On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:33 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the *idea
> *of "Open Source" is really not anything new.
I do think there is something which is radically new --- which is that
it's not a single company publishing all of the source code for a
particular OS, whether it's System/360 or the PDP-8 Disk Operating
System, or whatever.
Ted - that is what Doug pointed out!!! They did not create anything that was new. SHARED / DECUS / USENIX and the like were providing that exact same function starting in the late 1950s!!! Companies and Universities all pooled their resources to make things better and to get new and improved solutions. Sometimes they started with things that come from the original OEM. Also often they created their own technology and made it available to everyone. Sometime they combine both. And it was a 'bazaar where everyone had access and you chose to use it to not. Sounds pretty familiar, BTW.
What >>has<< changed (dramatically) was the method and ability to distribute your work and/or the manner you obtained someone else's efforts. Today we download via the Web (much less ftp from a public area), which is much more convenient than becoming a member of an organization and having to obtain (typically for a small $50-$100 trape copying fee) a 9-track distribution tape. But even the concept of 'free' is really not new as I said. Things like UCB's ILO used that model for a long time. MIT, CMU, Stanford, Univerity of Waterloo, Cambridge, et al, just made their work to any interested parties.
But due to the new way of being interconnected and a much better distribution scheme that indeed is a huge feature. But please understand 'open source and collective sharing/working together is not a new thing that just appeared with the Gnu project and was accelerated and taken to a new level with the Linux work.
I personally blame esr's book for that beginning of the rewriting of history/kicking the previous generations in the shins, as readers of it, or worse readers of summations of it, miss the big picture instead of the reality of standing on other shoulders.
I do want to give create for the cool and important things that have come. I just want to make sure we don't forget the success of the modern world is 100% dependent on two important things: moore's law to make things more economic and the hard work of a lot of people that came before (now and before me for that matter).