[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[Larry McVoy]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 09:27:47PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> That said, we have deviated from what it means to be "open."  What I'm
> hearing from Ted and Larry that they think open can only mean stallman's
> definition.  

No open means access to it in my mind. GPL is open, BSD is open, $$$ for
roff and $5/machine is not at all open, that's a for pay thing.  Your world
was "shrug", my world was "we're not paying for that because we don't
understand what it is".

> My point is that besides being to read about it in
> books and papers, getting access to the source from AT&T or UCB was really
> the norm and stating otherwise is disingenuous and trying to rewrite
> history a bit.

Umm, couldn't disagree more.  My experience was the source was locked up
and you had to be "someone" to have access to it.  It was like that at
UW Madison, it was like that at Lachman, it was like that even at Sun
for the non SunOS stuff.  They eventually loosened up but you had to
know where v7, 32v, etc were located and that was not public knowledge.

For whatever reason, there was hesitation about giving you access to the
AT&T Bell Labs source.  BSD was what we ran at Madison and that was 
locked up.

> A point Ted has made and I accept is by the time of the UNIX Wars, the old
> proprietary folks were trying to keep their own versions of UNIX 'secret'
> and to use Larry terms those roadblocks to >>there<< code was real.  But
> the truth is that the AT&T codebase (while getting more and more expensive
> as the HW dropped in cost), was always available, and people both
> commercial and research had it.

Not at all true in my experience.

> Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
> success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
> And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
> they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
> GPL'ed or otherwise.

I agree with that.

> And that is because the *ideas that makeup what we call UNIX ARE open* and
> the people looked at the sources, looked at the papers, talked to each
> other and the community built on it.

Ideas sort of, but the source was not was not at all open.  You had
access, I had to fight like hell to get access and I'm sort of somebody,
people knew me.  Think of all the people who were not as brash as I am
and didn't get access.

The default, this is what you don't get Clem, the default was no access
for you.

Ideas, sure, but there is nothing like the mind explosion that happened
for me reading the popen() source.  I had read all the Bell Labs papers
and a bunch more but seeing that fork() in libc's popen() changed how
I thought about things.  I never would have gotten that from a paper,
maybe I'm just dumb, but that was a mind twist.  I think there are lot
more in the source, swtch() is a good one.  Interrupts are a good one.
Page faults are a good one.  There is a lot that you can talk about but
it doesn't come into focus until you walk the call stack and think about
each one.

The majority of people did not have access to the source.  You keep saying
that they did, that's just not true.  And it is a shame, you can learn so
much by just reading those early Unix versions.

Ask yourself why the Lions book was so popular, I've seen photocopies
of photocopies of photocopies to the point you can barely read it.  If
people could easily look at the source, why all the photocopies?  I know
you've seen them too.