Moving to COFF where this belongs…

 

Here is my basic issue.  I'm not 'blind' as Larry says.  I lived it and I try to awknowledge who did what and why if I can.  I try to remember we got here by a path and that path was hardly straight, but you don't get to join the convoy late and they say -- hey the journey began someplace else.

@FLAME(on)

Open/Free/Available/Access – whatever you want to call it, did not just pop up in the late 1980’ with the Free Software Foundation or in the 90s with the Linux Foundation et al.   The facts are that in the early years, a computer customer got everything including schematics from the cpu manufacturer.   The ‘culture’ described in Levi’s circa 1980 book “Hackers” that took off at MIT, Stanford, CMU, et al. because everything was available and people shared things because it saved us all time and trouble.  In fact, the name of the IBM user group was just that, SHARE. 

 IBM published patched to the OS or their compilers, in the source as 'PTFs' - program temporary fix'.   Each site might have modified things a little (or a lot), so got the PTF and tape and looked at how the patch affected you.   That was my first job support York APL/360 on TSS. (CMU had TSS working before IBM did, so a lot of PTFs from IBM would be things we already had dealt).

 

Certainly, when I started programming in the late 1960s, the idea of proprietary SW had been around, but it was still somewhat constrained to the commercial side (Banking/Insurance etc… parts – where the real money was).  The research and university community (which of course DEC was heavily part) was very much, we are all in together. Still everyone had sources and we moved things back and forth via mag tape at DECUS conferences or eventually the ARPAnet.

 

At some point that started to change.   Doug, Ken and others older than I can probably tell you more than I can about that transition.  But the vendors started to lock up more and more of their IP.   A user no longer got a mag tape with the sources and you did not do a full system generation.  The end users/customers only got parts of the system, the rest was binaries.  Unless you paid huge fees, the source at best was available on microfiche, and often you lacked important things needed to recreate the binaries.   Thus the concept of the closed or proprietary systems started to become the norm, not as it has been previously.

I remember, since CMU had VAX Serial #1, and a 'special' relationship with DEC, we have VMS sources.  One spring/summer we were doing a consulting job (moving ISPS to the Vax for the Israel Government), and that was were I realized they only had the code on fiche, and CMU was 'different.'

 

But here is the interesting thing, as the vendors started becoming less and less 'open', AT&T was required by the 1956 consent decree to be 'open' and license its IP for ‘fair and reasonable terms’ to all interested parties.   (Which, they did, and the world got the transistor and UNIX as two of the best examples).  So AT&T UNIX behavior is the opposite of what the hardware manufacturers were doing at the time!!! 

 

The argument comes back to a few basic issues.  What is ‘fair and reasonable’ and ‘who gets to decide’ what is made available.  As the creators of some content, started to close access to ‘secret sauce’ a tension can and did start to build between the creators and some users.  BTW, the other important thing to remember is that you needed a $100K-$250K hunk of HW from DEC to use that ‘open’ IP from AT&T and the hardware acquisition was the barrier to entry, not the cost the SW.

 

Folks, those of us that lived it.  UNIX was 100% open.   Anyone could get a license for it.   The technologies that AT&T developed was also published in the open literature detailing how it was made/how it worked.  They did this originally because they were bound by the US Gov due to a case that started in 1949 and settled witht that 1956 decree!  The folks at AT&T were extremely free to talk about and they did give away what they had.   The ‘sauce’ was never secret (and thus AT&T would famously lose its case when they later tried to put the cat back in the bag in AT&T vs. UCB/BSDi case).

 

The key is that during the PDP-11 and Vaxen times, the UNIX community all had licenses, commercial or university.  But soon the microprocessor appears, we start to form new firms and with those sources, we created a new industry, the Open Systems Industry with an organization called /usr/group.  This is all in the early 1980s (before FSF, much less Linux).  What was different here, was we could all share between other licensees (and anyone could get a license if they >>wanted<< it).

 

But something interesting happens.   These new commercial Open Systems folk won the war with the proprietary vendors.  They were still competing with the old guard and they competed against each other (surprise/surprise – some were the same folks who had been competing against each other previously, now they just was using somewhat standard ammunition – UNIX and a cheap processor).

 

Moreover, the new people with the UNIX technology (Sun, DEC, HP, Masscomp, IBM et al) start to handle their own version of UNIX just like they handled their previous codes.  They want to protect it.

 

And this is where the famous fair and reasonable comes in.   Who gets to set what is fair?   Certainly, $150 fee to recover the cost of writing the magtape (the IP was really free) seemed fair at the time – particularly since you had to ‘cons up’ another $150K for that PDP-11.

 

Stallman, in particular, wants to go back to old days, where he got access toeverything and he had his playground.   To add insult to all, he currently fighting the same war with some of MIT's ideas and the LISP machine world.  So his answer was to try to rewrite everything from scratch and then try to give it away/get people to use it but add a funny clause that said you have to give to anyone else that asked for it.   He still has a license, he just has different rules (I’ll not open if this is fair or reasonable – but it was the rules FSF made).  BTW: that only works if you have something valuable (more in a minute).

 

Moore’s law starts driving the cost of the hardware down and at some point, the computer to run UNIX costs $50K, then $10K, $5K, and even $1K.   So now the fees that AT&T is charging the commercial side can be argued (as Larry and other have so well) are no longer ‘reasonable.’

 

At some point, FSF’s movement (IMO – after they got a compiler that was ‘good enough’ and that worked on ‘enough’ target ISA’s) starts to take off. I think this is the real 'Christensen Disruption'.  GCC was not as good as Masscomp or Sun's compilers for the 68k or DEC's for the Vax, but it was free.  As I recall, Sun was charging for its compiler at the time (we did manage to beat back the ex-DEC marketing types at Masscomp and the C compiler was free, Fortran and Pascal cost $s).

Even though gcc is not as good, its good enough and people love it, so it builds a new market (and gets better and better as more people invest in it -- see Christensen's theory for why).

But this at least 5 years after the Open Systems Community has been birthed. Sorry guys -- the term has been in use for a while to mean the >>UNIX<< community with its open interfaces and sharing of code.  BTW: Linux itself would happen for another 5 years after that and couple of more years before the Linux Foundation, much less the community that has grown around it.

 

But that’s my point…   Please at least here in the historic mailing lists, start to admit and be proud that we are standing on people's shoulders and >>stop<< trying to stepping on people’s toes.     

 

The current FOSS movement is just that – Free and Open.    That’s cool – that’s great.  But recognize it started long before FSF or Linux or any of that.

 

For a different time, the person I think who should really be credited as the start of the FOSS movement as we know it, is the late Prof. Don Pederson.   In the late 1960s, he famously gave away his first ECAD program from UCB (which I believe was called MOTIS – and would later begat SPICE).  As ‘dop’ used to tell his students (like me) back in the day – ‘I always give away my sources.  Because that way I go in the back door and get to see everything at IBM/HP/Tektronix/AT&T/DEC etc...   If I license and sell our code, I have to go in the front door like any other salesman.’   For the record a few years later, my other alma mater (CMU) was notorious for licensing it's work -- hence the SCRIBE debacle of the late 1970s and much of the CMU SPICE project/Andrew results of the early 1980s - while MIT gave everything away in Athena and more everything from the NU projects.  I notice that the things that lived the longest from CMU were things that were given away without any restrictions... but I digress.

 

So... coming back to the UNIX side of the world.  Pederson’s work would create UCB’s ‘industrial liaison office’ which was the group that released the original ‘Berkeley Software Distribution’ for UNIX (a.k.a. BSD).  They had a 10 year history of ‘giving away’ free software before UNIX came along.   They gave their UNIX code anyone that asked for it.  You just had to prove you had a license from AT&T, but again anyone could get that.  i.e. it was 'open source.'