Ted observed:

I always thought the implementation of /bin/true, which was a shell

script where the license statement proclaiming AT&T's copyright was

longer than the "exit 0" line, was both incredibly funny, and

incredibly sad.

It's been a long time since I looked at the AT&T source, but I recall that

the version number was pushing 2 digits. It's hard to get it "wrong" on the first try

(although I could possibly do it). More likely, the version numbers reflected

changes to the licensing wording. -- jpl

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 1:38 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 19, 2021 at 10:50:07AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> Ted -- yes, your generation put a >>name<< to the behavior, which is a
> wonderful thing and something you can be proud.  But the behavior of openly
> sharing your work product with the community long predates, Linux, the
> wider Internet, *et al. * It is sad a minimum, if not downright
> disingenuous to say "open source" was created at that point.

No one said that "open source" was created at that point.  The perl,
BSD, FSF's emacs, gcc, and other software published under the GPL all
predated the definition of the **term** "Open Source".

However, I strongly contest the claim that Unix was "Open Source".
Unix was the UNPUBLISHED TRADE SECRET of AT&T, and students exposed to
Unix source code became contaminated with AT&T's "methods and
concepts" clause.  So they couldn't even *reimplement* Unix without
potentially getting sued by AT&T.

I always thought the implementation of /bin/true, which was a shell
script where the license statement proclaiming AT&T's copyright was
longer than the "exit 0" line, was both incredibly funny, and
incredibly sad.

Cheers,

                                                - Ted
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