[TUHS] President's Message: June 2026

[Warren Toomey via TUHS]

  First up, I want to say that it was a big decision for me to stop
  being the TUHS benevolent dictator and help set up a legal entity
  to look after TUHS's assets. Now that we have an incorporated
  association, TUHSI, the decision making and responsibility is now
  shared across all of the team members. Along with this is a promise
  to be transparent to you, the people who use the TUHS web site, the
  Unix Archive and the TUHS mailing list. I will strive, every month,
  to give you a wrap-up of what the TUHS team members have been doing.

  If I say "I", that's my personal opinion and not of the team.
  If I say "We", then this reflects the general team consensus.

  Now on to the actual report :-)

Wow, so it's been a bit of a whirlwind since mid-April when I asked you
for donations to help keep the TUHS server running, and you graciously
gave way more than I needed in 24 hours. Thanks again.

With the money sitting in the GoFundMe account, I realised that I
couldn't just transfer it into my own bank account: that would allow
me to go spend it on frivolous things and nobody would be wiser.

I also realised, with my 60th birthday coming up, that it made sense
to set up some form of official succession mechanism for the day when
I am no longer able to look after TUHS.

I discussed things with the TUHS team of volunteers, and I took the
decision to set up a not-for-profit organisation, "The Unix Heritage
Society, Inc.". The "Inc." here means that the organisation is
officially registered in Victoria, Australia, and we must regularly
report publicly on our operations and financial activities.

Why Ausralia? I'm Australian and it was easier for me to set it up here.
Why Victoria and not another state? Victoria allows non-residents to be
public officers, whereas the other Australian states didn't.

(I'll refer to The Unix Heritage Society, Inc." as TUHSI below).

Thus, TUHSI achieves several objectives:
 + it legally ensures that your donations must be spent on the TUSHI
   purposes: to preserve and maintain historical UNIX artifacts, and
   to provide a forum for discussion of UNIX and its history;
 + it ensures transparency on the TUHSI operations and financial activities;
 + and it gives me a succession mechanism: I'm no longer a benevolent
   dictator and, when I'm no longer around, TUHSI will continue to exist
   and keep working on Unix's history.

We just had the first TUHSI AGM a few days ago.
You can find the agenda and minutes here:
https://www.tuhs.org/Governance/Agendas_and_Minutes/20260530-inaugural-agm/

The most important action was to accept the nominations of the four public
officers:

 + Warren Toomey as President
 + Clem Cole as Vice-President
 + Greg Lehey as Secretary
 + David Arnold as Treasurer

I want to thank Clem, Greg and David for taking on these roles
for the next year. You can find our legal roles and responsibilities
in our Rules of Incorporation:
https://www.tuhs.org/Governance/Rules/TUHSI_Rules.pdf

We gave David Arnold the authority to set up a bank account for TUHSI,
as your donations have been sitting in the GoFundMe account untouched
since mid-April. More on this in a minute.

Another AGM action item was to give Dan Cross the authority to work on
the design and implementation of a new TUHS server infrastructure, with
input from the TUHS team. The existing server is getting a bit outdated
in terms of software and configuration, and I'm looking forward to a
new system which is simpler to manage and which will have a smaller
vulnerability surface. This was also the reason that I moved my personal
stuff over to a separate server: the TUHS donations should not be
spent on providing hosting for my own files and e-mails.

At the AGM we discussed bringing in more team members to add to the
existing twelve TUHS team members. Our overall decision was that we
are still finding our feet as TUHSI, and we want to bed this new thing
down first.

That raises the question: who gets to be TUHSI members? As former
benevolent dictator and now president, I took the decision that
only the team of TUHS volunteers are the people who are members of
the incorporated organisation. It means that we can run meetings with
a handful of people, make decisions (mostly) quickly and get back
to the volunteer work. The alternative would be to open TUHSI
membership up to the general public. This would mean:

 + the Committee has to approve each new member, see Rule 11.
   We would probably be swamped with approvals.
 + We would have to deal with membership fees, see Rule 11(2).
   More work for the treasurer.
 + We would need to hold general meetings in real-time with dozens or
   hundreds of people in multiple locations, all trying to give their
   own opinion on how to do things, and then vote on motions.

My decision might not be popular with some of you, but I believe
that it is the best one to keep our volunteer work going with
as little distraction as possible.

Also at the AGM, I proposed a set of by-laws that would augment our
rules of incorporation. I drafted most of these and the TUHS team
gave valuable suggestions on the meaning and wording of all of them.
They were accepted and you can read them here:
https://www.tuhs.org/Governance/Rules/By-Laws.html

You will note that there are no membership fees and that new volunteer
members need to be approved by 3/4 of the existing membership. These
rules are to ensure that we recruit volunteers who have a track record
of good work and the existing team believe that they would make a
good addition to the team.

There are also some by-laws that make me somewhat special: my membership
is permanent and I retain control over parts of the "tuhs.org" domain
which I've traditionally used for personal activities.

So these were the main outcomes of the AGM: public officers, by-laws,
TUHSI members, work on obtaining a bank account and work on a new
server infrastructure.

Back to the bank account. Before the AGM I spent some time trying
to figure out if we could set up business accounts with any of the
Wise and Wise-like on-line groups. The basic answer is no: either
they won't accept donations from GoFundMe or they don't want to
deal with a not-for-profit organisation, or both the above. It
seems likely that we might have to open an account with a more
traditional bank. Hopefully we will have solved this by my next report!

Apart from setting up TUHSI, there has been other work behind the
scenes. Dan has taken the lead with the design of a new server
infrastructure which will be more resilient that just the single
virtual machine which we have at present. We will also host our
own DNS zone rather that have our records hosted by a third party.
In terms of deployment, the plan is to move the existing TUHS services
over to the new system one at a time: static web pages, the wiki,
the Unix Tree, then the mail system and the TUHS & COFF mailing lists.
We will give you a heads-up when things are about to be migrated,
and we are going to rely on you to tell us when things break :-)

Also behind the scenes have been some actual TUHS volunteer work.
There has been some reorganisation to the Distributions/UCB/ section
of the Unix Archive at https://www.tuhs.org/Archive. We had some
additions to the Unix Archive:

 + Distributions/USDL/Cloutier_USG_PG3
 + Documentation/Languages/B_Language_Historic_Information
 + Documentation/Theses

We have team members working on making some commercial releases
of Unix publicly available, but this work is embryonic and I
can't tell you the specific details as yet.

The TUHS team have also discussed if we could leverage our new
incorporated status to get us more legal protection in terms of
intellectual property issues. For over 25 years, TUHS has effectively
been a public museum of Unix software and artifacts. We have had many
researchers, academic and otherwise, use our collection for their research
work. It would be fantastic if, somehow, some of the Unix artifacts not
covered by the Ancient Unix licence could be made available to researchers
and/or to the general public under a legal framework.

That about it for this, my first monthly report as TUHSI president.
Please bear with us as we, this new organisation, find our feet.
I look forward to reporting in with more results and work in progress
in the next month.

Cheers, Warren