was that the compilers (e.g WATFIV-FTNG-ALGOLW-PL/1) and language interpreters (APL-Snolbol) for the TSS and MTS had been 'ported' from the IBM-supplied OS [my own first job was doing just that]. The same story was true for the PDP-8 with DOS-8/TSS-8 and the like. By the time of the PDP-11, while some of the DEC source code was available (such as the Fortran-IV for RT-11/RSX), since it took at PDP-10/BLISS to support it, DEC had it its protection - so moving it/stealing it - would have been harder. By the time of the VAX, DEC was charging a lot of money of SW and it was actually a revenue stream, so they keep a lot more locked up and had started to do the same with PDP-10 world. So, the available/unavailable source issue came when things started to get closed up, which really started with the rise of the SW industry and making revenue with the use of your SW. OEMs and IVSs started to be a lot less willing to reveal what they thought was their 'special sauce.' Some/many end-users started to balk. RMS just took it to a new level - just look at how he reacted to Symbolics being closed source :-) The question that used to come up (and still does not an extent) is how are the engineers and teams of people that developed the SW going to be paid/renumerated for their work? The RMS/GNU answer had been service revenue [and living like a student in a rent-controlled APT in Central Sq]. What has happened for most of the biggest FOSS projects, the salaries are paid for firms like my own that pay developers to work on the SW and most FOSS projects die when the developer/maintainer is unable to continue (if not just gets bored). In fact, [I can not say I personally know this - but have read internal memos that make the claim], Intel pays for more Linux developers and now LLVM developers than any firm. What's interesting is that Intel does not really directly sell its HW product to end-users. We sell to others than use our chips to make their products. We have finally moved to the support model for the compilers (I've personally been fighting that battle for 15 years). So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the *idea *of "Open Source" is really not anything new. While it may be new in their lifetime/experience, it is frankly at minimum a sad, if not outright disingenuous, statement for the people to try to imply otherwise because they are unwilling to look back into history and understand, much less accept it as a fact. Trying to rewrite history is just not pretty to witness. And I am pleased to see that a few folks (like Larry) that have lived a little both times have tried to pass the torch with more complete history. Clem. ᐧ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tytso at mit.edu Fri Jul 16 05:33:48 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 15:33:48 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 11:07:10AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > In fact, [I can not say I personally know this - but have read internal > memos that make the claim], Intel pays for more Linux developers and now > LLVM developers than any firm. What's interesting is that Intel does not > really directly sell its HW product to end-users. We sell to others than > use our chips to make their products. We have finally moved to the > support model for the compilers (I've personally been fighting that battle > for 15 years). That claim is probably from the data collected from the Linux Foundation, which publishes these stats every year or two. The most recent one is here: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020_kernel_history_report_082720.pdf The top ten organizations responsible for commits from 2007 -- 2019: (None) 11.95% Intel 10.01% Red Hat 8.90% (Unknown) 4.09% IBM 3.79% SuSE 3.49% Linaro 3.17% (Consultant) 2.96% Google 2.79% Samsung 2.58% "None" means no organizational affiliation (e.g., hobbyists, students, etc.) "Unknown" means the organization affiliation couldn't be determined. For more recent data, if you look at the commits for the 5.10 release (end of 2020), the top ten list by organizations looks like this: Huawei 8.9% Intel 8.0% (Unknown) 6.6% (None) 4.9% Red Hat 5.7% Google 5.2% AMD 4.3% Linaro 4.1% Samsung 3.5% IBM 3.2% For the full list and more stats, see: https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ > So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the *idea > *of "Open Source" is really not anything new. I do think there is something which is radically new --- which is that it's not a single company publishing all of the source code for a particular OS, whether it's System/360 or the PDP-8 Disk Operating System, or whatever. In other words, it's the shared nature of the collaboration, which partially solves the question of "who pays" --- the answer is, "lots of companies, and they do so when it makes business sense for them to do so". Intel may have had the largest number of contributions to Linux historically --- but that was still 10%, and it was eclipsed by people with no organizational affliation, and in the 5.10 kernel Huawei slightly edged out Intel with 8.9% vs 8.0% contributions. I completely agree with you that one of the key questions is the business case issue. Not only who pays, but how do they justify the software investment to the bean counters? Of course, the "Stone Soup" story predates computers, so this certainly isn't a new business model. And arguably the X Window Systems and the Open Software Foundation also had a similar model where multiple companies contributed to a common codebase, with perhaps mixed levels of success. The thing which Linux has managed to achieve, however, is the fact that there is a large and diverse base of corporate contributions. That to me is what makes the Linux model so interesting, and has been a reason for its long-term sustainability. Other companies may have been making their source code availble, but the underlying business model behind their "source available" practices was quite different. Cheers, - Ted From clemc at ccc.com Fri Jul 16 06:30:15 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 16:30:15 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:33 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the > *idea > > *of "Open Source" is really not anything new. > > I do think there is something which is radically new --- which is that > it's not a single company publishing all of the source code for a > particular OS, whether it's System/360 or the PDP-8 Disk Operating > System, or whatever. Ted - that *is what* Doug pointed out!!! They did not create anything that was new. SHARED / DECUS / USENIX and the like were providing that exact same function starting in the late 1950s!!! Companies and Universities all pooled their resources to make things better and to get new and improved solutions. Sometimes they started with things that come from the original OEM. Also often they created their own technology and made it available to everyone. Sometime they combine both. And it was a 'bazaar where everyone had access and you chose to use it to not. Sounds pretty familiar, BTW. What >>has<< changed (dramatically) was the *method* and *ability* to *distribute* your work and/or the manner you *obtained* someone else's efforts. Today we download via the Web (much less ftp from a public area), which is much more convenient than becoming a member of an organization and having to obtain (typically for a small $50-$100 trape copying fee) a 9-track distribution tape. But even the concept of 'free' is really not new as I said. Things like UCB's ILO used that model for a long time. MIT, CMU, Stanford, Univerity of Waterloo, Cambridge, et al, just made their work to any interested parties. But due to the new way of being *interconnected *and a *much better distribution scheme* that indeed is a huge feature. But please understand 'open source and collective sharing/working together is not a new thing that just appeared with the Gnu project and was accelerated and taken to a new level with the Linux work. I personally blame esr's book for that beginning of the rewriting of history/kicking the previous generations in the shins, as readers of it, or worse readers of summations of it, miss the big picture instead of the reality of standing on other shoulders. I do want to give create for the cool and important things that have come. I just want to make sure we don't forget the success of the modern world is 100% dependent on two important things: moore's law to make things more economic and the hard work of a lot of people that came before (now and before me for that matter). ᐧ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dfawcus+lists-coff at employees.org Fri Jul 16 06:44:40 2021 From: dfawcus+lists-coff at employees.org (Derek Fawcus) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 21:44:40 +0100 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <7wtukxtgag.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 06:33:14AM +0000, Michael Kjörling wrote: > On 14 Jul 2021 22:21 -0400, from douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu (Douglas McIlroy): > > IBM provided source code for the Fortran II compiler. > > More recently than that, for the original IBM PC anyone could get (I > believe) the complete schematics, detailed technical information, and > a commented ROM BIOS source code listing just by purchasing their > Technical Reference for, what, $50 or thereabouts? Not just the original PC, I recall having access to the PC-AT version at work a number of years ago. I've no idea what it cost. DF From tytso at mit.edu Fri Jul 16 11:58:53 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 21:58:53 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 04:30:15PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > Ted - that *is what* Doug pointed out!!! They did not create anything that > was new. SHARED / DECUS / USENIX and the like were providing that exact > same function starting in the late 1950s!!! Companies and Universities all > pooled their resources to make things better and to get new and improved > solutions. Sometimes they started with things that come from the > original OEM. Also often they created their own technology and made it > available to everyone. Sometime they combine both. And it was a > 'bazaar where everyone had access and you chose to use it to not. Sounds > pretty familiar, BTW. I remember looking at the DECUS program catalog for the PDP-8, and I seem to recall that for the most part, individuals were sharing their programs with others. In that way, it wasn't all that different from say, CPM/UG, and HUG (Heathkit Users Group). But the thing is, for the most part, it was a single author sharing individual programs, and often changes were not accepted back. Consider the history of Bill Jolitz and 386BSD, and the collection of patches that eventuallya became NetBSD and FreeBSD, which was formed because they were frustrated that they couldn't get their patch sets back into Jolitz's code base. Technology plays a part, in that it enables the change. But it's not just about technology. There is also a very strong social component. Even when you were richly interconnected at the network level, this does not guarantee that will be willing to be richly interconnected in terms of accepting patch sets from people who you may not know across the Internet, into *your* program, for which you are the author and high priest. I don't remember the exact date, but it would have been in the early 90's, when at the time I was already contributing patches to Linux, and where ftp and e-mail and applying patches via context diffs was very much available. At that time, we were interested in getting support for MIT Project Athena's Hesiod extenstions into the BIND distributions (we had just been carrying patches against BIND for many years). In order to get those patches integrated, Paul Vixie invited me to his house in Redwood City, and so I flew from Boston to San Francisco, carrying my Linux laptop with the BIND patches, and we got the patches integrated into master BIND sources. Paul was a gracious host, and it was lovely that I got to spend some time with him. But it was interesting that my physical presence was needed, or at least highly useful, in terms of getting those patches into BIND. Requiring physical presence to get patches integrated.... doesn't scale. And so it wasn't a matter of technology, since the technology for Linus, who didn't know me from Adam in 1991, to accept patches from me implementing BSD Job Control, was certainly available when I was working with Paul to get the Hesiod changes integrated into BIND. But like with Jolitz and 386BSD, it's a mindset thing, not just technology. I also want to emphasize again, the question of business model is also something which I think is different, and *important*. It's one thing for Academics and Researchers to be willing to give changes away to anyone who wants. It's quite another for a company to give away their intellectual property in such a way that it can actually be used by their competitors, either because that's the social convention, or because it's enforced by the license. Was the practices we use today for Linux built on the traditions of comp.sources.unix, and BSD, and AT&T Research, and IBM making sources available for System/360, yadda, yadda, yadda? Of course! I'm not denying that. But at the same time, to claim that nothing is new under the Sun, and *all* of this had been done decades earlier, is also not the whole story. And to call IBM releasing System/360, when they retained control of the license, and wasn't accepting any changes back, and *darned* well would have sued anyone trying to use that code on non-IBM computers into a smoking crater, as "Open Source" can be highly misleading, because that is not what most people associate with the term "Open Source" today. And if we take a look at what AT&T Lawyers did with the Unix source code, at some point, it most *defintely* was the antithesis of "Open Source". Which would lead me to assert that Unix was never really released under what today we would call, "Open Source". Cheers, - Ted From lars at nocrew.org Sat Jul 17 01:59:53 2021 From: lars at nocrew.org (Lars Brinkhoff) Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 15:59:53 +0000 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view) In-Reply-To: (John Floren's message of "Fri, 16 Jul 2021 15:28:22 +0000") References: <7w8s26pst6.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: <7wh7guntae.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Moved to the COFF list. > Yes, WAITS is what I was thinking of. As I mentioned in my previous > mail, it feels like the SAIL timesharing systems get mentioned briefly > in a lot of accounts of historical computing, sometimes with mention > that they had some sort of (relatively) advanced video terminals, but > no in-depth descriptions of the actual hardware/software environment. I agree WAITS gets very little attention, particularly in relation to the great number of things pioneered at SAIL. I'm involved making emulators for some of the hardware. SAIL started out with a couple PDP-1 timesharing systems with vector displays from Philco. But that's almost a pre historical era. The PDP-6/10 started with another vector system from III. It could support up to 12 displays, but only ever had 6. A raster display system was added in the early 70s. It must have been one of the very first bitmapped display systems. It came from the Data Disc company and used disk for storage. It was dual ported: the computer could write data, and the displays could read. 64 displays were supported. The III and DD displays used the SAIL keyboard which introduced the META key. The Data Disc displays and SAIL keyboard heavily influenced Tom Knight at MIT to make a similar system for their AI lab PDP-10 running ITS. From cowan at ccil.org Sat Jul 17 03:53:51 2021 From: cowan at ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 13:53:51 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view) In-Reply-To: <7wczriptt4.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> References: <1626375671.1426.for-standards-violators@oclsc.org> <7wczriptt4.fsf@junk.nocrew.org> Message-ID: [-TUHS] [+COFF] On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 4:06 AM Lars Brinkhoff wrote: On ITS it only ever stored characters as full 36-bit words! So sizeof > char == 1 == sizeof int. This is allowed per the C standard. (Maybe it > was updated somewhere else, I dunno.) > The ZETA-C compiler ran on the Symbolics Lisp Machine and translated C into Zetalisp; since everything was a Lisp object, from the C perspective all elementary types had sizeof == 1 also. The modern Vacietis compiler to Common Lisp uses the same design for its data, though it does not share any code. C pointers are represented by CL closures. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Sat Jul 17 04:02:39 2021 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 12:02:39 -0600 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <0afc6119-2900-1e72-618a-004549234cb2@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> On 7/15/21 7:58 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > Requiring physical presence to get patches integrated.... doesn't > scale. I believe I understand the spirit of what you are saying. However I have a question: Was the need / requirement for your physical presence motivated by (a lack of) technology? Or was it more an interview of you / your team to determine if your contributions were desired or not? I see a huge difference behind raw code and the team (trust ability / intentions) behind the code. May people can do work required for a job remotely, yet must apply and interview for said job in person. So, what was the real gate / blocker? Technology to accept the code? Or meeting / getting to know the person / representative of the people behind the code? > ... that is not what most people associate with the term "Open Source" > today. I think this touches on the crux of the issue for me. Does the ability to see the source code (in and of itself) constitute a license to use said source code (or compilations there of)? My opinion is that no, the ability to see the source code is not the same thing as a license to use said source code. There are many examples where visibility of source code and licensing to use it are two completely independent things. There are many freely available programs with licenses to run them which do not provide any access to source code. You probably only need to look as far as your Downloads folder for an example of such software / licenses. There are many freely available programs with licenses and source code. The Linux kernel is a quintessential example. There are fewer examples of programs where you can see the source code but do not have a license to run said program. I know that Microsoft has made (parts of) Windows source code available to various institutions. I'm confident that there are other examples. So to me, there are two circles with some overlap between them, forming three broad categories that software can fall into. Closed Source / Open License Open License / Open Source Open Source / Closed License I believe that many people think of "Open Source" as being the middle overlap where both the License and the Source are open. This may be accurate more of the time than it is not. However I think that assuming it to /always/ be the case is ... unsafe. After all, look at the terminology: Open /Source/. Emphasis on the word "Source" as short for source code. Nothing about source code in and of itself implies a /license/ to use it. Sure, there is quite likely an ability to use the source code (if you have all of it). But the ability to do something does not mean that it's proper or legal, much less proper, to do so. -- Grant. . . . unix || die -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From tytso at mit.edu Sat Jul 17 14:09:09 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:09:09 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: <0afc6119-2900-1e72-618a-004549234cb2@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> References: <0afc6119-2900-1e72-618a-004549234cb2@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 12:02:39PM -0600, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote: > On 7/15/21 7:58 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > Requiring physical presence to get patches integrated.... doesn't scale. > > I believe I understand the spirit of what you are saying. However I have a > question: > > Was the need / requirement for your physical presence motivated by (a lack > of) technology? Or was it more an interview of you / your team to determine > if your contributions were desired or not? I see a huge difference behind > raw code and the team (trust ability / intentions) behind the code. May > people can do work required for a job remotely, yet must apply and interview > for said job in person. > > So, what was the real gate / blocker? Technology to accept the code? Or > meeting / getting to know the person / representative of the people behind > the code? I'm really not sure what was the blocker. Hesiod had been used in production at MIT Project Athena for a number of years, and had been written up as papers at Usenix and LISA, and had been vetted by the IETF and the specification was in RFC 1035. The patches were available on MIT ftp servers, and there were one or two other sites who were using it. I didn't actually write the Hesiod patches; it was originally written by Steve Dyer, who was a full-time engineer on loan from IBM to Project Athena. But this was after Steve had returned to IBM, and I was maintaining the name servers running at MIT. I had tried communicating via email, and to be honest the patches weren't all that complicated. But I didn't have any luck, and finally Paul invited me to his house. Whatever the reason, if people require physical presence to develop trust, or something else --- it just doesn't scale. You can have the technology, but if people insist on wanting do the whole "dog sniffing another dog's butt" before trusting a code contribution, that's not a particularly healthy pattern for an active, vibrant open source project. > My opinion is that no, the ability to see the source code is not the same > thing as a license to use said source code. There are many examples where > visibility of source code and licensing to use it are two completely > independent things. I actually think there are three different dimensions. * Source Availability * Licensing which conforms to the Open Source Definition * Contributions Accepted (in practice) These are not binary, of course; Microsoft might make only part of its sources available to various companys or countries. But trying to claim that this is "Open Source" is just going to confuse people, because that is *not* how most people in the industry use that term today. So that's why I would suggest the terminology "Source Available". The third dimension, whether or not Contributions are accepted, is also an important distinction. And again, it's not a binary. It's not that it was *impossible* for me to get a new feature into BIND. It just required a physical visit in order to make it happen. > Closed Source / Open License > Open License / Open Source > Open Source / Closed License > > I believe that many people think of "Open Source" as being the middle > overlap where both the License and the Source are open. This may be > accurate more of the time than it is not. However I think that assuming it > to /always/ be the case is ... unsafe. You may want "Open Source" to mean something else, but the common language in the industry is that it means "License which conforms to the Open Source Definition". That's how it's been used since 1998[1]. Companies have Open Source Compliance Offices/Officers. The name was chosen specifically because "Free Software" was considered too scary, and radicalized. For too many people, brought to mind a creepy man who would talk about making all programming be funded by the government (Socialism!), and wearing a disk platter as "Saint IGNUcius". So it was very much a rebranding effort, taking the Debian Free Software Guidelines, changing it slightly, calling it the Open Source Definition, and then using the term Open Source. For all intents and purposes, the set of software which was "Free Software" and the set of software which was "Open Source" are identical. "Open Source" was a name that was picked so as not to scare the suits[1]. [1] https://opensource.org/history You can try to argue that it should have a different etymology, but that's not how the name was chosen, from a historical standpoint. And trying to change the definition after the fact is likely going to be as successful as Stallman's attempt to rename Linux to be GNU/Linux. Trying to dictate to the people who came up with and use a name that they should change the name, or change the definition, without their consent, will likely lead to your being ignored in the best case, or mocked in the worst. Cheers, - Ted From tih at hamartun.priv.no Sat Jul 17 16:30:56 2021 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2021 08:30:56 +0200 Subject: [COFF] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: (Theodore Y. Ts'o's message of "Sat, 17 Jul 2021 00:09:09 -0400") References: <0afc6119-2900-1e72-618a-004549234cb2@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" writes: > [The] common language in the industry is [Open Source] it means > "License which conforms to the Open Source Definition". That's how > it's been used since 1998[1]. I seem to remember, relatively shortly after that, a tendency on the net to differentiate between "open source" and "Open Source". Earlier in this thread, I mentioned MINIX 1, from 1987. That version of the OS was open source, but not, by the later definition, Open Source. (Prentice-Hall, being a publishing company, insisted on having the copyright, but the source code was printed in the book, and you could order it on floppies or tape for $80.) -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay From tytso at mit.edu Sat Jul 17 22:37:08 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2021 08:37:08 -0400 Subject: [COFF] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <0afc6119-2900-1e72-618a-004549234cb2@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 08:30:56AM +0200, Tom Ivar Helbekkmo wrote: > > I seem to remember, relatively shortly after that, a tendency on the net > to differentiate between "open source" and "Open Source". Earlier in > this thread, I mentioned MINIX 1, from 1987. That version of the OS was > open source, but not, by the later definition, Open Source. > (Prentice-Hall, being a publishing company, insisted on having the > copyright, but the source code was printed in the book, and you could > order it on floppies or tape for $80.) Can you provide any references? A quick Google Search doesn't turn up what you've described. Instead there are references such as this: "What you will find here is the contents of the last Minix 1 and 2 releases, 1.7.5 and 2.0.4... You won't find all the source here, because Minix came with most source, but not all; the C compiler is ACKPACK, a special version of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, carefully cut down and modified to run on Minix. Back when this was released, this wasn't open source." - https://github.com/davidgiven/minix2 I can imagine marketing folks trying to confuse people by trying to claim that their product was something it was not --- such as from Prentice Hall, the publisher of the Minix book. - Ted From tih at hamartun.priv.no Sat Jul 17 23:30:06 2021 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2021 15:30:06 +0200 Subject: [COFF] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: (Theodore Y. Ts'o's message of "Sat, 17 Jul 2021 08:37:08 -0400") References: <0afc6119-2900-1e72-618a-004549234cb2@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: "Theodore Y. Ts'o" writes: > Can you provide any references? A quick Google Search doesn't turn up > what you've described. I was paraphrasing what Andy Tanenbaum says near the beginning of every talk of his on MINIX 3 I've seen on Youtube. But yeah, you're right: while MINIX was open source, the C compiler was not, and was supplied in binary form only. > I can imagine marketing folks trying to confuse people by trying to > claim that their product was something it was not --- such as from > Prentice Hall, the publisher of the Minix book. I can't imagine them using the term "open source", either. :) -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Sun Jul 18 13:29:30 2021 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2021 21:29:30 -0600 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <0afc6119-2900-1e72-618a-004549234cb2@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On 7/16/21 10:09 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > You can try to argue that it should have a different etymology I'm not trying to argue anything. If anything, I'm sharing what I think is a different / an alternate understanding. I view "open source" (case insensitive) as having two different definitions, much like "hacker" has two almost diametrically opposed definitions depending which community you're in. The dualism exists, and I believe that there's nothing that I can do to change that. So why try? -- Grant. . . . unix || die -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From davida at pobox.com Sun Jul 18 13:42:11 2021 From: davida at pobox.com (David Arnold) Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2021 13:42:11 +1000 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> David Arnold 0487 183 494 > On 18 Jul 2021, at 13:30, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote: > > On 7/16/21 10:09 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: >> You can try to argue that it should have a different etymology > > I'm not trying to argue anything. > > If anything, I'm sharing what I think is a different / an alternate understanding. > > I view "open source" (case insensitive) as having two different definitions, much like "hacker" has two almost diametrically opposed definitions depending which community you're in. > > The dualism exists, and I believe that there's nothing that I can do to change that. So why try? That horse bolted when the Open Source folks claimed their definition.. “Open” was a widely used term at the time, with Open Systems in particular being a thing complete with history, corporate good will, conferences and magazines and so on. It was particularly valuable as the respectable corporate face of Unix (vs the feared hairy hacker). The attempt to leverage/hijack that to make the hairy hackers’ Free Software corporately palatable has eclipsed the uncapitalized sense of the term. Very few people distinguish the two, and so your meaning will often be lost. d From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Sun Jul 18 14:01:16 2021 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2021 22:01:16 -0600 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> Message-ID: <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> On 7/17/21 9:42 PM, David Arnold wrote: > Very few people distinguish the two, and so your meaning will often be lost. Lost and forgotten is quite different than non-existent. ;-) -- Grant. . . . unix || die -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From jdavidson at madberry.com Fri Jul 16 02:16:01 2021 From: jdavidson at madberry.com (Jesse Davidson) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 11:16:01 -0500 Subject: [COFF] quick question Message-ID: Hi Stephen, I noticed you shared an article from KiCAD.org when you talked about PCB design software tools, here: https://minnie.tuhs.org/Blog/2019_06_18_cscvon8_lessons_learned.html I thought that the article from KiCAD.org is actually pretty good, but we recently published an article that goes much deeper and talks about the ten best PCB design software tools in 2021. PCB design software is the operating program used by a computer that helps electronic engineers design printed circuit board (PCB) layouts. This design tool helps users to collaborate on various projects, access libraries of components created before, know the accuracy of their circuit schematic design, and more. The article talks about the best PCB design software tools available in the market today and provides answers to the following questions: - What is PCB design software and why do you need it? - What is the evaluation criteria for PCB design software? - What are the key features to look for when choosing PCB design tools? - What are other recommended PCB design software tools? We quote 30 different sources in the article -- it's quite authoritative. Here's the article, if you're interested: https://www.wellpcb.com/special/pcb-design-software.html Would you consider sharing our article with your readers by linking to it? Anyone who is looking for the right PCB design software to use might find this very useful. Please let me know if you have any questions and thank you for your time. Cheers, -Jesse -- Jesse Davidson, Editor 5 Ross Rd Durham, NH 03824 BTW, if you didn't like getting this email, please reply with something like "please don't email me anymore", and I'll make sure that we don't. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From joe at via.net Fri Jul 16 09:02:02 2021 From: joe at via.net (joe mcguckin) Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2021 16:02:02 -0700 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <36A1FADC-560D-47D2-9F0C-401A1B4E1655@via.net> I remember going to one of those cattle-call hiring events. I wanted to speak with the Intel compiler guy and when I got up to him, all he said was “Ganapathi”. I actually knew who/what hw was talking about. So, has Intel killed their own compiler toolset? Joe McGuckin ViaNet Communications joe at via.net 650-207-0372 cell 650-213-1302 office 650-969-2124 fax > On Jul 15, 2021, at 12:33 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 11:07:10AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: >> In fact, [I can not say I personally know this - but have read internal >> memos that make the claim], Intel pays for more Linux developers and now >> LLVM developers than any firm. What's interesting is that Intel does not >> really directly sell its HW product to end-users. We sell to others than >> use our chips to make their products. We have finally moved to the >> support model for the compilers (I've personally been fighting that battle >> for 15 years). > > That claim is probably from the data collected from the Linux > Foundation, which publishes these stats every year or two. The most > recent one is here: > > https://www.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020_kernel_history_report_082720.pdf > > The top ten organizations responsible for commits from 2007 -- 2019: > > (None) 11.95% > Intel 10.01% > Red Hat 8.90% > (Unknown) 4.09% > IBM 3.79% > SuSE 3.49% > Linaro 3.17% > (Consultant) 2.96% > Google 2.79% > Samsung 2.58% > > "None" means no organizational affiliation (e.g., hobbyists, students, > etc.) "Unknown" means the organization affiliation couldn't be > determined. > > For more recent data, if you look at the commits for the 5.10 release > (end of 2020), the top ten list by organizations looks like this: > > Huawei 8.9% > Intel 8.0% > (Unknown) 6.6% > (None) 4.9% > Red Hat 5.7% > Google 5.2% > AMD 4.3% > Linaro 4.1% > Samsung 3.5% > IBM 3.2% > > For the full list and more stats, see: https://lwn.net/Articles/839772/ > >> So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the *idea >> *of "Open Source" is really not anything new. > > I do think there is something which is radically new --- which is that > it's not a single company publishing all of the source code for a > particular OS, whether it's System/360 or the PDP-8 Disk Operating > System, or whatever. > > In other words, it's the shared nature of the collaboration, which > partially solves the question of "who pays" --- the answer is, "lots > of companies, and they do so when it makes business sense for them to > do so". Intel may have had the largest number of contributions to > Linux historically --- but that was still 10%, and it was eclipsed by > people with no organizational affliation, and in the 5.10 kernel > Huawei slightly edged out Intel with 8.9% vs 8.0% contributions. > > I completely agree with you that one of the key questions is the > business case issue. Not only who pays, but how do they justify the > software investment to the bean counters? Of course, the "Stone Soup" > story predates computers, so this certainly isn't a new business > model. And arguably the X Window Systems and the Open Software > Foundation also had a similar model where multiple companies > contributed to a common codebase, with perhaps mixed levels of > success. > > The thing which Linux has managed to achieve, however, is the fact > that there is a large and diverse base of corporate contributions. > That to me is what makes the Linux model so interesting, and has been > a reason for its long-term sustainability. > > Other companies may have been making their source code availble, but > the underlying business model behind their "source available" practices > was quite different. > > Cheers, > > - Ted -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From ggm at algebras.org Fri Jul 16 12:14:43 2021 From: ggm at algebras.org (George Michaelson) Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 12:14:43 +1000 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I was part of a discussion about a bug in the DECUS tape in Leeds uni, in '82-84 window. I was a very small part I might add, not the principal. I can't remember the package. It was probably trivia, like walking a specific SYS$SYSTEM value in a way which was dangerous or encoded assumptions about device:directory:user models in VMS. The feedback I got from this process was "thanks, we'll think about it" was closure, for those days. We'd been pretty specific about a fix. I got the sense the tape was an annual affair. And the likelihood of our "patch" being both accepted, and added to the next round of the tape was low-to-zero because everyone wanted "moar" and so people focussed on adding things, not fixing things. The exception here was compilers: people always want bugs fixed in a compiler. Or the NAG library, but both compilers (language spec) and NAG (strict maths formalisms about correctness) had policed mechanisms to accept user input, validate, run through a remorselessly tight compliance check, and emit, if it survived. A bug in the implementation of MUD for dec-10? ok, so the word "potato" is misspelled on one screen. Move on. On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 11:59 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 04:30:15PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > > > Ted - that *is what* Doug pointed out!!! They did not create anything that > > was new. SHARED / DECUS / USENIX and the like were providing that exact > > same function starting in the late 1950s!!! Companies and Universities all > > pooled their resources to make things better and to get new and improved > > solutions. Sometimes they started with things that come from the > > original OEM. Also often they created their own technology and made it > > available to everyone. Sometime they combine both. And it was a > > 'bazaar where everyone had access and you chose to use it to not. Sounds > > pretty familiar, BTW. > > I remember looking at the DECUS program catalog for the PDP-8, and I > seem to recall that for the most part, individuals were sharing their > programs with others. In that way, it wasn't all that different from > say, CPM/UG, and HUG (Heathkit Users Group). But the thing is, for > the most part, it was a single author sharing individual programs, and > often changes were not accepted back. > > Consider the history of Bill Jolitz and 386BSD, and the collection of > patches that eventuallya became NetBSD and FreeBSD, which was formed > because they were frustrated that they couldn't get their patch sets > back into Jolitz's code base. Technology plays a part, in that it > enables the change. But it's not just about technology. There is > also a very strong social component. Even when you were richly > interconnected at the network level, this does not guarantee that will > be willing to be richly interconnected in terms of accepting patch > sets from people who you may not know across the Internet, into *your* > program, for which you are the author and high priest. > > I don't remember the exact date, but it would have been in the early > 90's, when at the time I was already contributing patches to Linux, > and where ftp and e-mail and applying patches via context diffs was > very much available. At that time, we were interested in getting > support for MIT Project Athena's Hesiod extenstions into the BIND > distributions (we had just been carrying patches against BIND for many > years). > > In order to get those patches integrated, Paul Vixie invited me to his > house in Redwood City, and so I flew from Boston to San Francisco, > carrying my Linux laptop with the BIND patches, and we got the patches > integrated into master BIND sources. Paul was a gracious host, and it > was lovely that I got to spend some time with him. But it was > interesting that my physical presence was needed, or at least highly > useful, in terms of getting those patches into BIND. Requiring > physical presence to get patches integrated.... doesn't scale. > > And so it wasn't a matter of technology, since the technology for > Linus, who didn't know me from Adam in 1991, to accept patches from me > implementing BSD Job Control, was certainly available when I was > working with Paul to get the Hesiod changes integrated into BIND. But > like with Jolitz and 386BSD, it's a mindset thing, not just technology. > > I also want to emphasize again, the question of business model is also > something which I think is different, and *important*. It's one thing > for Academics and Researchers to be willing to give changes away to > anyone who wants. It's quite another for a company to give away their > intellectual property in such a way that it can actually be used by > their competitors, either because that's the social convention, or > because it's enforced by the license. Was the practices we use today > for Linux built on the traditions of comp.sources.unix, and BSD, and > AT&T Research, and IBM making sources available for System/360, yadda, > yadda, yadda? Of course! I'm not denying that. > > But at the same time, to claim that nothing is new under the Sun, and > *all* of this had been done decades earlier, is also not the whole > story. And to call IBM releasing System/360, when they retained > control of the license, and wasn't accepting any changes back, and > *darned* well would have sued anyone trying to use that code on > non-IBM computers into a smoking crater, as "Open Source" can be > highly misleading, because that is not what most people associate with > the term "Open Source" today. > > And if we take a look at what AT&T Lawyers did with the Unix source > code, at some point, it most *defintely* was the antithesis of "Open > Source". Which would lead me to assert that Unix was never really > released under what today we would call, "Open Source". > > Cheers, > > - Ted From corbet at lwn.net Sat Jul 17 02:11:10 2021 From: corbet at lwn.net (Jonathan Corbet) Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 10:11:10 -0600 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <87h7gufdcx.fsf@meer.lwn.net> Clem Cole writes: > On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:33 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > >> > So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the >> *idea >> > *of "Open Source" is really not anything new. >> >> I do think there is something which is radically new --- which is that >> it's not a single company publishing all of the source code for a >> particular OS, whether it's System/360 or the PDP-8 Disk Operating >> System, or whatever. > > > Ted - that *is what* Doug pointed out!!! They did not create anything that > was new. SHARED / DECUS / USENIX and the like were providing that exact > same function starting in the late 1950s!!! Companies and Universities all > pooled their resources to make things better and to get new and improved > solutions. I hate to admit it, but I contributed to the vax86a DECUS tape: http://mail.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vax86a/ncar/aaareadme.txt It was a fundamentally different experience. It showed that the desire to share software was alive and well, but DECUS tapes were full of dead offerings. You could take them or leave them, but there was no overall effort to integrate or improve that code or to make a coherent offering out of it. I know people used that code but nobody ever sent me an improvement to it. It was an ornament I could hang on DEC's tree. DECUS, X Consortium, USENET, etc. all laid a lot of the groundwork for what came after, but Linux was, for me at least, the first opportunity to get my hands on the whole system in a setting where nobody had privileged access. That, I think, was fundamentally different. jon From akosela at andykosela.com Sun Jul 18 16:44:44 2021 From: akosela at andykosela.com (Andy Kosela) Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2021 08:44:44 +0200 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> Message-ID: On 7/18/21, David Arnold wrote: > > > > David Arnold > 0487 183 494 >> On 18 Jul 2021, at 13:30, Grant Taylor via COFF >> wrote: >> >> On 7/16/21 10:09 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: >>> You can try to argue that it should have a different etymology >> >> I'm not trying to argue anything. >> >> If anything, I'm sharing what I think is a different / an alternate >> understanding. >> >> I view "open source" (case insensitive) as having two different >> definitions, much like "hacker" has two almost diametrically opposed >> definitions depending which community you're in. >> >> The dualism exists, and I believe that there's nothing that I can do to >> change that. So why try? > > That horse bolted when the Open Source folks claimed their definition.. > > “Open” was a widely used term at the time, with Open Systems in particular > being a thing complete with history, corporate good will, conferences and > magazines and so on. It was particularly valuable as the respectable > corporate face of Unix (vs the feared hairy hacker). > > The attempt to leverage/hijack that to make the hairy hackers’ Free Software > corporately palatable has eclipsed the uncapitalized sense of the term. > Very few people distinguish the two, and so your meaning will often be lost. But it is always the winners who write the history books, so it is going to be exactly the opposite -- the open source (uncapitalized) meaning will be lost. We are probably one of the last communities on the Net that still distinguish the two and know our history. The average modern young citizen of the Net even if he is computer savvy will know nothing about it. He might know how to program in Rust or run Kubernetes, but will know nothing about the "open source" practices of the ancients. But he is definitely familiar with GPL and Open Source movement. A lot of it has to do with the global spread of Internet when dispersed communities were joined together. The popularity of Linux and in consequence Open Source is directly connected with this Internet revolution that took place in the 90s. It was also the international revolution. Before 1989 it would be hard to imagine that a young student from Finland could jumpstart such a global movement. --Andy From tytso at mit.edu Mon Jul 19 23:41:35 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 09:41:35 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Jul 17, 2021 at 10:01:16PM -0600, Grant Taylor via COFF wrote: > On 7/17/21 9:42 PM, David Arnold wrote: > > Very few people distinguish the two, and so your meaning will often be lost. > > Lost and forgotten is quite different than non-existent. ;-) If anyone can show any examples of people actually *using* the term "open source" in the sense of "sources are available" before the Open Source Definition was promulgated, that would be great. But otherwise, I think you're trying to retrofit a definition that was never historically used. - Ted From clemc at ccc.com Tue Jul 20 00:50:07 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 10:50:07 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 9:41 AM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > > If anyone can show any examples of people actually *using* the term > "open source" in the sense of "sources are available" before the Open > Source Definition was promulgated, that would be great. But > otherwise, I think you're trying to retrofit a definition that was > never historically used. > Which is my point -- we never had a name for the behavior, but the behavior certainly existed for years before. Funny, I just got an email last night from Cerf, Sax and Haverty. Here it is cut and pasted: *"**Good paper! As I was reading it, I kept thinking that the same story could be told about TCP, which IMHO has succeeded for many of the same reasons.* *Another possible cause of multiple mechanisms -- the fact that an incompetent novice can make changes to open source. When I took on the task of writing TCP for 11/40 Unix, I had 1) seen Unix used once and thought the console interactions were pure gibberish; 2) had programmed in assembler on an 11/05 but never did anything in C; 3) had written applications (e.g., email) that used the ARPANET, but had never written any network system code; 4) had never heard of TCP; 5) had done some minor OS work in Multics, CTSS, and ITS, but knew nothing about Unix. Apparently, those qualifications made me perfect for the assignment.* *I suspect there's many similar situations where such people create code and it works its way into the system.* *BTW, the multiplicity characteristic is widespread. I have a handful of machines running Ubuntu, and I'm always amazed at how many different but apparently similar mechanisms exist to do the same thing. Struggling now with USB, trying to get a new mouse to work the way I want. Libinput, Evdev, xinput, .... where is Lions' current edition for Ubuntu.......**"* Which was (in context), a reaction to my observation about UNIX being successful because it was open source and people could use the idea, the code was published, al biet the license to use was not with our remuneration. This is coming from the networking and Tenex world. We had the same observation about the PDP-10 and ArpaNET community. Doug points out SHARE and DECUS. The fact is anyone that lived in that world will tell you that it really is not that different in behavior or intent. Yes, DECUS and SHARE had/have a lot of trash -- but you did not have to take it all -- just like today. Does anyone everything just from the Gnu project much less all the possible apt-get install for Linux? Ted -- yes, your generation put a >>name<< to the behavior, which is a wonderful thing and something you can be proud. But the behavior of openly sharing your work product with the community long predates, Linux, the wider Internet, *et al. * It is sad a minimum, if not downright disingenuous to say "open source" was created at that point. What changed was Moore's law allowed more people to participate because the cost of entry was dramatically lowered. Remember the cost of deploying UNIX (or Tenex or OS/360 etc..) was completely dominated by the HW cost. A few $K for an SW license was noise, in large sites a rounding error. The Internet changed how distribution took place. Netnews and the like changed how people learn about new things (you did not have to be part of the club). But in all cases, the same behavior was there and it was just a smaller group of people because the cost of the HW was the barrier to entry. Clem -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tytso at mit.edu Tue Jul 20 03:38:32 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 13:38:32 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 10:50:07AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > Ted -- yes, your generation put a >>name<< to the behavior, which is a > wonderful thing and something you can be proud. But the behavior of openly > sharing your work product with the community long predates, Linux, the > wider Internet, *et al. * It is sad a minimum, if not downright > disingenuous to say "open source" was created at that point. No one said that "open source" was created at that point. The perl, BSD, FSF's emacs, gcc, and other software published under the GPL all predated the definition of the **term** "Open Source". However, I strongly contest the claim that Unix was "Open Source". Unix was the UNPUBLISHED TRADE SECRET of AT&T, and students exposed to Unix source code became contaminated with AT&T's "methods and concepts" clause. So they couldn't even *reimplement* Unix without potentially getting sued by AT&T. I always thought the implementation of /bin/true, which was a shell script where the license statement proclaiming AT&T's copyright was longer than the "exit 0" line, was both incredibly funny, and incredibly sad. Cheers, - Ted From jpl.jpl at gmail.com Tue Jul 20 05:33:21 2021 From: jpl.jpl at gmail.com (John P. Linderman) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 15:33:21 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: Ted observed: I always thought the implementation of /bin/true, which was a shell script where the license statement proclaiming AT&T's copyright was longer than the "exit 0" line, was both incredibly funny, and incredibly sad. It's been a long time since I looked at the AT&T source, but I recall that the version number was pushing 2 digits. It's hard to get it "wrong" on the first try (although I could possibly do it). More likely, the version numbers reflected changes to the licensing wording. -- jpl On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 1:38 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 10:50:07AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > > > Ted -- yes, your generation put a >>name<< to the behavior, which is a > > wonderful thing and something you can be proud. But the behavior of > openly > > sharing your work product with the community long predates, Linux, the > > wider Internet, *et al. * It is sad a minimum, if not downright > > disingenuous to say "open source" was created at that point. > > No one said that "open source" was created at that point. The perl, > BSD, FSF's emacs, gcc, and other software published under the GPL all > predated the definition of the **term** "Open Source". > > However, I strongly contest the claim that Unix was "Open Source". > Unix was the UNPUBLISHED TRADE SECRET of AT&T, and students exposed to > Unix source code became contaminated with AT&T's "methods and > concepts" clause. So they couldn't even *reimplement* Unix without > potentially getting sued by AT&T. > > I always thought the implementation of /bin/true, which was a shell > script where the license statement proclaiming AT&T's copyright was > longer than the "exit 0" line, was both incredibly funny, and > incredibly sad. > > Cheers, > > - Ted > _______________________________________________ > COFF mailing list > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Tue Jul 20 06:08:34 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 16:08:34 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 1:38 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > However, I strongly contest the claim that Unix was "Open Source". > Unix was the UNPUBLISHED TRADE SECRET of AT&T, and students exposed to > Unix source code became contaminated with AT&T's "methods and > concepts" clause. But it was not. And in fact, the whole thing about the AT&T court case was that most of thought it was about *copyright, *not if it was a *trade secret* (Which is why they lost) in the end. Note Jack Haverty's words to me last night about UNIX in the mid-1970s when he was working the first PDP-11/40 TCP implementation show he was is thinking the same way as I am: * the fact that an incompetent novice can make changes to **open source.* BTW: I asked Jack last night what type of license BBN had. He responded that he did not think they really had one originally. They were an ARPA contractor. He (i.e. BBN) did not have to go into legal hoops until he wanted more documentation (*a.k.a.* the Lions text). The concern was not that we were going to be sue for being mentally contaminated, that whole idea did not come about until after the law suite. > So they couldn't even *reimplement* Unix without potentially getting sued > by AT&T. > Which of course is what made the whole thing silly. The first 'UNIX clone' was by an ex-BTL, Dave Plauger's Idris, an implementation of v6. Many others would follow, from Coherent to Sol, Chorus, Minix, and Linux to name a few quickly. In fact, AT&T did check on the Mark Williams code base. Dennis once wrote about having to check out the sources for the lawyers. As I understand it, the AT&T team concluded that while the MW team may not have directly taken the AT&T code, the MW folks clearly had seen it [which the Mark Williams folks I do not believe ever denied]. AT&T chose not to pursue them. It was not until BSDi/UCB that they literally made of case of it. Which again was why so many of us thought that case was about copyright, not trade secrets. It had never been really discussed with us ->> on the outside<< of BTL (it would later learn from Dennis and few others that they had discussed TS with their lawyers at some point). Your thinking would be reasonable *iff* AT&T had won the case, but the fact is the ideas (IP) and even the source to the basic UNIX was open and available. The IP was published by but in places like CACM and from Prentiss-Hall. Larry's point is a solid one, is that *to get access *was limited by having the *means to afford the licenses* but more importantly it was having the *means to afford the hardware* to run it. So until a computer and 'mortal could own' on his own, AND that could support UNIX *(i.e.* a 386-based PC), the issue was moot. I point out that the 1956 consent decree *>>required<<* AT&T to make UNIX (like the transistor before that) available to all *'interested parties*' (see Pinheiro J. (1987). “AT&T Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market”, Berkeley Technical Law Journal, 303, September 1987, Volume 2, Issue 2, Article 5 if you don't believe me). They had to make it available to research folks and we allowed to license its use to commercial people using 'fair and reasonable licensing terms regulated by the US Gov. You can suggest that $20K was unreasonable for personal use, but again it was not unreasonable for a University ($150) or for the commercial sector for that matter and those were the people buying the computers in those times. The practice of the day was to make the sources (which of course were written in assembler) to the customers of your hardware. And by the way, IBM was not going to 'sue your pants off' as you mentioned. The first 'clone market' was in fact the IBM 360 clones and IBM licensed their SW to non-IBM HW customers (like Amdahl, Nixdorf, and NEC to name 3) because IBM was afraid of being sued by the US Gov!!! It was folks like DEC that sued Cal Data for 'cloning the PDP-11,' not IBM. Yes, UNIX was licensed and yes the IP was owned by AT&T. But that's really not much different than a GPL2 which is licensed and owned by someone else. The rules of use are different, however. But the source was just as open. A difference was how it was distributed (you had to be part of the club in Larry's terms) but anyone that could pay the HW fees could join the club. Larry has made an excellent point (which I agree with), is that in practice it was clubby. But in my defense ... the was the same club as before. You had to have the hardware and the need. But if you had that you could get to it. Hey Ted, you were part of that club too -- you had access to things at MIT Athena that most people did not see. MIT had paid the club fees and gotten the HW. Frankly, you personally had way more access to the sources as an MIT undergrad with a job at Athena, than say, Larry did at U Wis. What changed was Moore's law and who afford (and thus get access) to the HW and *economics associated with the desire to obtain* but please don't try to say the behavior or intent was any different. It just was not. We once called this the 'hacker culture' -- we are all in it together and we shared what we had with each other. FWIW: this is has been discussed in other books and areas too. It was noted that the late 1960s 'hippie' sharing culture around the SFO area played into too. Steve Levy's wonderful book 'Hackers' talks about it from the MIT Model RR club. In fact, the last chapter of his book is dedicated to RMS and calls him 'the last hacker.' Methinks the horse is dead ... you can think it's new. It just was not. You can say, UNIX closed because you came upon it a timer when the versions that mattered (SunOS/Solaris/Ultrix/AIX/etc...)were becoming less available to you as a user. But the fact is the core material of UNIX was open. We all had access to it that's what made it great. We did and could access and change it. We could share it. Sometimes we chose to clone it. Sometimes we even improved on it (and sometimes like systemd, we can argue if we did). It did not become more of a 'closed' until the HW economics changed the rules, which just happens to be when you and others came of age. Which is fine, just please, please, please respect that the whole FOSS movement got its start because of foundations and ideas that came long before. The cool part is the because of the new economics, you were able to do something with it and expand it. I do celebrate and laud you for that. But I do also ask that your respect the foundation which gave you that start. Clem ᐧ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clemc at ccc.com Tue Jul 20 06:21:40 2021 From: clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 16:21:40 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: And remember add in the copyright to that does not come about until much, much later in UNIX's life. After Judge Green and after the cat was out of the bag, and when AT&T was allowed to be in the computer business. Pre Judge Green - if you go in the V7 source that Warren has you will see: [ctcole-mac09:ResearchEditions/v7_SeventhEdition/V7_FileTree] ctcole% cat bin/true [ctcole-mac09:ResearchEditions/v7_SeventhEdition/V7_FileTree] ctcole% cat bin/false exit 1 [ctcole-mac09:ResearchEditions/v7_SeventhEdition/V7_FileTree] ctcole% ll bin/{false,true} -rwxrwxr-x 1 ctcole staff - 7 Jan 10 1979 bin/false -rwxrwxr-x 1 ctcole staff - 0 Jan 10 1979 bin/true ᐧ On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 3:33 PM John P. Linderman wrote: > Ted observed: > > I always thought the implementation of /bin/true, which was a shell > script where the license statement proclaiming AT&T's copyright was > longer than the "exit 0" line, was both incredibly funny, and > incredibly sad. > > > It's been a long time since I looked at the AT&T source, but I recall that > the version number was pushing 2 digits. It's hard to get it "wrong" on > the first try > (although I could possibly do it). More likely, the version numbers > reflected > changes to the licensing wording. -- jpl > > > On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 1:38 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote: > >> On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 10:50:07AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: >> > >> > Ted -- yes, your generation put a >>name<< to the behavior, which is a >> > wonderful thing and something you can be proud. But the behavior of >> openly >> > sharing your work product with the community long predates, Linux, the >> > wider Internet, *et al. * It is sad a minimum, if not downright >> > disingenuous to say "open source" was created at that point. >> >> No one said that "open source" was created at that point. The perl, >> BSD, FSF's emacs, gcc, and other software published under the GPL all >> predated the definition of the **term** "Open Source". >> >> However, I strongly contest the claim that Unix was "Open Source". >> Unix was the UNPUBLISHED TRADE SECRET of AT&T, and students exposed to >> Unix source code became contaminated with AT&T's "methods and >> concepts" clause. So they couldn't even *reimplement* Unix without >> potentially getting sued by AT&T. >> >> I always thought the implementation of /bin/true, which was a shell >> script where the license statement proclaiming AT&T's copyright was >> longer than the "exit 0" line, was both incredibly funny, and >> incredibly sad. >> >> Cheers, >> >> - Ted >> _______________________________________________ >> COFF mailing list >> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org >> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff >> > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tytso at mit.edu Tue Jul 20 10:55:31 2021 From: tytso at mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 20:55:31 -0400 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 04:08:34PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > Your thinking would be reasonable *iff* AT&T had won the case, but the fact > is the ideas (IP) and even the source to the basic UNIX was open and > available. And yet, much is made by the *BSD's that the reason why Linux won and *BSD's lost the battle of mindshare was because of the AT&T lawsuit. The FUD caused by the copyright and the license *did* have an impact. Which is why I believe the Open Source Definition matters, and why it's important that we make a sharp distinction between "Source Available" and "Open Source". The license matters. Just making the code out there, but restricting under various clauses or "you have to be in the club"[1] is not enough. [1] Or worse, in the case of Audacity, where the new copyright holders attempted to add spyware and then to stay out of trouble in the E.U. tried to restrict usage of the software to people over the age of 18 --- in violation of the GPL and the Open Source Definition. This is why insisting on this distinction is so important, and not letting people try to weasel out of saying, "the source is available but we can jerk you around and possibly add extra conditions, and possibly threaten to sue any competitors" is NOT OK. - Ted From gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net Tue Jul 20 11:05:05 2021 From: gtaylor at tnetconsulting.net (Grant Taylor) Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 19:05:05 -0600 Subject: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released In-Reply-To: References: <57DB6C33-5CE1-4A06-B646-0E5C6707F866@pobox.com> <739a4ab8-352a-060c-115f-e2f14dd7dfc7@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> Message-ID: <348d3fd5-6cc7-6f0c-9495-76f3f0553f8b@spamtrap.tnetconsulting.net> On 7/19/21 1:33 PM, John P. Linderman wrote: > It's hard to get it "wrong" on the first try (although I could possibly > do it). IBM's IEFBR14 comes to mind. Link - IEFBR14 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14 -- Grant. . . . unix || die -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4013 bytes Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature URL: From dave at horsfall.org Mon Jul 26 11:54:44 2021 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 11:54:44 +1000 (EST) Subject: [COFF] In these COVID times... Message-ID: I wonder how many bods rememeber: "Nothing sucks like a VAX!"? -- Dave From rudi.j.blom at gmail.com Mon Jul 26 12:29:24 2021 From: rudi.j.blom at gmail.com (Rudi Blom) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 09:29:24 +0700 Subject: [COFF] In these COVID times Message-ID: That rang a Bell with VAX as IBM-killer :-) Even if it's on an MS site it's still a nice article. https://news.microsoft.com/features/the-engineers-engineer-computer-industry-luminaries-salute-dave-cutlers-five-decade-long-quest-for-quality/ Take care and stay healthy, uncle rubl >From: Dave Horsfall >To: Computer Old Farts Followers >Cc: >Bcc: >Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 11:54:44 +1000 (EST) >Subject: [COFF] In these COVID times... >I wonder how many bods rememeber: "Nothing sucks like a VAX!"? > >-- Dave -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing. From tih at hamartun.priv.no Mon Jul 26 22:25:05 2021 From: tih at hamartun.priv.no (Tom Ivar Helbekkmo) Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2021 14:25:05 +0200 Subject: [COFF] In these COVID times... In-Reply-To: (Dave Horsfall's message of "Mon, 26 Jul 2021 11:54:44 +1000") References: Message-ID: Dave Horsfall writes: > I wonder how many bods rememeber: "Nothing sucks like a VAX!"? Still have mine, and use it for dirty work in the basement and garage. It must be about 25 years old, now, and working as well as ever. -tih -- Most people who graduate with CS degrees don't understand the significance of Lisp. Lisp is the most important idea in computer science. --Alan Kay From wobblygong at gmail.com Sat Jul 31 18:57:12 2021 From: wobblygong at gmail.com (Wesley Parish) Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2021 20:57:12 +1200 Subject: [COFF] 70s Matlab source Message-ID: <5904d57f-a726-b428-d8dc-fc9f98129513@gmail.com> I'm wondering, is it still floating around somewhere? Thanks Wesley Parish