I see in many places the 1973 Symposium on Operating System Principles mentioned
as one of the earliest if not the earliest discussion of UNIX in the public eye.
This would be around the time of the Fourth Edition and the rewrite of the
system for the PDP-11/45 in C.
Well, I recently picked up Aho and Ullman's The Theory of Parsing, Translation,
and Compiling. The very last sentence of the preface in Volume 1 reads:
> The use of UNIX, an operating system for the PDP-11 computer designed by
> Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson, expedited the preparation of certain
> parts of this manuscript.
Given that this text was published in 1972, would this have been a completely
esoteric reference to the general target audience of these books or was
knowledge of UNIX already well circulated in the computing community by then?
What other sorts of notoriety/publicity did UNIX get out in the general public
prior to its presentation in 1973 and subsequent publication of the paper in
CACM?
- Matt G.
So System V shops had to hold a license with AT&T to modify and redistribute
code based on UNIX System V and they would then license directly with their
customers correct? This being distinct from the way licensing with BSD was
concerned in that you had to pursue the license with AT&T to then use BSD. That
is my current understanding anyway that I base this question on.
So IBM, DEC, Sun, HP, Microsoft, etc. approach AT&T, got a source license, and
started producing their System V value adds out there in the world. In this
present day and age, for those still shipping genuine System V derivatives, what
does this licensing landscape actually look like? Do the players still in the
game still refer to whatever license they started with back in the 80s, did they
renew up until say SVR4 when folks stopped drinking from the USL well, or are
there still ongoing licenses that the remaining vendors have to renew to
distribute their software?
Where I'm going with this is just another angle on the whole "who owns System V"
question which comes up in my mind all the time. Knowing the specific legal
entities involved in the most recent licensing documentation would certainly
factor into understanding the landscape a little better.
To boil that down to a specific example, once upon a time, Sun held a license
with AT&T to use, modify, and redistribute UNIX System V. At the present
moment, Oracle is the distributor of Solaris. If there is a piece of licensing
paperwork sitting in a filing cabinet at Oracle somewhere, who would that
paperwork say is the original licensor of the product? Would that even matter
in this year of 2025?
- Matt G.
Hi all,
I see that there has been quite a bit of activity in the last few weeks
with 2.11BSD, resulting in the release of a number of patches. Is there
any sort of announcement list that one could subscribe to in order to be
notified of when these patch releases occur? Would it make sense to post
patch announcements to the TUHS or SIMH lists? TUHS seems somewhat natural
since one of the patch distribution methods is through their archive,
though I am open to thoughts that anyone else has about this. I only
happened to be aware of the patches because I have the "History of the
Berkeley Software Distribution" page on my Wikipedia watchlist and someone
has been very diligent about updating the 2.11BSD patch status there.
-Henry
