On Sun, 6 Jan 2019, A. P. Garcia wrote:
On Sun, Jan 6, 2019, 7:43 PM Jon Steinhart
<jon(a)fourwinds.com wrote
<snip
I would argue that Linux would not have
happened without the internet
> making it possible for folks around the world to participate. And I
think
> that there's a good chance that the
tools would have been created
anyway.
That's more or less how I look at it. Back in the day there was
comp.sources.unix for example. In Unix itself, there was /usr/ where
tools
developed by users other than the core developers
belonged, and there was
/usr/ucb/ where they put stuff from Berkeley. The culture surrounding
Unix
has always seemed to encourage outside
participation, going back to the
lenient licensing of Research Unix, and even before that, when it just
existed at Murray Hill.
If not for GNU, Unix would still have been cloned. Net/2 happened in
parallel, did it not?
Berkeley actively rewrote most of unix yes. Net/1 was released about the
same time GNU was getting started. Net/2 and later 4.4 BSD continued this
trend, where 4.4 was finally a complete system. BSD386 only lagged Linux by
about a year and had much stronger networking support, but supported fewer
obscure devices than linux...
Warner
Ps I know this glosses over a lot, and isn't intended to be pedantic as to
who got where first. Only they were about the same time... and I'm
especially glossing over the AT&T suits, etc.