[TUHS] IANAL. Kimball has ruled

[Bryan Cantrill]

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:55:53AM -0400, Gregg C Levine wrote:
> Hello!
> Good to know.
> However that's only valid for those individuals who are still running older
> versions of Solaris.
> 
> It would not have impacted any version of Solaris, including the Open one.
> And why you are asking? I am glad you asked. It seems that according to the
> good people at the Sun offices here in the City, that by the time version 9
> was released, that the code base was completely rewritten, and contains
> absolutely nothing from BSD, and most certainly nothing from the original
> creators of UNIX.

That is, of course, absurd, and whoever told you that doesn't have much of
a grasp of the source base.  Yes, gobs of stuff has been rewritten --
but plenty of code dates from Back in the Day, especially in userland.  
For evidence of this, I point (as I often do) to troff, and files like
http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/troff/n5.c,
which has had very little modification in the 18 years since The Merge,
and still contains comments like this gem:

  /*
   * The following routines are concerned with setting terminal options.
   *	The manner of doing this differs between research/Berkeley systems
   *	and UNIX System V systems (i.e. DOCUMENTER'S WORKBENCH)
   *	The distinction is controlled by the #define'd variable USG,
   *	which must be set by System V users.
   */

And those who know their history already know the punchline:  much of
that code isn't going to change because (1) it basically works and (2) the
engineer who wrote it -- Joe Ossanna -- is dead, having died of a heart attack
in 1977.  (This code is legend among Solaris developers; see, for example,
http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock/entry/real_life_obfuscated_code.)

	- Bryan

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Bryan Cantrill, Sun Microsystems Fishworks.       http://blogs.sun.com/bmc