Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

At Tue, 18 Feb 2020 10:11:45 -0500, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark Indeed. I was going to use the word "freeware", but it seems to have gone out of common use in favour of the now more common "open-source", as in https://opensource.org/ At the times I referred to the lack of freely available AT&T source code was extremely limiting in how people viewed the availability of such "add-on" tools for Unix -- including the C compiler! AT&T's break-up of the "Unix" distribution into separately licensed chunks was, from my perspective, one of the main driving forces behind the creation and adoption of so many clones and alternatives -- no matter how far they strayed from the original Unix philosophy. It was _very_ different. If you weren't out in the trenches of end-user Unix-based systems at the time it may not have been as obvious as to just how restrictive it was to have proprietary fee-based licensing of such add-on software. Most end-users couldn't even pay their vendors for ditroff -- their vendors didn't want to have to license it from AT&T, even when they had advocates inside the companies (e.g. I did some work supporting software for a couple such vendors and was never able to convince them). Some, as you mention, were all-in, but it wasn't until UNIX System V Release 4 became more widely available that systems based on it were more likely to have ditroff, and sometimes (though much more rarely) the "new" dpost post-processor was also included. I don't know if there were different licensing terms for SysVr4 or not. Don't get me started on how hard it also was to get some end users to buy a C compiler too. For the entire decade of the 1990s I was still one of the only people I knew (outside of those I knew in AT&T Canada and their customers) who owned a system that included ditroff and dpost and could print directly to a PostScript laser printer -- and that's despite living in the same city where SoftQuad was re-licensing ditroff and their variant of dpost to quite a wide variety of users. This was my situation because I had chosen to buy a used AT&T 3B2. Without that I'd have been without ditroff -- I would have been very lucky if I had v7 troff binaries so that I could use Chris' PSroff. These days of course there's the full ditroff source release in the Heirloom Documentation Tools collection. I'd like to see it used to replace Groff in some places, but so far I've been less than successful -- that cart seems to have rolled off the road into the ditch, hopefully without losing the horse though. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>