18 Jul
2008
18 Jul
'08
12:30 a.m.
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 01:22:15PM -0700, Bryan Cantrill wrote:
The history is made by people and their actions, people are not isolated
beings but they are social. Therefore, history is always about politics.
The code of Unix did evolve because of the politics they
creators/vendors were engaged with (I'm talking about political
economy). The actions which created and evolved Unix had political
goals, sometimes for academic gain, sometimes for commercial gain.
I don't think Unix as a phenomenon can be understood without
understanding it's politics.
You happen to have a different view on the political angle of Unix.
That's fine. You also don't hold a totally impartial stance on Unix
politics, as you are affiliated to one of the Unix parties. But I don't
think it is fair to try to suppress the political views one doesn't like,
or to try to suppress the political expression of history altogether..
It is as much "historical Unix" the political history of Unix, as it is
the code history of it.
--
Pepe
pepe(a)naleco.com
Sun needed desperately to find a way to stop
losing money, and that
meant making themselves again desirable to the IT market. Sun mayor [sic]
rivals were (and are) Microsoft and Linux. Specially Linux, since more
Sun machines are being replaced by Linux than by Windows. So the Sun
strategy was two-fold: release an "opensource" Unix to "steal" the
grassroots support away from Linux, and give money to The SCO Group
so they could keep afloat their FUD campaign against Linux in the
Enterprise. If they could achieve these two goals with one swift move,
much better; and they did: the gave money to The SCO Group to buy a
bogus license to opensource Solaris.
Can we keep this kind of invective to a minimum? As it happens, you're
wrong in this particular case, but more generally it would be nice if
we could try to stick to the history of Unix as code, and not Unix as
endless trench warfare...