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

[Warner Losh]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:28 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> I'm not 100% sure why I'm arguing other than I feel this is so wrong and
> so disingenuous to those that came before.
>

I think the difference is whether you were in the club or not. If you were
inside and read in, there was a vibe that was very much like open source is
today. If you read the old Australian Unix User Group newsletters, you have
window into this time... but with a weird "papers please" to prove you were
in the club. People passed things around in many of the same ways. It was
cool and different than before. And people recall this fondly. Network
Unix, for example, dominated the ARPANET from 75 to 78... and it was pure
sharing... with a catch.

Now, if you weren't in the club, or recall a time when you were excluded,
you'd have a very different remembrance. The model was better than what
came before, but not yet to where it needed to be.

The Unix Wars, imho, shot that all to shit. It set the stage for the
revolutions that happened.

I disagree the GPL was all that. It didn't force people to really do the
right thing... I have had dozens of boards that run Linux but no source.
The manufacturer doesn't care or has gone out of business. People only
comply because they think it is in their best interest.  But they do it for
BSD too... and just because it is free doesn't make it good..  linux has a
dozen Wifi stacks...

It's no wonder people have divergent interpretations of how we got here.
What myth do you but into? That will determine if you look at things one
way or another...

Warner

But, you have to decide that having access to all your sources for your
> system is your measure of 'success.'  My value of success is no more VMS,
> Kronos, or VM/CMS or the like.   I will accept Larry's position that he had
> many roadblocks that were often silly.   But I really don't think my world
> was as 'charmed' as he claims and his was quite as bad as his might think
> you look at it.
>
> 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.  I have said, that is not, was not the original definition, nor
> is it the only case and that the UNIX technology itself was really not as
> tied up as he claims.  I think Larry did have access to sources (maybe not
> at his University), but like so many of us, once he got to a place that had
> them (like SGI or Sun).  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.
>
> 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.
>
> The problem was that as hardware cost dropped, more and more people wanted
> the sources too and that were the I think the difference in the success
> metrics come.
>
> 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.
>
> In the end, what matters to me is the ideas, the real intellectual
> property NOT the source that implements it.    This has been proven within
> the UNIX community too many times.  It has been re-engineered so many times
> over.    Just like Fortran lives today, although it's different from what I
> learned in the 1960s.  It's still Fortran.   Unix is different from what I
> saw in the early 1970s, but its still Unix.
>
> 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.
>
> It looks like a duck.  It quacks like a duck and even tastes like duck
> (mostly) when you inside.   It's a duck.
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