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

[Clem cole]

I’m traveling so I can not really reply.  But I too think Warren is correct and it probably does come from where you started / your core experiences will taint your view. 

Clem

Sent from my Handheld - expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Feb 19, 2020, at 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> Warner is spot on.  I was a little late to the party so I didn't even 
> realize there was a club at the time, I just knew that it was hard to
> get to the source.  Looking back, I can see there was a club and I was
> not in it, I was a little late, I sort of clawed my way in a bit but
> I was definitely not part of the club.  I'm annoyed by that because
> not being part of it held me back a bit.
> 
> So yeah, very different memories depending on where you were.  Warner
> nailed it.
> 
>> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 11:11:29PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
>>> 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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> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy                     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm