From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: geoff@x.bell-labs.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] Running Version 2 along with Version 3
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Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 16:41:01 -0500
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>i believe the phrase 'like pulling teeth' was used in reference to
>getting certain information from certain vendors.

I believe pulling teeth is easier, you just need a good set of pliers
and a strong arm.  Maybe a chisel and hammer in the worst case.
Getting the necessary information or permission to distribute it
from Sun or SGI was nearly impossible when I (and others) tried to
do it (and not just for Plan 9).  It's possible that application
of sufficient heaps of gold, NDAs or both might have eased things.
Sun and SGI insiders did point people at /usr/include, wherein
there was hardware documentation found nowhere else.

The situation these days is somewhat different.  US legislation
such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has muddied the legality
of reverse engineering such as disassembling ROMs.  SGI has got
even more secretive (I'm told that at least one university with
a properly-executed source-code licence for Irix 6.something
can't get said source from SGI).  On the other hand, Solaris 8 source
is allegedly freely available under what they call `community source'
terms; I haven't examined it to see if that includes the interesting
bits like bootstrapping, running the MMU(s) and the kernel memory map.
Plus the `L' word seems to enable Jedi mind-tricks against vendors
(`I'm writing a Linux driver for your harware.  Give me your hardware
documentation.'  `You're writing a Linux driver.  I'll give you the
hardware documentation.').  Even SGI are doing Linux ports.
And as forsyth and others have observed, the various free Unixes
and Linux have already extracted a good deal of information about
hardware from vendors or other sources.