Re: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX")

On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 8:16 PM, Jason Stevens <jsteve(a)superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote: In June 1993, you could already get FreeBSD, NetBSD and 386BSD as well as BSD 4.4-lite. I think Minix was also available and several other 'also ran' Unix clones of the era whose names have slipped from my memory.... Most of the folks in this thread are lamenting the era before the Net2 release when nothing was available without some kind of encumbrance. And they do have a point. Where you went to school mattered a lot for how much access to the sources you could get. But I was at a school that had a liberal source access policy. You asked Mike and he told you where to find the source. :) Mike was the director of the computer center, and he also told you not to release it and it would be an expellable offense if you shared it or copied off the servers. But at the time, I didn't have enough disk space on my PC to do that.... and I always had dialin access to the encumbered 4.2BSD sources as well as the SunOS 3.x sources. But without a machine to run it on, it was hard to hack the kernel, or even know the good kernel code from the bad with certainty.... Wasn't until my senior year that the OS course switched over from writing an OS for a TOPS-20-like machine emulated on a TOPS-20 machine to writing modules to replace bits of SunOS with your own code... It was also part of an evolving notion of "OPEN". The SunOS systems were Open. Totally Open. All the protocols they used were documented and others could write implementations to them. And there was even a sample implementation for things like NFS. For the day, that was super open. Try it with VMS, which had some of the protocols documented and some of those you could implement w/o running afoul of DEC's (claimed) IP of various flavors... Sure, it isn't as Open as today, but it was the first steps down that path... So Unix has always been an open system. It's just that it's help drive the notion of Open, including motivating people to work on Linux while the last bits of it were being freed up and the inevitable legal hassles that caused.... Of course, various commercial flavors complicated this picture significantly.... But various commercial Linux vendors don't really release their sources today, so it can be hard to get all the bits you need, especially in BSP land.... So Linux is open, but only mostly open since compliance isn't universal.... Warner