[TUHS] TUHS Digest, Vol 31, Issue 9

[Lyrical Nanoha]

On Thu, 18 May 2006, Larry McVoy wrote:

> Tim wrote:
>> A good example would probably be SunOS 4 - we already know that Sun are
>> quite interested in open sourcing stuff given OpenSolaris, but SunOS 4
>> hasn't been, presumably because it is full of stuff-they-don't-own and has
>> no commercial value at all.
>
> I'm the guy who took SunOS 4.1.3 and removed all the non-free stuff from it
> (which was 90% STREAMS) and demo-ed it to McNealy in effort to set it free.
> A lot went into this: http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html

The idea is not unlike what I am hoping to be able to do, that is, make a 
system as close to "real" Unix as possible, and fully open-source / 
copyleft, where Linux really isn't "it", BSD is closer to this goal, and 
indeed NetBSD + Heirloom Toolchest is where I would start.  I'd like to 
see a system, and hell, if I could I'd implement it myself.  One that felt 
so like commercial Unix that you couldn't tell the difference unless you 
ran uname.  And had needed functionality without being uber-bloated like 
GNU.

-uso.