Stuart, Jon scripsit:
Perhaps an OSF1-"lite", on par with
4.4BSD-Lite which had the
copyrighted code removed, would be possible to get released.
That was only possible because of the massive effort to rewrite all things
AT&T out of the BSD source.
All of this, the closing of UNX, the loss of the VAX
and now the dying
of the Alpha chip, is very disheartening. Although I'm lucky enough to
have access to 5 VAXen (running 4.3 BSD UNIX and one running Ultrix4),
it's tough for anyone to learn and play with this stuff, because they
are becoming so scarce (you can by a VaxStation/MicroVax on eBay, but
these will only run Ultrix and not 4.3 BSD, unfortunately).
On come the emulators.
I guess I'm somewhat nostoglic about old UNIX,
and I enjoy seeing it's
evolution. That's why whenever I'm able to view the source code of some
closed-source UNIX, it's very enjoyable to me. Old UNIX has a rustic
appeal to me.
It's really "middle Unix" you are talking about. Old Unix and new Unix
(and I don't agree that Linux/*BSD are not Unix) are both now open source.
It's unfortunate that it seems we must resign
ourselves to a future of
x86-based OSs, such as Linux, or even Open/Free/NetBSD, which aren't
really UNIX (Linux definitely isn't, and the modern BSDs have changed
enough that they also aren't IMO).
Unix is a local minimum in the design space. It can be reimplemented
over and over.
--
John Cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
http://ccil.org/~cowan
If he has seen farther than others,
it is because he is standing on a stack of dwarves.
--Mike Champion, describing Tim Berners-Lee (adapted)