[TUHS] TUHS: Maintenance, Succession and Funding

[steve jenkin via TUHS]

> On 18 Apr 2026, at 10:17, Warren Toomey via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:
> 
> So that's where we are. I hope you've been happy with the TUHS work
> over the past 30 years, and I'm keen to see it continue indefinitely :-)
> 
> Cheers, Warren

It’s worth remembering the future we could’ve had if SCO had won.

We are very lucky to have had leaders and communities around them
that prevented this, including this one.

Not just no ‘Historical Unix’, no TUHS, but no Free Linux
and a much reduced Open Source Software movement as a result.

Which would’ve squeezed Apache, MySQL and the post-PERL languages.

Including no ‘Git’ and ‘github’.

The Web as we know it, could never have developed.

No Linux, No Android? 
or could a BSD variant have been the base?

XKCD’s “Dependency” is a visualisation of the complex web of interrelated,
necessary, free-to-use software that supports our modern world.

	<https://xkcd.com/2347/>

———

Diomidis Spinellis took the TUHS archives and gave us
the Continuous Unix History Repository from 1970… 

A brilliant exposition of capability & source code history.
	<https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo>

———

The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
	2021
	<https://lwn.net/Articles/924577/>

	Magazines like Forbes were warning the 
		"Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement” 
		that they "should wake up”. 

	SCO was suggesting a license fee of $1,399 - per-CPU - to run Linux. [ in 2001 ]

	SCO managed to prove the cleanliness of the (linux) kernel's pedigree in a far more convincing way 
		than anybody else could have. 
	Nobody now questions the legitimacy of the kernel's source code.

	Many other projects have adopted similar procedures (to Linux’s 'certificate of origin’),
	most of which have the happy result of documenting the provenance of code 
	without imposing heavy bureaucracy on the process. [ github publicly proves provenance ]

	 It was not just IBM's lawyers and money that won this fight; 
		it was a widespread community that had built something special 
		and had no intention of letting a failing company steal it.

———
--
Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design 
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin