16 Mar
2017
16 Mar
'17
6:52 a.m.
Right and as Larry points out that led to a club mentality, which can see
would (in practice) make people interpret something in a different way than
really was the case or the intended case.
On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 8:46 PM, Wesley Parish <wes.parish(a)paradise.net.nz>
wrote:
One of the problems was the hardware system price
ratio to software system
price. When you could get
a 486 PC for $5-10k and the SysV source license (for 4.3BSD!) was $100k,
it seemed rather monstrously
disproportionate. :)
This mismatch didn't exist in the Minicomputer world, where a VAX cost
rather more than $5-10k and
the price for a source license was thus not disproportionate.
FWVLIW
Wesley Parish
Quoting Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>:
BTW Josh, I am trying to be respectful here. I
suspect you are tad
younger
I am and your early introduction into UNIX was on the WINTEL platform,
not
on the DEC systems like mine. So, if I'm going to make a guess you were
not in a position when you were introduced to be able to get access to
the
sources.
So in your experience the UNIX source were closed to you personally
(and
many others). I get that. But it does not change the fact it, there
were
available and there open and were not a secret. Which was very
different
from many of "closed" systems (says Cisco, or much of the other
infrastructure) of the day. They always have been. Even System V.
It was quite easy to get source if you were willing (and could pay).
I'm
not suggesting that it was easy for you could and I understand that
frustration. I personally would not have been able to pay for the
licenses, but I was being employed by firms that could and valued my
abilities, so they did. This was also true for many educational
institutions.
Sun and DEC actually were quite liberal with their source licenses,
because
AT&T had been. They had to be also - because their customer required
it.
The point is there is a difference between "open" and "free." There
are
a
lot of things that are open and we can look at but not touch or have
the
wearwithall to modify. But that does not change their openness - we can
still (and do) learn from them.
Linus and many of us learned because UNIX (the ideas) and the basic
implementations were open. We talked about them, they were well
specified.
We wrote application that relied on those ideas, APIs etc. And Linus,
Andy Tannenbaum and Plaguer before them reimplemented those ideas and
created clones. *Unix was and is "open" and the implementations were
and
are available.* The problem for many is the price to look at the
implementations - that I grant. And for many, for some of those
implementations, can be high. But it does not make them "closed."
The effect may seem that way to you, but it was not and is not the
same.
All, I'm asking you to say, is that traditional UNIX implementations
such
as System V were not "Free and Open," unlike Linux some of the other
Unix
clones. And that make all the difference.
They were and still are open.
On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Josh Good <pepe(a)naleco.com> wrote:
"I have supposed that he who buys a Method means to learn it." - Ferdinand
Sor,
Method for Guitar
"A verbal contract isn't worth the paper it's written on." -- Samuel
Goldwyn
On 2017 Mar 14, 21:11, Clem Cole wrote:
>
> My point is that you (and many others) equate "open" and "free"
- I
ask
> you to please not make that error. Open
means we can talk about it
and
> share it, see it. Which is exactly what we
did "back in the day".
But
as
> people pointed out you had to pay AT&T to be a member of the UNIX
club
if
> you were commercial, although any University
type could be apart
for
free.
What UNIX for PC in the '90s had the option to buy a source code
license
for that specific version, so that PC hackers
could write drivers for
their hardware and tune the kernel internals to their liking, or be
able
to fix themselves a bug in the serial port
driver, etc.?
Certainly not OpenServer, not UnixWare nor SCO Xenix. Did DELL Unix
offered a payware source code license for their product? I'm not
aware
of such.
From System V onwards, UNIX became closed source in what matters,
that
is, the version running on your hardware and the
version with the
drivers
you are using (unless you were an employee at
IBM, DEC, HP or SUN
running
propietary hardware and happened to be in the
right group).
It is obvious to me that RMS's GNU movement was aimed at solving that
very problem. And if that was a problem, then the "UNIX openness" you
talk about does not seem to have been very practical at all. At
least,
it was totally useless to PC hackers, like Linus
Torvalds - he had to
write his own UNIX, because he was not able to get any UNIX source
code
he could readily compile and run on his i386.
--
Josh Good