22 Feb
2017
22 Feb
'17
9:38 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 9:25 PM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
I started screwing around with Linux in the late 90s,
and it would be many
years before any sort of real Unix (of the AT&T variety), in any form, was
readily available to me - that being Solaris when Sun started offering it
for free download.
See my comment to Dan. I fear you may not have known where to look, or whom
to ask. As I asked Dan, were you not at an university at time? Or where
you running a Sun or the like -- i.e. working with real UNIX but working
for someone with binary license, not sources from AT&T (and UCB)?
I really am curious because I have heard this comment before and never
really understood it because the sources really were pretty much available
to anyone that asked. Most professionals and almost any/all
university students had did have source access if they ask for it. That is
part of why AT&T lost the case. The trade secret was out, by definition.
The required by the 1956 consent decree to make the trade secrets
available. A couple of my European university folks have answer that the
schools kept the sources really locked down. I believe you, I never saw
that at places like Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburg, Darmstad or other places I
visited in those days in Europe. Same was true of CMU, MIT, UCB et al
where I had been in the USA, so I my experience was different.
The key that by definition, UNIX was available and there were already
versions from AT&T or not "in the wild." You just need to know where to
look and whom to ask. The truth is that the UCB/BSDi version of UNIX - was
based on the AT&T trade secret, as was Linux, Minix, Coherent and all of
the other "clones" -- aka look-a-likes and man of those sources were
pretty available too (just as Minix was to Linus and 386BSD was to him also
but he did not know to where/whom to ask).
So a few years later when the judge said, these N files might be tain'ted
by AT&T IP, but can't claim anything more. The game was over. The problem
was when the case started, techies (like me, and I'm guessing Larry, Ron
and other ex BSD hackers that "switched") went to Linux and started to
making it better because we thought we going to lose BSD.
That fact is if we had lost BSD, legally would have lost Linux too; but we
did not know that until after the dust settled. But by that time, many
hackers had said, its good enough and made it work for everyone.
As you and Dan have pointed out, many non-hackers did know that UNIX really
was available so they went with *Linux because they thought that had no
other choice, *when if fact, you actually did and that to me was the sad
part of the AT&T case.
A whole generation never knew and by the time they did have a choice but a
few religion began and new wars could be fought.
Anyway - that's my thinking/answer to Noel's original question.
Of why Linux over the over the PC/UNIX strains... I think we all agree that
one of the PC/UNIX was going to be the winner, the question really is why
did Linux and not a BSD flavor?
22 Feb
22 Feb
10:28 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 10:38 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 9:25 PM, Steve Nickolas <usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
Clem, I think this is a great way to put it, and that you're fundamentally
right, but bear in mind the following, below:
I really am curious because I have heard this comment before and never
I started screwing around with Linux in the late
90s, and it would be
many years before any sort of real Unix (of the AT&T variety), in any form,
was readily available to me - that being Solaris when Sun started offering
it for free download.
See my comment to Dan. I fear you may not have known where to look, or
whom to ask. As I asked Dan, were you not at an university at time? Or
where you running a Sun or the like -- i.e. working with real UNIX but
working for someone with binary license, not sources from AT&T (and UCB)?
really understood it because the sources really were
pretty much available
to anyone that asked. Most professionals and almost any/all
university students had did have source access if they ask for it. That is
part of why AT&T lost the case. The trade secret was out, by definition.
The required by the 1956 consent decree to make the trade secrets
available. A couple of my European university folks have answer that the
schools kept the sources really locked down. I believe you, I never saw
that at places like Cambridge, Oxford, Edinburg, Darmstad or other places I
visited in those days in Europe. Same was true of CMU, MIT, UCB et al
where I had been in the USA, so I my experience was different.
The universities you are mentioning here are top-tier for CS. But please do
bear in mind that if you were not at one of those institutions (for
whatever reason), asking for that code might well have gotten you the hairy
eyeball from folks you didn't want giving you a furry look. If you were in
an institution better known for Mech E than CS, even if you had access, the
folks who you would ask to get it wouldn't necessarily know to give it to
you. By the time I was a student, I didn't much care as I was more
interested in pure math than computers, but hey.
The key that by definition, UNIX was available and there were already
versions from AT&T or not "in the wild."
You just need to know where to
look and whom to ask. The truth is that the UCB/BSDi version of UNIX - was
based on the AT&T trade secret, as was Linux, Minix, Coherent and all of
the other "clones" -- aka look-a-likes and man of those sources were
pretty available too (just as Minix was to Linus and 386BSD was to him also
but he did not know to where/whom to ask).
So a few years later when the judge said, these N files might be tain'ted
by AT&T IP, but can't claim anything more. The game was over. The
problem was when the case started, techies (like me, and I'm guessing
Larry, Ron and other ex BSD hackers that "switched") went to Linux and
started to making it better because we thought we going to lose BSD.
That fact is if we had lost BSD, legally would have lost Linux too; but we
did not know that until after the dust settled. But by that time, many
hackers had said, its good enough and made it work for everyone.
As you and Dan have pointed out, many non-hackers did know that UNIX
really was available so they went with *Linux because they thought that
had no other choice, *when if fact, you actually did and that to me was
the sad part of the AT&T case.
A whole generation never knew and by the time they did have a choice but a
few religion began and new wars could be fought.
Anyway - that's my thinking/answer to Noel's original question.
Of why Linux over the over the PC/UNIX strains... I think we all agree
that one of the PC/UNIX was going to be the winner, the question really is
why did Linux and not a BSD flavor?
Small anecdote: I got access to NetBSD fairly quickly (but it still had
this feeling of not *really* being Unix, for some odd reason). I suppose I
must have installed 0.8. I switched to FreeBSD once I realized one could
install via FTP instead of a myriad of floppies. I ran Linux on one machine
but some folks I regarded gave me guff about it and I switched to the
publicly available BSD stuff shortly thereafter.
As someone once said, BSD is what you get when Unix folks port to the PC;
Linux is what you get when PC folks build a Unix. Most local folks were
running Suns or RS/6000s and the PC-based stuff was regarded as something
of a toy. A couple of years later, someone pointed out the Wintel economics
and it was hard to refute.
- Dan C.
(PS: A self-deprecating anecdote. When I started gaining access to the
local Unix culture, access to USENET came along with that and, of course,
discovery of the local flame newsgroup. Not knowing anything, I posted
something; I was immediately flambeed and told to post my SAT score. a) I
hadn't yet taken the SAT, and b) I had no idea how to respond to a posting
and quote what I was responding to, so I just "played it cool" by
responding with single-word posts saying likes what, "Whatever." or
"Loser." This apparently gained me something of a reputation as a savvy
participant as it drove some of the regulars batty, but really, it was
entirely due to my own ignorance of how [not] to use an NNTP client. The
SAT thing was apparently a matter of local lore and had to do with a
particularly verbose community participant who was sufficiently impressed
with his SAT score that he kept posting about it, eventually prompting a
flood of tongue-in-cheek replies about standardized test scores....)
9:36 p.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
Dan & Larry thank you -- this helps me understand and I'm going reply you
both in line hopefully without screwing up either of your messages as I
try...
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The universities you are mentioning here are top-tier for CS. But please
do bear in mind that if you were not at one of those institutions (for
whatever reason), asking for that code might well have gotten you the hairy
eyeball from folks you didn't want giving you a furry look.
Unfortunately, I can see that. Sad, but probably a reality. Again, "he
who has the gold, rules." Funny thing about gatekeepers. Larry's closing
comment about Bill Shannon walling off the Research kernels was the same
thing, and IT folks often seem to be like that too. My wife likes
referred this behavior just this AM at breakfast, she calls "can't" a
"magic button word" for me. I hate it when providers say things like
that. Pisses me off and something go off to prove otherwise. ;-)
....Small anecdote: I got access to NetBSD fairly quickly (but it still
had this feeling of not *really* being Unix, for some odd reason). I
suppose I must have installed 0.8. I switched to FreeBSD once I realized
one could install via FTP instead of a myriad of floppies. I ran Linux on
one machine but some folks I regarded gave me guff about it and I switched
to the publicly available BSD stuff shortly thereafter.
FYI: I ran them both in the early days. @ the time, *BSD was more
"finger ROM" compliant(still is). I preferred Slackware for Linux
because it was more BSD-like, and seemed a little less hackneyed but as you
say the floppy distro just sucked.
As someone once said, BSD is what you get when Unix folks port to the PC;
Linux is what you get when PC folks build a Unix.
I love it, never heard that and in fact that helps with Noel's original
question, I think. It all comes back to the Christiansen disruption
theory.
...
A self-deprecating anecdote.
I had to laugh a little when I read all that. I'm going to reply to
something Larry said in a minute and this all related. Yeah, Larry's
right, places like CMU, MIT, UCB are elite schools and yes, I have too
solid board scores *etc*. As I like to say I have "the usual degrees from
the usual institutions" - *i.e*. I have my union card. But I'm nothing
special. You're from Penn State or UWisc (aka "UC Madison" - a lot of my
class from UCB is the core of the faculty there). Hey, I believe Seymour
Cray did his undergrad at St. Olaf's, a school better know for music - i.e.
a small liberal arts school in Northfield, MN.
I've never really cared where you went to school, what your score were,
what your degrees are etc. I'm a hacker, and proud of being that. The
schools, as you and Larry correctly point out, gave me opportunity and
access. So I have network from them. But its what you do with it that
matters to me.
Two stories about me. First, I have always said, the greatest gift I was
ever given was *not* getting a scholarship to MIT. I would have gone there
and likely been "The nerd down the hall" - either that or flunked out. Who
knows, as I later got to know folks that went there, it would not have been
a good match for me as an undergrad. CMU (as screwed up as it was at time)
was a better match for my personality.
The fact is, I did not know know enough about the MIT culture when I was in
HS (I was a faculty brat - *i.e.* scholarship student -- from a
Philadelphia prep school - my Sr year in college 7 of the 7 Ivy League
Squash Captains are my classmates from said prep school). That HS pushed
me to MIT because I wanted to an engineer and that's all they knew. I did
not even know about CMU until it was suggested by a family friend who was
professor in the B School there. But in the end, it was about $. CMU
offered me a scholarship, MIT did not and tricky Dick wanted to put a gun
in hand. It was an easy choice. What was lucky for me was it a
reasonably good culture match... mostly because of the close friends I
made there ... out side of the EE, Math and CS Depts (two weekend ago I
was a party with some of them that has occurred for 40 years on the same
weekend since). Point is, I got lucky...
Second, the proudest moment for me was watching my children pick colleges.
Unlike me, I swore they would know about the culture of the schools and
make darned sure that where they went matched their personalities and not
rely on luck (and I'm very pleased to say that worked well with my daughter
and seems to be working with my son). So to me, what the school you one
too says about you is the network you have, who are your friends and the
culture you learned. It tells me a little about how I can expect you to
have been versed as a starting point, but I'm really much more
interest want you do, have done.
It's sad, that Penn State and UWisc had walled areas like both described.
Sadly I saw the same thing at UCB, certainly of the undergrads. I have
nothing but respect for the young folks that did an undergrad at UCB,
because it was definitely different as a grad student. To me that's about
respect for the individual and helping them grown up to be their best -
creating opportunity. But I fear you are right. If things like UNIX
access were walled off at places like that, then as you both point out,
people we search for it where they could find it, *what is sad is that BSD
UNIX was available at the time Linux was available. *The problem was that
too few knew it, although many did (more in a minute).
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:17 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
... Yup, source was there. Access was restricted,
you had to get a login
on slovax, and you had to be
"somebody" to get that login. I don't remember how I got access, I just
knew I wanted it. So I probably just begged and eventually one of the
admins took pity on me? Dunno.
Fair enough... that's me... I don't take no for answer either ;-).
I can easily imagine that the CMU CS department let all
their students have access to the source if they wanted it.
Sort of... when you took the OS course, since we used V6, everyone signed
a "sub-license" from the CMU lawyers saying you were bound by the same
rules as CMU, subject to being drawn and qtr'ed or otherwise
severely admonished.
I don't think that was anywhere near as common as
Clem thinks it was.
I have to accept that, as strange as it seems to me. But I can see it
happening.
My guess is that Clem interacted with a bunch of
people who were his peers
(aka
pretty elite people) and all those guys had source access.
Maybe... I accept that view, but I don't think it was intended that way
by the >>developers<<. Security by obscurity more than intent I actually
think. But people that >>owned<< the computers, did tend to put up the
walls. I saw that. The problem was that the cost of those systems was
very high, so making the available to "anyone" was a hard thing to
"justify." Only pretty "enlighten" folk knew it was in their self
interest
to do so. Places like CMU, MIT and Stanford where the computing was pretty
available to anyone who asked, were probably fewer than place like what two
have described... sigh.
Us unwashed masses had to work a lot harder to get
it.
Fair enough - on the other side, you could not tell the difference and I'll
grant that. But I don't think it was intended. In fact, just the opposite
was intended I think. If you look at the core of things like the GNU
project for the 386BSD / Jolitix it was all about trying get a code
available to anyone. The "hacker philosophy" really was of science and
computing for all.
Once 386BSD came out, yeah, source was easy. Not
before.
Maybe... As I said, the ftp address to download the original Jolitz 386
stuff (before the BSDi) split, was a poorly kept secret.
I think I can date this sketch because as I remember it, it happened very
near the time I was about to leave for my honeymoon. So that would have
made it sometime in 2nd qtr of 1990. But around that time, I was
consulting for NCR and during that gig, I was helping Bill with the disk
driver for what would be BSD for the PC/386 (Bill references in the DDJ
article BTW).
Because of my working NCR, I had access to the documentation for the WD
disk controller used in the PC/AT. Jollitz had tried to write the driver
by reverse engineering the AT BIOS ROMS. But since I had access to the
actual docs, I was able to tell what board was supposed to be doing, so I
was able fix the driver to work correctly. I also think I added the
original SCSI support of the WD7000 which they had just released and NCR
was using (which is pre CAM BTW). Anyway, I remember trying to upload a
new copy of the driver to the UCB ftp server and having issues, and i
wanted to get it done before I left and was not available for a month.
IIRC, Bostic told me that earlier that week the reason I was having
issues, was the path for the ISO download for "hidden" 386 bits had been
posted on Netnoise or the like and hehe ftp server was getting slammed.
The point is that the* if you knew* where to look, the BSD UNIX was out
there and people that were listening were finding it. And that was before
Linus released Linux (or BSDi was forked or the court case etc...).
But as I said, after the case, those of that wanted a PC/UNIX switched to
Linux because we were worried we were going to lose the BSD base and Linux
was good enough to get us going. That was my point.
I think your counter point is that while I believe folks like yourselves or
Linus could have gotten BSD UNIX if you had tried to find it it was
available and folks like Keith and Bill were trying to get it out the door,
but have suggest that you don't think so. You think the walls were too
high, the access was only for the "chosen few" and a difference was the
Linux really was available to what Larry referred to as the great unwashed.
To that I say, fair enough. You could be right, I do hope you are not. I
don't think that was the intention/theory - but in practice, it seems
different.
As I said -- thanks.
Clem
10:11 p.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 10:36:08AM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
I think your counter point is that while I believe
folks like yourselves or
Linus could have gotten BSD UNIX if you had tried to find it it was
available and folks like Keith and Bill were trying to get it out the door,
but have suggest that you don't think so. You think the walls were too
high, the access was only for the "chosen few" and a difference was the
Linux really was available to what Larry referred to as the great unwashed.
The way it felt to me at the time was yes, you could, maybe, get access
but it was proprietary source code. If you put it up for FTP you were
going to get sued or something. It was not freely available.
You keep saying that 386BSD was up for FTP as a poorly kept secret.
Why was it secret? Because it wasn't legal to get it.
A lot of us were pretty sick of that legal bullshit. Linux didn't
have that problem.
To that I say, fair enough. You could be right, I do
hope you are not. I
don't think that was the intention/theory - but in practice, it seems
different.
I think most hackers wanted it to be free, though even there it was
sort of hit and miss. The BSDi guys thought they saw a market
opportunity so they weren't so excited about free.
11 p.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 11:11 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
It was not freely available.
Mumble....
You keep saying that 386BSD was up for FTP as a poorly kept secret.
Why was it secret? Because it wasn't legal to get it.
Fair enough.. but that was the point where the CRSG folks were beginning
to push back a little. Bostic has already suggested it had been
rewritten to the "CSRG Management" and folks were beginning the rethink the
whole issue at UCB. Remember BSDi does not yet exist. Before BSDi can
come to be, the idea of BSD for being "freely" available (for
any processor) has to be broached.
A lot of us were pretty sick of that legal bullshit.
Actually - that was exactly the point. A lot of folks did not think that
the AT&T copyright mattered any more. I think most of us at the time we
sick of it. The code base had been rewritten. But of course, none of
us were lawyers. It was pretty clear an awful lot of the code was not
"direct derivative works" of the Research base at this point. /usr/ucb
was >> /usr/bin. The boot system had pretty much been completely redone.
Tools like Sam's config subsystem did not exist in the AT&T code base.
Plus, by now BSD has already switch compilers, so the whole PCC thread is
gone. Even the rest of user level tools had slowly been rewritten. Keith
had been replacing anything in /usr/bin or /bin with code from a difference
provenance. That's part of why he rewrite ex/vi - so they it could not
claimed to have been based on ed anymore.
But you are right .. no one was really sure what was going to happen. So
the BSD/386 iso's were hidden, so at least officially they could say the
only people that we supposed to have access were the BSD licensees. But
as I say it was a well known "secret."
Take someone like myself at time. Officially, I'm a contractor. I had
been working at Masscomp and Stellar before this. I had been a student at
UCB and worked with the CSRG folks. At this point, I had branched out on
my own. I'm whoring myself to anyone that will pay me to hack on UNIX.
At the time I had a gig with NCR. I don't personally own AT&T licenses.
The folks I work for do. NCR is working on what would become SVR4 BTW.
I'm clearly "mentally contaminated" with the AT&T IP. But I know the
BSD
code base pretty well also.
Since, I had been a BSD hacker and he was a friend of mine from the old
days, I hear that Bill Jolitz is having issues with the AT/Disk
controller. I offer to help him cause I have access to the WD1003
controller doc and think I know what is going on. Bill sends me the url
for the system so I can down load it mess with it. I use my Wyse 386:16 at
home in MA to load it (and it fails). So, I start hacking, redo the driver
and send it back to Bill. Bill likes my new driver and switches it....
etc... now I have the sources ... too "unofficially." BTW: the truth is
my customer (NCR) is a licensee and I have access to the AT&T code South
Carolina when I am there. I'm very, very careful to never mix code
bases. But if the Judge ever asked, I justify that NCR is license from UCB
who is licensed from AT&T and I'm licenses from NCR. But I will also look
the judge in the eye and insist never, never did the UCB code run on
anything owned by or paid for by NCR.
Could I have been sued, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, but as I have had
copyright law explained to me, I should have been ok. Trade Secret on the
other hand, clearly, I had seen AT&T's IP so I was contaminated. But I
had been was contaminated at CMU, 15-20 years earlier with the same AT&T IP.
Linux didn't
have that problem.
And BSD did not either in practice, although as I said, once the suit was
filed, you are right. A lot us, myself in included got scared. So we
switched... because we thought (incorrectly) that Linux was free of the
legal burden (it wasn't) - we were all contaminated, Linus, Tannenbaum,
you, me, the Russias :-). As I said, the cow as out of the barn and barn
had burn downed long ago, so trying to keep the IP off the market, had
little realistic chance, IMO.
It did not matter if it was called UNIX, Minux, Linux, Idris, Coherent or
Larry and Clem's cool new OS. They all had the problem.
I think most hackers wanted it to be free, though even there it was
sort of hit and miss.
I agree. Or really closer to free than $1K. I was willing to pay $50-100.
The BSDi guys thought they saw a market
opportunity so they weren't so excited about free.
Yup, and I understood that too. I had done 2 startup's by then, so I
already had a feel for the cost of care and feeding of hackers like you and
me. IIRC, BSDi's "nut" those days was about $2-3M per year, so at $1K a
copy they need a few thousand copies per year to may salaries and expenses.
What they really needed was a larger firm, say some one like ILM or one
of the National Labs that was using the technology for a critical thing and
would pay many K per year for support. But they had not been figure out
yet.
They were getting there ... but then the law suite came.
Having had this conversation with him at one point, I actually think, Kolstad
had already gotten to "service model" - but the law suite killed the goose.
They never recovered. So Linux with RH and Cygnus behind them filled
the vacuum.
So in summary -- I think the two parts of Christiansen disruption theory we
all agree is that it was
- the PC/386 based UNIX that was the key driver and
- the acquisition cost for the end user had to get low enough to make it
spread.
Those other stuff we will never completely know. I suspect it depending
on how to you look at it, personal experience. I acknowledge a number of
your points and can see how you might come to such conclusions. That
said, I do stick by own belief of the root cause, but not coming to
complete agreement is ok with me.
I definitely learned a bit from you and Dan's view and I thank you both.
Clem
11:06 p.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On 2/22/17 12:00 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
But you are right .. no one was really sure what was
going to happen. So
the BSD/386 iso's were hidden, so at least officially they could say the
only people that we supposed to have access were the BSD licensees. But
as I say it was a well known "secret."
This has very much the aura of a private club. If you were in the club,
the secret was well known, but most of the people who went to Linux and
supported its growth were not.
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU chet(a)case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
23 Feb
23 Feb
12:24 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 12:00:59PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
Sorry to keep yapping on this, but I think we're trying to get at accurate
history, right?
So what is written there was not how I felt at all. I personally felt
like AT&T had a case, I thought it was copyright not trade secret. I went
through the code, I had access to the AT&T code and the free code. I was
a UFS/FFS hacker at the time so that's what I read. I found routines
that were bit for bit identical in both in less than 5 minutes. The one
I remember was bmap(), I found a couple of others that I don't remember
(just remember there were more) and I gave up in disgust. I was pretty
disappointed that CSRG considered this not AT&T source, it was.
That left me with a strong feeling that AT&T was going to win. I was
wrong but it didn't matter, BSD was sort of dead to me. I can't tell
you how painful that was for me, I was very much a BSD guy, SunOS was
BSD plus the stuff you would want fixed, fixed.
Linux wasn't BSD but it wasn't going to get taken away from me like
SunOS was taken away and now BSD looked like it was going to be taken
away. It just looked like a bad investment to work on BSD so I worked
on Linux.
A lot of us
were pretty sick of that legal bullshit.
???Actually - that was exactly the point. A lot of folks did not think that
the AT&T copyright mattered any more. I think most of us at the time we
sick of it. The code base had been rewritten.
1:35 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 1:24 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I think we're trying to get at accurate
history, right?
Agreed... apologies to all if this is a strange thread, but frankly its
refreshing to try to tease this out in my own mind and I respect so many of
you here. Thank you for listening to my rambling and my dealing with my
dyslexic typing.
So what is written there was not how I felt at all. I personally felt
like AT&T had a case, I thought it was copyright not trade secret.
So did I at the time!! So did most people I knew. That was exactly the
problem.
...
I found routines
that were bit for bit identical in both in less than 5 minutes. The one
I remember was bmap(), I found a couple of others that I don't remember
(just remember there were more) and I gave up in disgust. I was pretty
disappointed that CSRG considered this not AT&T source, it was.
Agreed... the argument... I'm not saying it was correct... was that the
code for bmap and like was the obvious code and any reasonable programmer
would have written it that way. Again .. not a lawyer ... but as the law
has been explained to me... *obviousness* is one place in copyright law
where code *can be duplicate*. So the question, come if there are when
does it go over the line and become *infringement*.
Don't ask me.... I'm not defending or saying one way was right or wrong.
In fact, like you, I was *really* worried, I too thought the case was
about copyright and I thought, like the Apple/Franklin Computer Case (which
I personally knew a little about but thats a different story), believed
that AT&T would win (which pissed me off - even though I had a number of
friends at AT&T - i remember grousing at some of them - they would not
defend their employees for their actions - I'm not sure they were happy
either). But like you, I started to help the Linux folks too.
That said, I will also say I thought morally.... *Bostic and team was
right.* By that point the core of what I consider "UNIX" really had been
rewritten and it ws not the same thing I had run on the PDP-11 at CMU years
before. I too, wanted a "freely available PC/UNIX" (with sources). Even
if I was as, Chet suggested, a card carrying member of the "BSD Club."
So, maybe I was splitting hairs. Could be. I wanted BSD, I had helped
make it happen. Like Larry, it was a system I cared deeply about. I did
not yet have children, at that point, probably felt similar to the way I
feel today about them. I have put lot emotional energy into BSD's
success. All of my early career. I had started companies around it
etc... I watch Microsoft unfairly crap on the UNIX community etc... Can't
say I wasn't too happy with Sun in those days too, as I felt Scotty was
almost a slimy as Billy G. I had a pretty low opinion of the "boys in the
coats and ties" and this court case was just another example of "TPC" (see
the movie "The Presidents Analyst" for the reference) doing it again.
But it was the AT&T lawyers that made the case about trade secret not
copyright. They want to win everything and they lost it all. That called
karma: "Squeeze too tight, while you keep the bird, it will die."
That left me with a strong feeling that AT&T was going to win.
ditto..
I was
wrong but it didn't matter, BSD was sort of dead to me.
Ah, that was the difference... I was still rooting for phoenix to rise
from the ashes. I was hoping there was a still one more chance.
I can't tell
you how painful that was for me, I was very much a BSD guy, SunOS was
BSD plus the stuff you would want fixed, fixed.
I think I have an idea. I was very nearly the in same spot.
Linux wasn't BSD but it wasn't going to get
taken away from me like
SunOS was taken away and now BSD looked like it was going to be taken
away. It just looked like a bad investment to work on BSD so I worked
on Linux.
Ah... and I was hedging my bet. but trying to help both. I admit, I
wanted BSD to win. Which is why I also tried to get OSF to make an
alternative. OSF/1 vs. Linux at the point (again as a pure technology
play) was the same as BSD vs Linux. Linux had a long way to go.
I just wanted a PC/UNIX (basically with the BSD extension and managed like
a BSD system) that I run on the PC/386 that was no more than the cost of
DOS/Win or the like. If that could be found and better yet, source were
available (and here Chet is probably right - because I had always been part
of the club, I guess I was less worried, as I suspect my employers
would always have sources and thus I would too).
Clem
2:18 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
I'll add my two cents. My experience was that source was hard
to get to. My undergrad school had IS/1 - v6 on a PDP-11 - and source
was definitely not available to us seniors. One person who actually
worked for the computer center did have access. This was 1980-1981.
In grad school at Georgia Tech, there was no access to students to
the vax, and even after I went to work there I had to sign something
first before seeing source.
Later I was a sysadmin at Emory U and so I had source but it wasn't
widely open. We ran Mt. Xinu 4.3 + BSD on vaxen, so there source was
necessary.
By the mid-80s, even if you had AT&T and BSD licenses, it didn't help,
as there were lots of vendors NOT giving out source (Sun, Pyramid, DEC,
Gould, DG, you name it). This was pretty much OK; things worked
fairly well and you didn't need to fix drivers and recompile the
kernel and so on on those machines.
Vaxen were aging, BSD didn't support 8500s, and so if you wanted BSD
you pretty much had to go to one of the vendors offering it. Sun
was probably the most popular.
At a startup company we ran ESIX, SVR3 (and later SVR4) based on 386s
for our product alongside a few Sun boxen. It was a good Unix, but
again no source, but no real need for it either. This was ~ 1990-1991.
W.R.T. personal machines, I shelled out $$ to buy an AT&T 3B1 (68010
based, System V kernel, SVR2 user land + vi) which I used happily
for many years. Later I bought a Sun IPC. (More $$.) Also used happily
for quite a while.
I only got into Intel land for myself when I moved to Israel, buying a laptop
and running Linux on it. I had played some with Linux on Sparc and
was fairly impressed with it. This was circa 1997.
Linux generally "just works" out of the box on PC hardware, and
with Debian/Ubuntu, software updates are a breeze. I spend almost no
time having to be a sysadmin for myself, which is wonderful.
I mostly watched the whole AT&T/BSD lawsuit stuff from the side. At
one USENIX I remember talking to Keith Bostic about it, and understanding
that it was trade secret, but I asked him "Given the book by Maurice
Bach on how UNIX works, how can they still think it's trade secret?"
He just sorta nodded and said "yep" or something equivalent.
But yes, the sense while it was going on was definitely that BSD
was risky and problematic. And that the whole lawsuit thing was
really, REALLY stupid.
Sigh.
Arnold
4:11 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 3:18 PM, <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote:
I mostly watched the whole AT&T/BSD lawsuit stuff
from the side. At
one USENIX I remember talking to Keith Bostic about it, and understanding
that it was trade secret, but I asked him "Given the book by Maurice
Bach on how UNIX works, how can they still think it's trade secret?"
He just sorta nodded and said "yep" or something equivalent.
Not a lawyer... but for patents, I am under the impression that the date
is defined as "first public discloser." So I think the official date would
be the UNIX talk given in *"paper presented at the Fourth ACM Symposium on
Operating Systems Principles, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center,
Yorktown Heights, New York, October 15-17, 1973." [*
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/cacm.html]
I believe that said paper predates all of the books. Fact is before Bach,
UNIX shows up in a number of OS texts, so the point is that the IP is being
taught by Universities and studies by students. Which is of course what
the judge points out when the case was decided.
And clearly, the legal battle was stupid. But pride is an amazing thing
and corporate pride seems the worst in my experience.
all quite sad.
Clem
3:34 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 02:35:00PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
So suppose you owned a software company and someone had a source license,
rewrote some of the code and claimed the rest was obvious so it didn't
need to be rewritten. Now your code is out there for free. Affecting
your revenue stream. How well is that "any reasonable programmer
would have written it that way" going to play with with you?
You are an experienced guy, you know that any reasonable programmer would
have written the very same initial version of your code but that's not
what you shipped. You shipped debugged, tuned code. It was debugged
and tuned through years of experience with users, that takes time.
I find it really really hard to swallow that any reasonable programmer
would come up with the same code in a vacuum.
I'll remind you I'm deep into the source management world and I've
repeatedly seen my own engineers want to rewrite code and what do they
want to write? What was checked in as version 1.1. All the warts are
from real world experience and they want to get rid of them (until
they look at the history and understand why the warts are there).
I'd argue that what you'd get from any reasonable programmer is the
naive initial version that works in theory but fails in practice.
In my mind, the BSD guys cheated. If it were my code, if I owned
that and they tried to make that argument, yeah, I'd sue them as well.
AT&T messed up the suit but I don't think they were wrong. IP counts
for something, it's expensive to fix all those bugs, it's cheap to do
the initial naive implementation.
Morally, in my mind, BSD was tainted. Whether it was proven so in a
court of law doesn't change my opinion. It was AT&T's code to release,
yes, I wanted them to do so as well, but it's their code. Just
because we think it should free doesn't make it morally right to
make it be free. Doing so is theft in my book.
And for the record, I've seen the same behaviour in Linux. There
was wholesale copying of BSD licensed drivers and other code into
the kernel, some mumbles about it being dual licensed, but eventually
it became GPL only. That's theft as well in my opinion.
Perhaps my ethics are a bit too rigid, but they are my ethics and
aren't likely to change.
I found
routines
that were bit for bit identical in both in less than 5 minutes. The one
I remember was bmap(), I found a couple of others that I don't remember
(just remember there were more) and I gave up in disgust. I was pretty
disappointed that CSRG considered this not AT&T source, it was.
???Agreed... the argument... I'm not saying it was correct... was that the
code for bmap and like was the obvious code and any reasonable programmer
would have written it that way.???
4:56 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 4:34 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
How well is that "any reasonable programmer
would have written it that way" going to play with with you?
That is the key point of course. I suspect it depends on a lot of
things. I could see myself being pretty upset.
I find it really really hard to swallow that any reasonable programmer
would come up with the same code in a vacuum.
And that is why there are courts. I'm not going to say you are right or
wrong. Low level routines like bit map, locks etc, I suspect are going to
look pretty similar. For whatever it is worth we talk about this in a
committee I'm on at Intel. The lawyers want to know how they can detect
that some one is infringing on a patent. I'm usually the guy saying --
"wait a minute -- that's how we designed the instruction - that how its
supposed to be used, so that's reasonable."
I'm not lawyer.... and I don't even try to play one. But my experience is
that at least in the low level stuff, the lower stuff, it does get pretty
common. That said, if you have a trick or two up, say using an
instruction sequence in an unusual manner - as you say -- experience --
that's where the differences start to show.
BTW: you pick on BFFS (aka UFS). I was under the impression that pretty
much that was an entire rewrite. The vax code brought over from 4.1 was
code Berkeley had written during the joy's speed up work (even things like
bmap). I did not think that came from 32/V. The key is the changes were
done a little a time. Some in BSD, some more in BSD 2.0, more in 3.0 ....
by the time of 4.2 the feeling was most of the kernel was different from
what Ken and Dennis had originally written.
I'd argue that what you'd get from any
reasonable programmer is the
naive initial version that works in theory but fails in practice.
Fair enough... and you might be able to make a reasonable living as a
expert witness ;-)
In my mind, the BSD guys cheated.
I understand and I see your point, although here is where we disagree. I
lived it differently, since I was part of it. I think it was like the wolf
that became the dog. A very slow process. But at some point, there was a
change and the wolf stopped being a wolf and started being a new thing, a
dog.
Morally, in my mind, BSD was tainted. Whether it was proven so in a
court of law doesn't change my opinion.
That's fair and I think you know, I very much respect your opinion and
thinking. I don't expect to change it any more than I can expect you will
change mine own, but I'm trying to understand it.
It was AT&T's code to release
....
Doing so is theft in my book.
Fair enough. To you its still a wolf and I can see that and if I did see
it as a wold, I suspect I might agree. But I think having lived so much
working being done outside of AT&T that was not getting credit and that
"DNA" was being "stollen" by AT&T in my mind, it worked both
ways.
And for the record, I've seen the same behaviour in Linux.
yep...as bad or worse. Names of have changed to protect the guilty ;-)
Many of the things the esr, rms et al have pontificated about frankly is
not different. I see the same behaviors, just a change in who has the
gold now.
Perhaps my ethics are a bit too rigid, but they are my
ethics and
aren't likely to change.
Amen, they work for you, and I as I said, I can (and do) respect that.
Clem
5:13 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 05:56:38PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
I took early retirement, I spend a lot of my time on tractors these days:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/tractor-tree.jpg
If someone offers me a pile of money to be an expert witness, I suppose.
But quite frankly, that sounds like being an adult. Not a lot of fun
in my opinion.
I'd so love to agree with you. But the code diffs I did do not support
that view, there was more than enough unchanged to call it cheating.
I think that if I spent 20 minutes with you diffing code you would agree.
BTW: you pick on BFFS (aka UFS). I was under the
impression that pretty
much that was an entire rewrite.
Nope, that's my wheelhouse, I spent a lot of time in there. I rewrote
bmap() for the extent based file system work:
http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/bitmover/lm/papers/SunOS.ufs_clustering.pdf
so I know that code very well. The bmap() from research is the bmap()
in BSD. It's bit for bit, including comments, identical. There were
others but I sort of lost interest at that point, it was stolen code
in my opinion.
code Berkeley had written during the joy's speed
up work (even things like
bmap). I did not think that came from 32/V. The key is the changes were
done a little a time. Some in BSD, some more in BSD 2.0, more in 3.0 ....
by the time of 4.2 the feeling was most of the kernel was different from
what Ken and Dennis had originally written.
A lot of it was different. But enough of it was the same that it was
stolen code in my opinion. And I don't say that lightly, I admire and
respect the BSD guys from CSRG pretty deeply.
I'd argue
that what you'd get from any reasonable programmer is the
naive initial version that works in theory but fails in practice.
???Fair enough... and you might be able to make a reasonable living as a
expert witness ;-) 
In my mind,
the BSD guys cheated.
???I understand and I see your point, although here is where we disagree.??? I
lived it differently, since I was part of it. I think it was like the wolf
that became the dog. A very slow process. But at some point, there was a
change and the wolf stopped being a wolf and started being a new thing, a
dog. ???Fair enough. To you its still a wolf and I can see
that and if I did see
it as a wolf, I suspect I might agree. But I think having lived so much
working being done outside of AT&T that was not getting credit and that
"DNA" was being "stollen" by AT&T in my mind, it worked both
ways.
So there we can agree. In no way do I hold AT&T blameless, if you want
me to rail on them I can do that. Kind of an easy target, they really
didn't understand what they had or what to do with it. It was better
when it was Bell Labs and Bell Labs had a charter (didn't it have to
do with being a monoply) that said they released their patents for
free (or something like that, right?). When the suits came in it all
got screwed up.
And for the record, BSD moved the state of the art forward, I know that.
I'd much rather be stuck on 4.3 BSD than SVr3 (and even SVr4). They redid
a lot and added sockets and at least imagined mmap(). A BSD kernel
was a nicer place to be than a AT&T kernel. So I mean no disrespect
to their work. I just don't think they rewrote as much as they claimed
they did, it was not a total rewrite, there was more than enough still
there that AT&T could have prevailed with a copyright case.
--lm
5:51 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:13 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I just don't think they rewrote as much as they
claimed
they did,
Maybe...
it was not a total rewrite, there was more than enough
still
there that AT&T could have prevailed with a copyright case.
I agreed today and I certainly thought so at the time it all went down ( I
was scared UNIX for the PC was going to disappear).
But we all never know what would have happened if AT&T had only taken on
copyright. Greed took over and AT&T tried to get everything. Their
exec's make a choice and they did keep the goose, but they killed it too.
Which brings us back to the original question Noel asked: W*hy Linux and
not another UNIX flavor?*
While I learned a great deal in the thread and I think I personally have a
better understanding of why different people acted in different ways, the
the answer is to me in unchanged and stays a simple two parts:
1. I think most if not all of us agree it was the WINTEL economics that
made the PC/386 the HW platform "win", and
2. I truly believe that it was the the AT&T/BSDi legal entanglement that
was the key item in Linux end up in the lead
All of the other contributed things people talked about were good reasons
for some specific choice by different folk, but the common driver behind it
all / the real root of it was the court case. It did not matter which side
you were on and who you thought was right/wrong, held the moral ground
etc... if that case had not been there, I really don't think Linux would
have gotten the momentum and had the ability to last.
Others may not think so, but too me, that is sad, it was opportunity lost.
5:51 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On 22 Feb 2017, at 19:24 , Larry McVoy wrote:
So what is written there was not how I felt at all. I
personally felt
like AT&T had a case, I thought it was copyright not trade secret.
I'm not a lawyer, but wasn't part of the background that prior to 1988
in US law one could not claim both copyright and trade secret protection,
and that for something to be copyrighted it had to expressly claim to
be copyrighted material, and be registered as such?
I have a vague recollection that the AT&T legal department instructed the
Unix team to remove copyright notices from the Unix source (and this seems
supported by code, see for instance:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V5/usr/sys/ken/sys1.c
and
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/sys/ken/sys1.c)
because the legal folks thought that trade secret was a stronger
protection for software?
I also seem to recall that the AT&T code base included original material
from CSRG where the copyright notice had been removed by USL.
All in all, the USL lawyers probably felt that they would lose the case if
fought on the grounds of copyright violations alone.
I wish something like Groklaw had existed during the USL-UCB case: the
legal twists and turns would have been documented a lot better. There is
some material though, see:
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=legal-docs#bsdi
The amicus brief by the Regents, and the settlement make for interesting
reading. If the position taken by the Regents is correct, all of Unix
up to and including 32V is in the public domain now.
Warren: the links from Groklaw to TUHS are broken, perhaps because of
the recent reorganization of the archive.
24 Feb
24 Feb
1:15 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:51 PM, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
I'm not a lawyer, but wasn't part of the
background that prior to 1988
in US law one could not claim both copyright and trade secret protection,
and that for something to be copyrighted it had to expressly claim to
be copyrighted material, and be registered as such?
Take this with what its worth (it came for free and I'm not a lawyer ....)
Your comment got me thinking, why would try to change and can you. So I
asked on our patent counsel this am to explain the difference. For context
in the USA we have Patent, Trade Secret, Copyright Registration and
Copyright Protection. Her reply to me was:
Copyright *protection* is automatic – as soon as the code is written it is
considered protected. Copyright *registration* is just a formality
necessary to instigate litigation. There is no time limit for registration.
Trade Secret is not compatible with copyright and patents (in a patent you
have to disclose how to make and use the invention while a trade secret
must be kept secret).
You can get a patent while having the automatic copyright protection –
remember that they protect two different things. A patent protects the
“functionality” while a copyright protects what is written, word for word.
So, you can get patent protection for what a software program does while
having copyright protection for what is written. A patent is a stronger
form of protection.
because the legal folks thought that trade secret was
a stronger
protection for software?
At the time, you could not get SW patents, and it is not clear you could
have patented UNIX as a whole anyway. But that begs the secrecy issue.
We know it had been disclosed as early as SOSP4. My engineering training
and what we teach folks I work with is, secret is secret. Do not publish
and no release, even under confidential NDA. My company, like government
folks who I have worked with, have different classification for different
documents. But "secret" means that. Which means we would not be allowed
to give a talk about the technology, nor would be we able to call it
"secret" if we had given a talk about it.
I also seem to recall that the AT&T code base
included original material
from CSRG where the copyright notice had been removed by USL.
Yep - it's hard to live in a glass house.
All in all, the USL lawyers probably felt that they would lose the case if
fought on the grounds of copyright violations alone.
Which I fear, we will never know. But to me, if they thought copyright
was not strong enough, how could anyone think it was a "secret" when by the
definition of the 1956 consent decree they had to tell people?
I wish something like Groklaw had existed during the USL-UCB case: the
legal twists and turns would have been documented a lot better.
Indeed....
There is
some material though, see:
http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=legal-docs#bsdi
The amicus brief by the Regents, and the settlement make for interesting
reading.
Right, I recommend all read it.
If the position taken by the Regents is correct, all
of Unix
up to and including 32V is in the public domain now.
That's been said before and I think between this precedent of this case,
the code for the old UNIX versions, given the ancient system licenses, the
formal publication of Lions book et al, I personally feel good about the
legality of the code being available today. But everyone should ask their
own lawyer and make their own decision definitively if they believe it or
not.
2:31 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 14:15, Clem Cole wrote:
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:51 PM, Paul Ruizendaal
<pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
That's true today, but to my understanding wasn't true in 1988. (Well,
registration wasn't a requirement to be copyrighted - that requirement
went away retroactively in 1978, and only applied to unpublished works
then.) The change seems to have been March 1, 1989 from what I can find.
I think AT&T *tried* to construct a basis to claim that UNIX source code
was "unpublished", even when distributed to source licensees (or e.g.
shell scripts which were by necessity distributed to all licensees),
possibly in service of this trade secret theory. Remember, the infamous
comment on the otherwise empty SVR2 /bin/true had two lines of copyright
notice and three lines of assertion that it was unpublished.
And if that attempt involved removing all copyright notices from V6, V7,
and 32V (and presumably not registering any copyright on any
"unpublished" works pre-1978) then that might have killed any
copyright-based case. By the time the actual lawsuit happened, they were
fully committed to the trade secret theory.
I'm not a lawyer, but wasn't part of
the background that prior to 1988
in US law one could not claim both copyright and trade secret protection,
and that for something to be copyrighted it had to expressly claim to
be copyrighted material, and be registered as such?
Take this with what its worth (it came for free and I'm not a lawyer
....) > Your comment got me thinking, why would try to change and can you. So I
asked on our patent counsel this am to explain the difference. For
context in the USA we have Patent, Trade Secret, Copyright Registration and
Copyright Protection. Her reply to me was:
Copyright *protection* is automatic – as soon as the code is written it
is
considered protected. Copyright *registration* is just a formality
necessary to instigate litigation. There is no time limit for
registration. Dennis Ritchie wrote:
>
> "Paul" <pssawyer(a)comcast.net.INVALID> wrote in message >>
> ....
>> ISTR there was a copyright notice in a Sys V /bin/true; explaining
>> why we thought this was funny might be a violation of that copyright!
>
> The local lawyers here also flip-flopped over the copyright issue.
> I can't recall whether it was because of law changes or reinterpretation
> or whether they just changed their minds. The issue partly had to do
> with the question of whether a copyright claim amounted to publication,
> while their primary protection theory had to do with trade secret
> protection, and its possible conflict with publication.
>
> At any rate, here is the whole contents of /bin/true in SVr2:
>
> # Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T
> # All Rights Reserved
>
> # THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
> # The copyright notice above does not evidence any
> # actual or intended publication of such source code.
>
> #ident "@(#)true:true.sh 1.4"
4:48 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 14:15, Clem Cole wrote:
Copyright *protection* is automatic ??? as soon
as the code is written it
is
considered protected. Copyright *registration* is just a formality
necessary to instigate litigation. There is no time limit for
registration.
That's true today, but to my understanding wasn't true in 1988. (Well,
registration wasn't a requirement to be copyrighted - that requirement
went away retroactively in 1978, and only applied to unpublished works
then.) The change seems to have been March 1, 1989 from what I can find. From what I have in mind, there have been changes from
around 1992 from the
Berne convention. Before, US code (even when it was
copyrighted) was not
protected in Europe.
I know that in former times, code was only copyrighted in the USA in case a
sample had been given to a governmental site. I thought this changed together
with the Berne convention....
Given that the AT&T code that was used by BSD does not have a copyright notice,
it seems to be obvious that it was not copyrighted as AT&T did not give a
sample to the government.
So the question was whether there was a copyright problem with the fact that
BSD included the code. The fact that AT&T did give away their code did exhaust
the right to prevent distribution.
BSD on the other side did bundle the right to distribute with the condition
that the license notice must not be removed and that distributors need to
announce that they include software developed at BSD.
AT&T removed this notice and did not announce the porevenance.
This is why BSD finally won...
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/
8:07 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
Isn't the lack of notices and wide distribution which also lead VM/370 and friends
being in the public domain? It's odd now that history is fluid they are now
considered open source?
On February 24, 2017 6:48:08 AM GMT+08:00, Joerg Schilling <schily(a)schily.net>
wrote:
Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com> wrote:
(Well,
--
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 14:15, Clem Cole wrote:
> Copyright *protection* is automatic ??? as soon as the code is
written it
is
considered protected. Copyright *registration* is just a formality
necessary to instigate litigation. There is no time limit for
registration.
That's true today, but to my understanding wasn't true in 1988. registration wasn't a requirement to be
copyrighted - that
requirement
went away retroactively in 1978, and only applied
to unpublished
works
then.) The change seems to have been March 1,
1989 from what I can
find.
From what I have in mind, there have been changes from around 1992 from
the
Berne convention. Before, US code (even when it was copyrighted) was
not
protected in Europe.
I know that in former times, code was only copyrighted in the USA in
case a
sample had been given to a governmental site. I thought this changed
together
with the Berne convention....
Given that the AT&T code that was used by BSD does not have a copyright
notice,
it seems to be obvious that it was not copyrighted as AT&T did not give
a
sample to the government.
So the question was whether there was a copyright problem with the fact
that
BSD included the code. The fact that AT&T did give away their code did
exhaust
the right to prevent distribution.
BSD on the other side did bundle the right to distribute with the
condition
that the license notice must not be removed and that distributors need
to
announce that they include software developed at BSD.
AT&T removed this notice and did not announce the porevenance.
This is why BSD finally won...
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.net (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353
Berlin
joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog:
http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.org/private/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/schilytools/files/ 
5:06 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
And given the Unix-based CS study and research going on world-wide at the time, AT&T
versus the
Regents of the University of California at Berkeley is an example of why you must maintain
a careful
separation of the arts of sticking your foot in your mouth and shooting yourself in the
foot. Medical
authorities warn against it, and who am I to dispute them? :)
FWVLIW
Wesley Parish
Quoting Random832 <random832(a)fastmail.com>:
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017, at 14:15, Clem Cole wrote:
lawyer
"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 Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:51 PM, Paul Ruizendaal
<pnr(a)planet.nl>
wrote:
> I'm not a lawyer, but wasn't part of the background that prior to
1988
> in US law one could not claim both copyright
and trade secret
protection,
> and that for something to be copyrighted it
had to expressly claim
to
be
copyrighted material, and be registered as such?
âTake this with what its worth (it came for free and I'm not a ....) > Your comment got me thinking, why
would try to change and can
you. So I
asked on our patent counsel this am to explain
the difference. For
context in the USA we have Patent, Trade Secret, Copyright
Registration and
Copyright Protection. Her reply to me was:
Copyright *protection* is automatic â as soon as the code is written
it
is
considered protected. Copyright *registration* is just a formality
necessary to instigate litigation. There is no time limit for
registration.
That's true today, but to my understanding wasn't true in 1988. (Well,
registration wasn't a requirement to be copyrighted - that requirement
went away retroactively in 1978, and only applied to unpublished works
then.) The change seems to have been March 1, 1989 from what I can
find.
I think AT&T *tried* to construct a basis to claim that UNIX source
code
was "unpublished", even when distributed to source licensees (or e.g.
shell scripts which were by necessity distributed to all licensees),
possibly in service of this trade secret theory. Remember, the infamous
comment on the otherwise empty SVR2 /bin/true had two lines of
copyright
notice and three lines of assertion that it was unpublished.
And if that attempt involved removing all copyright notices from V6,
V7,
and 32V (and presumably not registering any copyright on any
"unpublished" works pre-1978) then that might have killed any
copyright-based case. By the time the actual lawsuit happened, they
were
fully committed to the trade secret theory.
Dennis Ritchie wrote:
>
> "Paul" <pssawyer(a)comcast.net.INVALID> wrote in message >>
> ....
>> ISTR there was a copyright notice in a Sys V /bin/true; explaining
>> why we thought this was funny might be a violation of that
copyright!
>
> The local lawyers here also flip-flopped over the copyright issue.
> I can't recall whether it was because of law changes or
reinterpretation
> or whether they just changed their minds.
The issue partly had to
do
> with the question of whether a copyright
claim amounted to
publication,
> while their primary protection theory had to
do with trade secret
> protection, and its possible conflict with publication.
>
> At any rate, here is the whole contents of /bin/true in SVr2:
>
> # Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T
> # All Rights Reserved
>
> # THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T
> # The copyright notice above does not evidence any
> # actual or intended publication of such source code.
>
> #ident "@(#)true:true.sh 1.4"
22 Feb
22 Feb
11:41 p.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
The line of succession for me, starting with my hobby/business UNIX
installs on Intel was:
Beginning 1991-1992, Consensys SVR4 - Used up until around 1995. UUCP
and USENET. Ran a BBS off of this and was a USENET node "kilowatt"
during that time. I'm in NIXPUB. Buying this version of UNIX was for a
joint business venture I went into with a friend, and we needed a decent
UNIX platform to work with without a huge hardware cost. Very happy with
it, but it did have some bugs. Wound up getting a few UNIXware drivers
with fixes that took care of many of the issues mostly to do with the
Adaptec 1541 SCSI card.
I toyed with Linux around this time, but there was a local BBS guy who
was such a fanboy that I was turned off by it - and there was NO
advantage to it over SVR4 at that time. All I saw was a bunch of stuff
glued together that was not "real" UNIX. It also offered almost no
possibility of developing for SunOS or the up and coming Solaris 2.x
During the above time, I also ran a Sparc-IPC with SunOS 4.1.2(3?) on it
so it wasn't for lack of having a decent hardware platform to work with.
I did a lot of SunOS development on it, and wrote stuff that I could
compile it on both SVR4 and SunOS
Around 1994-1995, started getting into FreeBSD - which I loved. Ran that
from 1995 or so right up until around 1999 as my main firewall/router on
one machine, and file server on another. Device support was better than
Consensys, and I could fix any bugs I found myself if I had to - but
never really had to. And, it was much like SunOS 4, if you squinted and
tilted your head slightly.
Also around that timeframe, I think I toyed with Solaris 2.4 or 2.5 on
x86, but I know I that I went fully into Solaris x86 around the
late-1998/early-1999 with Solaris 2.7
I'm not entirely sure when it was but at various times I checked out
Linux on test machines. I had instances where I thought "oh boy! this is
cool" but then, my installed base of computers and development
environments meant having to go whole-hog into Linux for at least one of
my machines and I had too much invested in them in terms of time.
At one point, I decided I needed to find an alternative to my main
workstation (running on Solaris 7 or maybe even 8 by this time) and
turned back to Linux for it's plethora of device drivers and third-party
applications - mostly audio/video players, Adobe Flash, Acrobat Reader,
that sort of thing.
This was the time of the turning-point for me for Linux, and it was
turning AWAY from it for a long time. Still haven't recovered from it.
I found that while running a decent-sized machine at the time - maybe it
was 64 megs of RAM, maybe it was even more, I really don't remember. I'd
have to go back and look at my old archived hardware to find out.
Suffice it to say, I had a machine that made a GREAT Windows NT 4.0
machine. Did everything I wanted, plenty of applications ran on it, etc.
So, I started to look at Linux again, because I detested Windows at the
time. Installed it, early kernel 2.6 version, it ran great, did
everything. Netscape, Flash, Acrobat Reader, some word processing (don't
remember what), etc.
Problem was, after running a while, it got really REALLY slow and kept
banging the disk for long periods of time. Took about 5 seconds to
realize what it was. It had swapped out most of the application pages to
disk. Click on a link in Netscape, chunka-chunka-chunka. Go to a shell
and try to do an ls, chunka-chunka-chunka.
Found some references for kernel 2.4 that you could limit the amount of
disk cache. So went to try that, 2.6 didn't have that anymore. So I went
online, forget where, maybe it was a mailing list, maybe it was a USENET
group, I really don't remember.
I remember asking why the HELL did they remove that when it so obviously
caused the system to get slower than dog-shit in a snow storm. First, it
was "you need more RAM" - yeah, I never like the "go buy more hardware
answer" neither for myself nor my customers. Strike one. Continue the
discussion, and got some answer like "We know better than you do about
how to deal with virtual memory, go away". This, after having worked
with SunOS, Solaris, HP/UX, IBM AIX, SCO, SGI, and everything else under
the sun that did NOT DO THIS. The discussion continued like that a
little bit, and I turned around, installed Windows NT on the machine,
and never looked back until the past 5-6 years where I've been forced to
deal with Linux.
Of course, now, there are tunables to alter the "pressure points" and
timing of how the kernel decides that it needs a page for disk cache
more than the application does.
By default Oracle Linux will still swap the Oracle database itself out
to disk when it thinks it needs more disk cache. That blows. Answer is
to open the Oracle on Linux best practices PDF and set all the tunables
to different values, and VOILA - now it only swaps out once in a while.
Of course one of those is "swappiness" which for years seemed to do
absolutely nothing.
So now, it's OK - when a company I consult for eventually brings up "We
can run this on Linux, right? We need to cut costs" - My answer is "yes"
even though I don't want to. But when you consider a SPARC or IBM AIX
box compared to an Intel Linux box, it's really a no-brainer. My only
caveat when they do this is: If you had X amount of RAM in your existing
system, and you're not making any substantial changes, double it for the
Linux box. This tends to relieve the pressure to swap out, but it still
doesn't completely remove it. And then, of course, I send them a
document with all the tunables I've gathered.
Anyway, long winded, rambling story, but I think you all might get the
idea why for ME it wasn't the answer.
After that period of time, I upgraded some of my hardware to newer
dual-core AMD, and started running Solaris 10 and used ZFS for the first
time in my "production" environment. What a blast ZFS has been. Linux
doesn't come out-of-the-box with ZFS support? Oh well... see ya! :)
I now have over 56TB of multiple raidz2 arrays spread over 46 disks or
so all tied to a Solaris 11.3 machine and run multiple Solaris guests in
VMware. Still not going Linux except when I need to test/develop stuff
for customers and that's always on a VMware guest.
zfs_arc_max for-the-win. And now, for Solaris 11.3|,
|user_reserve_hint_pct - even better.
Yes, I grew up to be a "real UNIX" snob. Now, at 51 years old, I'm
confident I made the right choice. I know enough about Linux to make
sure my customers are well taken care of. But for my personal use, if I
have to, I'll go back to FreeBSD and ZFS before I run Linux. Hopefully
Oracle does the "right thing" with Solaris when it's time.
|
|||
23 Feb
23 Feb
3 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
Personal anecdote time. I'm probably a bit younger than most of the folks
here and my first exposure to computers came when my father bought a shiny
new Northgate 486 in 1990. He'd been talking about getting a computer for a
few years and had been researching getting some sort of Unix, but even it
was all too expensive even for someone who could buy a 486 in 1990. By the
time I got interested in Unix-y systems (partly by reading a copy of _Life
With Unix_ that my dad had bought back before we go our first computer),
Linux was the cheapest game in town: free on CDs from the back of books in
the public library.
Mike
4:03 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
IMHO one thing that Linux offered many people/coders/developers, especially
in the early years, was the chance to actually make a contribution and a
difference to the development and growth of the system.
Especially in the early Linux years you could track down bugs or
make improvements, send the patches to Linus and they'd actually end
up in the code in a few days to weeks. How cool was that!?!?
On BSD (at least my experience with NetBSD) it was *hard* to get
fixes incorporated and with new releases only once a year or so
it seemed very 'stale' and boring.
I think this Linux style open-ness of development, the willingness to
accept fixes and patches and perhaps horribly break things along the way,
resonated with a lot of coders and enthousiasts making it popular very
rapidly in those circles.
Heck.. I did some minor low-level and early stuff on the Linux/M68k
kernel port for the Amiga's and even though Linus himself was not interested
in a 'non-i386' port or version of Linux he was also not against it and open to
the idea and did accept fixes for bugs in the mainline kernel that were
exposed by the port (eg. byteorder issues, hardcoded i386 bits, etc.)
and basically sanitized a lot of code.
It also forced some of the early splits in some drivers in platform
independent and dependent pieces because of the vastly different styles
of I/O and interrupt handing between the i386 and the M68k family,
but Linus also saw the merit in such increased abstraction and
portability and accepted such changes even though they did 'nothing'
for the i386.
All in all at the time (early/mid 90's) I feel that the whole 'community'
(a much-abused word these days..) around Linux was much more conductive
and supportive than any of the other *IX-with-source-available options
for those that wanted to help/improve/fix stuff in the OS/kernel so it
drew in more people.
And when the (snow)ball started rolling with the free CD's on magazines
and such then all hell broke loose as far as the popularity goes.
Not saying it's "the best" at all as it can be a horrible mess, but
the earlier mention of 'good enough' (or perhaps being the 'VHS' of
*IX'es) is probably a good description.
Bye, Arno.
4:51 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
+1 to all of this, I agree. And I was working on SunOS at the time,
then later IRIX, and both were walled gardens. I loved working
with customers who had source licenses but those were few and far
between. Linux was like everyone had the source, because, well,
they did.
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 11:03:21PM +0100, Arno Griffioen wrote:
IMHO one thing that Linux offered many
people/coders/developers, especially
in the early years, was the chance to actually make a contribution and a
difference to the development and growth of the system.
Especially in the early Linux years you could track down bugs or
make improvements, send the patches to Linus and they'd actually end
up in the code in a few days to weeks. How cool was that!?!?
On BSD (at least my experience with NetBSD) it was *hard* to get
fixes incorporated and with new releases only once a year or so
it seemed very 'stale' and boring.
I think this Linux style open-ness of development, the willingness to
accept fixes and patches and perhaps horribly break things along the way,
resonated with a lot of coders and enthousiasts making it popular very
rapidly in those circles.
Heck.. I did some minor low-level and early stuff on the Linux/M68k
kernel port for the Amiga's and even though Linus himself was not interested
in a 'non-i386' port or version of Linux he was also not against it and open to
the idea and did accept fixes for bugs in the mainline kernel that were
exposed by the port (eg. byteorder issues, hardcoded i386 bits, etc.)
and basically sanitized a lot of code.
It also forced some of the early splits in some drivers in platform
independent and dependent pieces because of the vastly different styles
of I/O and interrupt handing between the i386 and the M68k family,
but Linus also saw the merit in such increased abstraction and
portability and accepted such changes even though they did 'nothing'
for the i386.
All in all at the time (early/mid 90's) I feel that the whole 'community'
(a much-abused word these days..) around Linux was much more conductive
and supportive than any of the other *IX-with-source-available options
for those that wanted to help/improve/fix stuff in the OS/kernel so it
drew in more people.
And when the (snow)ball started rolling with the free CD's on magazines
and such then all hell broke loose as far as the popularity goes.
Not saying it's "the best" at all as it can be a horrible mess, but
the earlier mention of 'good enough' (or perhaps being the 'VHS' of
*IX'es) is probably a good description.
Bye, Arno.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
5:29 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
Arno - thanks for more on this, as I think you scratched a difference
between your experience and my own.
By the time Linux shows up in the early 1990s, people like me had been
developing UNIX for a long time and the novelty of hacking on the system,
making changes, bug fixes was gone. I just wanted to use it on a PC/386.
BSD for the 386 worked and so Linux was a step backwards and I was only
going there because I felt I needed too. I remember when I first got
Slackware running, after the trying Linus's 0.9 mumble release.... and it
actually sort of ran ... saying "maybe this will work" but then I start
running it issues such as I could not back up it like my other systems,
network hosed up, few scripts "just worked", etc..
Yet, one of my coworkers who was about 2/3 years out of school at that
point, thought Linux was so cool because of all things Arno suggested. He
could submit bug reports and he changes go in. When I was b*tching about
something breaking, he would say - "Clem you know how to fix it And I
would reply "yup I do. But I don't want to." This was a the system I
wanted to use ( at home ). I get paid to hack at work. I wanted a
DOS/Windows alternative for home that I could rely on. I was not looking
for a yet another system to do development (I had that).
Which shows that difference... I was part of Chet's club, so I was hacking
on UNIX already, and I did not need/want another system at home to hack
just to keep my day to day working at home (or my wife being able to print
things etc). The point was that I did not mind fixing the occasional
thing I ran into with BSD - but those problem were few and usually had to
do with new device bring up. But once something was was running, I could
just use it. But the Linux systems I could not do that - they were very
fragile, so it was not "fun" -- it was work.
That was probably different for many of you. Linux was fun and cool, just
like UNIX had been for me 10-15 years earlier in the mid 1970s.
Clem
10:53 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
Hello!
And as it happens, I downloaded a two disk job and found it ran on my
first P100 system. I eventually tried others and much the same style
as some you. I've been running Slackware since they packaged the
2.2.xx series. I still do.
However I've got a Sun SPARC box here, who's happily running Solaris 10.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 6:29 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Arno - thanks for more on this, as I think you
scratched a difference
between your experience and my own.
By the time Linux shows up in the early 1990s, people like me had been
developing UNIX for a long time and the novelty of hacking on the system,
making changes, bug fixes was gone. I just wanted to use it on a PC/386.
BSD for the 386 worked and so Linux was a step backwards and I was only
going there because I felt I needed too. I remember when I first got
Slackware running, after the trying Linus's 0.9 mumble release.... and it
actually sort of ran ... saying "maybe this will work" but then I start
running it issues such as I could not back up it like my other systems,
network hosed up, few scripts "just worked", etc..
Yet, one of my coworkers who was about 2/3 years out of school at that
point, thought Linux was so cool because of all things Arno suggested. He
could submit bug reports and he changes go in. When I was b*tching about
something breaking, he would say - "Clem you know how to fix it And I
would reply "yup I do. But I don't want to." This was a the system I
wanted to use ( at home ). I get paid to hack at work. I wanted a
DOS/Windows alternative for home that I could rely on. I was not looking
for a yet another system to do development (I had that).
Which shows that difference... I was part of Chet's club, so I was hacking
on UNIX already, and I did not need/want another system at home to hack just
to keep my day to day working at home (or my wife being able to print things
etc). The point was that I did not mind fixing the occasional thing I ran
into with BSD - but those problem were few and usually had to do with new
device bring up. But once something was was running, I could just use it.
But the Linux systems I could not do that - they were very fragile, so it
was not "fun" -- it was work.
That was probably different for many of you. Linux was fun and cool, just
like UNIX had been for me 10-15 years earlier in the mid 1970s.
Clem
4:18 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 4:00 PM, Michael Kerpan <madcrow.maxwell(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
...
Linux was the cheapest game in town: free on CDs from the back of books
in the public library.
Yup... and the point is ended up in the legal troubles, I believe what
you would have seen in library would have been based on some flavor of BSD
because the BSD unix was much farther along/more mature/stable than Linux
at the time.
As Larry said -- people just wanted some "free" (I said "cheap
enough").
24 Feb
24 Feb
9:53 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
[Apologies in advance for this enormous wall of text]
On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 10:36 AM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
As
someone once said, BSD is what you get when Unix folks port to the PC;
> Linux is what you get when PC folks build a Unix.
I love it, never heard that and in fact
that helps with Noel's original
question, I think. It all comes back to the Christiansen disruption
theory.
I think the disruption was also cultural and not just technical. One of the
most maddening things to me about the Linux community is that they don't
seem to listen to other folks or critically examine prior art. I know
that's a massive generalization and it's obviously not true in all cases,
but I think it's fair to a first order approximation that they often "go
with their gut."
I think at least part of that is because, when Linux was getting started,
the existing Unix community was somewhat haughty and aloof and sort of
looked down on it as a toy that would never go anywhere. As a result, I
sort of feel like they've got something of a chip on their shoulder about
other ways of doing things; the prevailing attitude seems to be one of,
"well, it's right because that's how we do it." Epoll is a great
example of
this; it has all sorts of strange structural problems that didn't exist in
BSD's kqueue, but adopting kqueue was unpopular. Perhaps that stems from
being told too many times that what they wanted to do was alternately
impossible and stupid. They've proven the "other side" (for whatever that
means) wrong enough times that when they're told there could be another way
it's immediately dismissed. And while skepticism in general is probably
good (the 'S' in 'CS' is for 'Science', after all, and a
healthy dose of
skepticism is important to look at something scientifically...), I feel
that the pendulum has swung so far it's now just incredulity that someone
would dare contradict the way Linux does something.
...
Great stories. I understand where you are coming from. The culture thing is
critical; that's why I decided not to go to Penn State; having lived in the
town I knew it wasn't a great fit for me. Also, to be frank, I wasn't
really ready to go immediately after HS. A couple of startups, a stint in
the Marines and experiencing M.O.Rabin teach cryptography at Columbia (he
was on sabbatical from Harvard) eventually got me walking in the right
direction though. :-)
It's sad, that Penn State and UWisc had walled areas like both
described. Sadly
Dan & Larry thank you -- this helps me understand
and I'm going reply you
both in line hopefully without screwing up either of your messages as I
try...
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:28 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Well, for what it's worth, I think that all parties were acting in good
faith. Sure, there was a little bit of a "ooo and ahh" factor to have root
access or access to source code on what were, at the time, expensive
machines, and that lead to something of a "cabal" forming that felt like
they needed to protect such things.
Still, I think the bulk of the hesitation had its roots in three things:
1) Protecting university resources. Hardware often came from research
grants, and the bulk of the school's research wasn't in CS. The MechE or EE
departments, for example, didn't really want Unix hackers using machines
that had been obtained through a grant to study beam stresses or molecular
properties of semiconductor materials. Could you imagine some poor grad
student 16 hours into an 18 hour simulation run when his/her professor's
workstation rebooted because some joker thought he had a better terminal
driver or something goofy like that that just absolutely had to go into the
kernel right then? (I mention that example specifically because Ken Arnold
has a great vignette on his web site about hacking the TTY driver at UCB.)
Similarly, access to wide area networks was mainly to support research, not
give budding CS weenies FTP access. I mean, I kind of get this: being
irresponsible with a grant could get you in trouble with the funding
agency; similarly, starving out bandwidth for your researchers so that they
had trouble communicating with their collaborators at other institutions or
with their sponsors would give the administration headaches as they got an
earful from a large community of angry professors and grad students. And at
the time, for geographical reasons, getting more bandwidth to State College
would have been painful.
Example: I found a discarded VAX 750 in a room in the physics department
one day; someone had put 4.3BSD on it. I fired it up and a physicist nearly
had a heart attack, "You mean that thing is running?! OMG; shut it off
before someone sees you!" I'm pretty sure they were thinking that this was
not exactly in line with the department's core academic mission.
2) Protecting the university from litigation. Let's be frank: students
(and, uh, young townies who hang around too) could be careless and don't
always exercise the best judgement (*cough* not that I would be talking
about myself or anything *cough*). I could imagine that sys admins who were
not lawyers might be paranoid that they could endanger their jobs and their
ability to support themselves and their families by opening the university
to some legal danger by giving someone access to something they shouldn't
have access to (e.g., Unix source code). If I thought my job was at stack,
I'd be hesitant too.
3) Protecting themselves from being overburdened supporting someone in
waaaay over his/her head. I managed to wrangle a tape of the SPARC port of
4.4BSD (encumbered) out of someone and get it installed on a SPARCstation;
I was a high school senior. I had to promise to a) not give it to anyone
else, and b) leave the person who gave me the tape the hell alone when it
didn't work (though it did). In other words, he'd give me an 8mm exabyte
tape if I never mentioned it to him ever again, but only because I knew
him. I thought that was a fair deal.
There also just wasn't that much of a Unix hacker culture there. There were
a few folks who were exceptionally good, but they'd graduate or otherwise
migrate away. And by the time I came on the scene, we were in that odd
phase where the most advanced systems were commercial and vendor supplied.
I remember suggesting that we put BSD on a bunch of the Suns in one of the
labs, and getting shot down because it wouldn't be supported by Sun. I
found that odd since only a decade before the same group of people didn't
seem to bat an eye at getting a tape of 4.2 or 4.3 from Berkeley and
putting that on a VAX that cost something like 10-20 times what a
SPARCstation cost and running the whole department off of that.
For myself, early on, I may have encountered resistance more because I
wasn't actually a student (though I was nominally "staff" in the sense of
being a university employee, albeit minimum wage...hey, for a high
schooler, it sure beat what my buddies who were washing dishes or flipping
burgers were doing to earn gas money). I ended up going elsewhere for
college and majoring in math instead of CS, but by then it was clear that
Linux had won and it wasn't an issue anymore anyway. I was running Plan 9
at the time, though.
[snip]
The universities you are mentioning here are top-tier for CS. But please
do bear in mind that if you were not at one of those institutions (for
whatever reason), asking for that code might well have gotten you the hairy
eyeball from folks you didn't want giving you a furry look.
Unfortunately, I can see that. Sad, but probably a reality. Again,
"he who has the gold, rules." Funny thing about gatekeepers. Larry's
closing comment about Bill Shannon walling off the Research kernels was the
same thing, and IT folks often seem to be like that too. My wife likes
referred this behavior just this AM at breakfast, she calls "can't" a
"magic button word" for me. I hate it when providers say things like
that. Pisses me off and something go off to prove otherwise. ;-)
A
self-deprecating anecdote.
I had to laugh a little when I read all that. I'm going to reply to
something Larry said in a minute and this all related. Yeah, Larry's
right, places like CMU, MIT, UCB are elite schools and yes, I have too
solid board scores *etc*. As I like to say I have "the usual degrees
from the usual institutions" - *i.e*. I have my union card. But I'm
nothing special. You're from Penn State or UWisc (aka "UC Madison" - a
lot of my class from UCB is the core of the faculty there). Hey, I
believe Seymour Cray did his undergrad at St. Olaf's, a school better know
for music - i.e. a small liberal arts school in Northfield, MN.
I've never really cared where you went to school, what your score were,
what your degrees are etc. I'm a hacker, and proud of being that. The
schools, as you and Larry correctly point out, gave me opportunity and
access. So I have network from them. But its what you do with it that
matters to me.
Two stories about me. First, I have always said, the greatest gift I was
ever given was *not* getting a scholarship to MIT. I would have gone
there and likely been "The nerd down the hall" - either that or flunked
out. Who knows, as I later got to know folks that went there, it would not
have been a good match for me as an undergrad. CMU (as screwed up as it
was at time) was a better match for my personality.
The fact is, I did not know know enough about the MIT culture when I was
in HS (I was a faculty brat - *i.e.* scholarship student -- from a
Philadelphia prep school - my Sr year in college 7 of the 7 Ivy League
Squash Captains are my classmates from said prep school). That HS pushed
me to MIT because I wanted to an engineer and that's all they knew. I did
not even know about CMU until it was suggested by a family friend who was
professor in the B School there. But in the end, it was about $. CMU
offered me a scholarship, MIT did not and tricky Dick wanted to put a gun
in hand. It was an easy choice. What was lucky for me was it a
reasonably good culture match... mostly because of the close friends I
made there ... out side of the EE, Math and CS Depts (two weekend ago I
was a party with some of them that has occurred for 40 years on the same
weekend since). Point is, I got lucky...
Second, the proudest moment for me was watching my children pick
colleges. Unlike me, I swore they would know about the culture of the
schools and make darned sure that where they went matched their
personalities and not rely on luck (and I'm very pleased to say that worked
well with my daughter and seems to be working with my son). So to me, what
the school you one too says about you is the network you have, who are your
friends and the culture you learned. It tells me a little about how I can
expect you to have been versed as a starting point, but I'm really much
more interest want you do, have done.
I saw the same thing at UCB, certainly of the
undergrads. I have nothing
but respect for the young folks that did an undergrad at UCB, because it
was definitely different as a grad student.
To be fair, I think a lot of it was that those schools have a different
focus. The educational focus is on grad students and the academic focus is
primarily on research. I don't think that's bad, but the educational
mission towards undergrads is just different: the state schools do an
excellent job of taking in-state kids from farms and formerly-factory towns
and giving them a solid education.
A colleague in my office now dropped out of a math PhD program $n$ years in
ABD and made a fascinating remark to me once; he asserted that the way to
REALLY learn math was over coffee with a professor or with fellow grad
students, not sitting in a classroom or studying texts or the literature. I
remembered that from my own perspective, some of the most eye opening
experiences accompanied by the largest number of "Aha!" moments *I* had
were sitting in the common room chatting with my advisor about various math
topics, or taking something simple I'd done to a professor and asking for
commentary. But certainly not sitting in the lecture hall in Mathematics
building furiously transcribing what the learned professor had written on
the board into my notebook. Well, when you've got a huge undergrad
population logistically that's just not feasible for everyone.
To me that's about respect for the individual and helping them grown up
to be their best - creating opportunity. But I fear
you are right. If
things like UNIX access were walled off at places like that, then as you
both point out, people we search for it where they could find it, *what
is sad is that BSD UNIX was available at the time Linux was available. *The
problem was that too few knew it, although many did (more in a minute).
Yup. It really feels like a lost opportunity.
[snip]
I think your counter point is that while I believe
folks like yourselves
or Linus could have gotten BSD UNIX if you had tried to find it it was
available and folks like Keith and Bill were trying to get it out the door,
but have suggest that you don't think so. You think the walls were too
high, the access was only for the "chosen few" and a difference was the
Linux really was available to what Larry referred to as the great unwashed.
The unwashed masses comment is apropos. A few places I've read papers
advocating that one should look at Unix the way one would go about literary
criticism; in this sense, Linux feels more like a populist reaction to Unix
than a linear continuation of the same school of thought. Indeed,
comparisons to the arts abound in our community. Indeed, Stu Feldman wrote
a neat metaphorical paper comparing the history of Unix to the history of
western architecture (
https://books.google.com/books?id=5xyk_PXaloAC&lpg=PA8&ots=cZQ3TYbp…
).
- Dan C.
22 Feb
22 Feb
11:56 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Tue, 21 Feb 2017, Clem Cole wrote:
On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 9:25 PM, Steve Nickolas
<usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
No, and no. I was in high school, actually, and I only attended college -
a local 2-year school - for one semester before dropping out because I
couldn't handle it.
-uso.
I started screwing around with Linux in the late
90s, and it would be many
years before any sort of real Unix (of the AT&T variety), in any form, was
readily available to me - that being Solaris when Sun started offering it
for free download.
See my comment to Dan. I fear you may not have known where to look, or whom
to ask. As I asked Dan, were you not at an university at time? Or where
you running a Sun or the like -- i.e. working with real UNIX but working
for someone with binary license, not sources from AT&T (and UCB)? 
24 Feb
24 Feb
11:31 a.m.
New subject: Why Linux not another PC/UNIX [was Mach for i386 ...]
On Feb 21, 2017, at 9:56 PM, Steve Nickolas
<usotsuki(a)buric.co> wrote:
On Tue, 21 Feb 2017, Clem Cole wrote:
Apologies for the late response, but just wanted to chime in to say that I, too, was in a
position similar to Steve’s.
As a teenager around 1982, I’d been fortunate enough to sneak my way onto the ARPAnet (via
a DOD TAC dialup in DC), and had wrangled accounts on MIT-CCC (a V6 machine) and
Brookhaven National Lab (V7 on an 11/44). I believe both machines had source (CCC
definitely did), and I enjoyed perusing the code.
Instead of going to college, I moved west to the Bay Area, and no longer had local dialup
access to the ARPAnet (not to mention Unix source code), so moved over to UUCP. I ported
the UUCP/NNTP code to Mac OS (classic, not OS X) using the Lightspeed C compiler, splurged
on a Telebit Trailblazer, and somehow convinced some very kind person at MIPS to call my
modem in Sonoma County once an hour. For a time, I think I had the only Mac-based UUCP
node — sly.graton.ca.us. I still regret not releasing my port.
At some point there in the late eighties, I had the bright idea to start a small Unix ISP,
and bought (with too many $$$) what I recall was an ESIX system, on a big 386 tower. I
remember SVR4 (?) feeling pretty corporate and sterile, and there definitely was no
source. I can’t remember why I couldn’t/didn’t buy a BSDi system — maybe too expensive?
Spent too much time writing code, not enough time actually getting the ISP up, but the
experience was educational.
A few years hence, I worked for O’Reilly & Associates (also in Sonoma County) on
Global Network Navigator, the first commercial web publication. We had a few Sun
workstations, but mostly these clunky monochrome X terminals. So the idea of Linux — a
downloadable, hackable, personal, fun, almost punk-rock Unix, easily installable on a
fairly generic 386 machine (once I downloaded the fifty-odd diskette images) was pretty
damned appealing. And because my previous experience had been mostly V6 and V7 (with only
a smattering of BSD), the supposed difference between Linux and “real Unix" felt
quite minimal to me.
—John
See my comment to Dan. I fear you may not have
known where to look, or whom
to ask. As I asked Dan, were you not at an university at time? Or where
you running a Sun or the like -- i.e. working with real UNIX but working
for someone with binary license, not sources from AT&T (and UCB)?
No, and no. I was in high school, actually, and I only attended college - a local 2-year
school - for one semester before dropping out because I couldn't handle it.
2857
days inactive
2859
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29 comments
16 participants
participants (16)
-
Arno Griffioen -
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Arthur Krewat -
Chet Ramey -
Clem Cole -
Dan Cross -
Gregg Levine -
Jason Stevens -
John Labovitz -
Larry McVoy -
Michael Kerpan -
Paul Ruizendaal -
Random832 -
schily＠schily.net -
Steve Nickolas -
Wesley Parish