[TUHS] Bell Labs Holmdel site coming down

patv at monmouth.com patv at monmouth.com
Thu May 18 07:39:31 AEST 2006


I have heard some grumblings of TOG possibly releasing CDE as open source,
but have no idea of where that stands.  To be perfectly frank, it had a
lot of problems, especially in a 64-bit world.  There were too many word
size assumptions, and a very good friend struggled for many, many hours
fixing those problems before it went to DEIL in India for support.  It
could probably still benefit from a good “many eyes” developer review and
bug fix session in the hands of open source developers.  However, IMHO, it
no longer has any advantage over KDE or Gnome, but, as I said, that is my
opinion.

Personally, I’d love to see OSF1 released open source.  There were
experimental x86 and two Itanium versions in various states of completion
floating around DEC/Compaq/HP.  I was part of the last Itanium effort
before the HP merger.  That one booted to single user before the project
was killed.

OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX was already branded as UNIX, and it would be
fun to see what would happen to the landscape if a branded UNIX was free.
 Unfortunately, too many proprietary licensed pieces of code in the HP
version, especially in System V support, for that to ever happen. Oh well,
we can all dream …

Pat

 

> On Wed, 17 May 2006, patv at monmouth.com wrote:
> 
> > Another loss to the UNIX community that I can personally report was the
> > closing, one year ago this month, of the old DEC Manalpan facility (UNX).
> > This was the home of VAX System V, a large portion of Ultrix, and
> > everything that made up OSF1/Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX except for kernel,
> > drivers, and several other components (although I personally did some
> > kernel work on occasion).  We did shell and utilities, about 1/2 of X,
> > Motif, CDE, installation, mail, and other parts of the OS that made it
> > useful.  If you look at old uucp headers anywhere on usenet, any of the
> > traffic with headers that included systems with "unx" in the name was
> > routed through this facility.  I was there from when it was Digital
> > through Compaq and finally HP, almost all the way through to the closing.
> 
> It would be nice if CDE were free, the rest is either part of the Heirloom 
> project or cloned in some open-source system (e.g., Lesstif). --;
> 
> -uso.
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