19 Feb
2020
19 Feb
'20
10:44 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 12:22:56PM -0800, Greg A. Woods wrote:
Yep, lived through this as well. I fought with Sun to make more stuff
free for developers, it just didn't make sense to not do that but the
powers that were didn't get it.
One thing that Sun did do, probably in spite of itself, was fund
Michael Tiemann's work on C++. He worked out some deal that that
work would be open source and he pretty much made GNU C++ work
for some definition of work (C++ is a mess).
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!
This wasn't just an AT&T thing, Sun and SGI and everyone charged for their
C compiler. I sort of get it, writing a good compiler is up there with
writing a good kernel in effort, not quite the same, but probably the
2nd hardest thing to do. So the compiler people cost a lot, companies
wanted to get that cost back.
It was stupid. Having a free compiler meant that more people would
write apps for your platform. It should have been a loss leader.
For folks
running binary only systems from Masscomp/Sun/DEC/HP/IBM and the
like, it is possible it was different.
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.