[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[clemc]

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Moving to COFF where this belongs…



Here is my basic issue.  I'm not 'blind' as Larry says.  I lived it and I
try to awknowledge who did what and why if I can.  I try to remember we got
here by a path and that path was hardly straight, but you don't get to join
the convoy late and they say -- hey the journey began someplace else.



@FLAME(on)



Open/Free/Available/Access – whatever you want to call it, did not just pop
up in the late 1980’ with the Free Software Foundation or in the 90s with
the Linux Foundation *et al*.   The facts are that in the early years, a
computer customer got everything including schematics from the cpu
manufacturer.
The ‘culture’ described in Levi’s circa 1980 book “Hackers” that took off
at MIT, Stanford, CMU, *et al.* because everything *was available* and
people *shared things because it saved us all time and trouble*.  In fact,
the name of the IBM user group was just that, SHARE.


 IBM published patched to the OS or their compilers, in the source as
'PTFs' - program temporary fix'.   Each site might have modified things a
little (or a lot), so got the PTF and tape and looked at how the patch
affected you.   That was my first job support York APL/360 on TSS. (CMU had
TSS working before IBM did, so a lot of PTFs from IBM would be things we
already had dealt).



Certainly, when I started programming in the late 1960s, the idea of
proprietary SW had been around, but it was still somewhat constrained to
the commercial side (Banking/Insurance *etc*… parts – where the real money
was).  The research and university community (which of course DEC was
heavily part) was very much, we are all in together. Still everyone had
sources and we moved things back and forth via mag tape at DECUS
conferences or eventually the ARPAnet.



At some point that started to change.   Doug, Ken and others older than I
can probably tell you more than I can about that transition.  But the
vendors started to lock up more and more of their IP.   A user no longer
got a mag tape with the sources and you did not do a full system
generation.  The end users/customers only got parts of the system, the rest
was binaries.  Unless you paid huge fees, the source at best was available
on microfiche, and often you lacked important things needed to recreate the
binaries.   Thus the concept of the closed or proprietary systems started
to become the norm, not as it has been previously.


I remember, since CMU had VAX Serial #1, and a 'special' relationship with
DEC, we have VMS sources.  One spring/summer we were doing a consulting job
(moving ISPS to the Vax for the Israel Government), and that was were I
realized they only had the code on fiche, and CMU was 'different.'



But here is the interesting thing, as the vendors started becoming less and
less 'open', *AT&T was required by the 1956 consent decree to be 'open' and
license its IP *for ‘fair and reasonable terms’ to all interested parties.
(Which, they did, and the world got the transistor and UNIX as two of the
best examples).  So AT&T UNIX behavior is the opposite of what the hardware
manufacturers were doing at the time!!!



The argument comes back to a few basic issues.  What is ‘fair and
reasonable’ and ‘who gets to decide’ what is made available.  As the
creators of some content, started to close access to ‘secret sauce’ a
tension can and did start to build between the creators and some users.
BTW, the other important thing to remember is that you needed a $100K-$250K
hunk of HW from DEC to use that ‘open’ IP from AT&T and *the hardware
acquisition was the barrier to entry*, not the cost the SW.



Folks, those of us that lived it.  UNIX was 100% open.   Anyone could get a
license for it.   The technologies that AT&T developed was also published
in the open literature detailing how it was made/how it worked.  They did
this originally because they were bound by the US Gov due to a case that
started in 1949 and settled witht that 1956 decree!  The folks at AT&T were
extremely free to talk about and they did give away what they had.   The
‘sauce’ was never secret (and thus AT&T would famously lose its case when
they later tried to put the cat back in the bag in AT&T *vs*. UCB/BSDi case)
.



The key is that during the PDP-11 and Vaxen times, the UNIX community all
had licenses, commercial or university.  But soon the microprocessor
appears, we start to form new firms and with those sources, we created a
new industry, the *Open Systems Industry* with an organization called
/usr/group.  This is all in the early 1980s (before FSF, much less Linux).
What was different here, was *we** could all share* between other licensees
(and anyone could get a license if they >>wanted<< it).



But something interesting happens.   These new commercial Open Systems folk
won the war with the proprietary vendors.  They were still competing with
the old guard and they competed against each other (surprise/surprise – some
were the same folks who had been competing against each other previously,
now they just was using somewhat standard ammunition – UNIX and a cheap
processor).



Moreover, the new people with the UNIX technology (Sun, DEC, HP, Masscomp,
IBM *et al*) start to handle their own version of UNIX just like they
handled their previous codes.  They want to protect it.



And this is where the famous fair and reasonable comes in.   Who gets to
set what is fair?   Certainly, $150 fee to recover the cost of writing the
magtape (the IP was really free) seemed fair at the time – particularly
since you had to ‘cons up’ another $150K for that PDP-11.



Stallman, in particular, wants to go back to old days, where he got access
toeverything and he had his playground.   To add insult to all, he
currently fighting the same war with some of MIT's ideas and the LISP
machine world.  So his answer was to try to rewrite everything from scratch
and then try to give it away/get people to use it but add a funny clause
that said you have to give to anyone else that asked for it.   He still has
a license, he just has different rules (I’ll not open if this is fair or
reasonable – but it was the rules FSF made).  BTW: that only works if you
have something valuable (more in a minute).



Moore’s law starts driving the cost of the hardware down and at some point,
the computer to run UNIX costs $50K, then $10K, $5K, and even $1K.   So now
the fees that AT&T is charging the commercial side can be argued (as Larry
and other have so well) are no longer ‘reasonable.’



At some point, FSF’s movement (IMO – after they got a compiler that was
‘good enough’ and that worked on ‘enough’ target ISA’s) starts to take off. I
think this is the real 'Christensen Disruption'.  GCC was not as good as
Masscomp or Sun's compilers for the 68k or DEC's for the Vax, but it was
free.  As I recall, Sun was charging for its compiler at the time (we did
manage to beat back the ex-DEC marketing types at Masscomp and the C
compiler was free, Fortran and Pascal cost $s).


Even though gcc is not as good, its good enough and people love it, so it
builds a new market (and gets better and better as more people invest in it
-- see Christensen's theory for why).


But this at least 5 years *after* the Open Systems Community has been
birthed. Sorry guys -- the term has been in use for a while to mean the
>>UNIX<< community with its open interfaces and sharing of code.  BTW: Linux
itself would happen for another 5 years after that and couple of more years
before the Linux Foundation, much less the community that has grown around
it.




But that’s my point…   Please at least here in the historic mailing
lists, start
to admit and be proud that we are standing on people's shoulders and
>>stop<< trying to stepping on people’s toes.



The current FOSS movement is just that – Free and Open.    That’s cool –
that’s great.  But recognize it started long before FSF or Linux or any of
that.



For a different time, the person I think who should really be credited as
the start of the FOSS movement as we know it, is the late Prof. Don
Pederson.   In the late 1960s, he famously gave away his first ECAD program
from UCB (which I believe was called MOTIS – and would later begat SPICE).
As ‘dop’ used to tell his students (like me) back in the day – ‘*I always
give away my sources.  Because that way I go in the back door and get to
see everything* at IBM/HP/Tektronix/AT&T/DEC etc..*.   If I license and
sell *our code*, I *have to *go in the front door like any other salesman.’*
 For the record a few years later, my other alma mater (CMU) was notorious
for licensing it's work -- hence the SCRIBE debacle of the late 1970s and
much of the CMU SPICE project/Andrew results of the early 1980s - while MIT
gave everything away in Athena and more everything from the NU projects.  I
notice that the things that lived the longest from CMU were things that
were given away without any restrictions... but I digress.



So... coming back to the UNIX side of the world.  Pederson’s work would
create UCB’s ‘industrial liaison office’ which was the group that released
the original ‘Berkeley Software Distribution’ for UNIX (*a.k.a.* BSD).
They had a 10 year history of ‘giving away’ free software before UNIX came
along.   They gave their UNIX code anyone that asked for it.  You just had
to prove you had a license from AT&T, but again anyone could get that.
i.e. it was 'open source.'
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[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[tytso]

It seems that you are primarily arguing that the idea of "Open
Systems" predates that of the Free Software and Open Source movements.
That's no doubt true, chronologically speaking.  However, for those of
us who came up a bit after you, from our perspective, the "Open
Systems" movement *failed*.  Source code for Solaris, Ultrix, AIX, was
very hard to get, and when we could get it, we were not able to make
changes and share them with others.

I've told the story before about how MIT managed to obtain a Unix
license without the infamous "methods and concepts" clause.  It was
able to continue to renew it because, quite frankly, AT&T needed
access to MIT researchers more than the other way around, so it was a
matter of sheer power politics.  But AT&T refused to *acknowledge*
that MIT had a Unix license to Digital, so the only way MIT Project
Athena got access to Ultrix and OSF/1 sources was through back
channels where MIT alumni working at DEC passed unofficial source
tapes complete with editor backup and coredumps.  But officially, once
AT&T refused to acknowledge that MIT had a valid Unix license (even
though we did), MIT wasn't able to get *legal* source snapshots from
Digital.

So this is why I don't view the Open Systems movement with quite the
same rose colored classes as others.

It's also why I like the GPL license, because it forces people to give
the code back.  Essentially I have *zero* trust that corporate
entities will do anything other than maximize shareholder value, and
if that means taking BSD licensed code, and adding their own secret
sauce, and not returning it back to the commons --- which is part what
led to the mess which was Solaris, HPUX, AIX, etc., that's exactly
what companies will do.

Companies may have mission statements saying things like "don't be
evil", but sooner or later, that phrase will quietly disappear and
companies will start making more and more compromises in pursuit of
the almighty dollar.  So if it helps, consider thinking of the GPL
license as a commitment device[1] for the philosophy of Open Systems.  :-)

[1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-me-from-myself-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

						- Ted

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[clemc]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 5:58 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso at mit.edu> wrote:

> It seems that you are primarily arguing that the idea of "Open
> Systems" predates that of the Free Software and Open Source movements.
> That's no doubt true, chronologically speaking.  However, for those of
> us who came up a bit after you, from our perspective, the "Open
> Systems" movement *failed*.

If your measurement of success was getting access to sources, yes it
failed.   But if you measurement was making UNIX the standard for all
computers in the future -- it was wildly successful.   It's a bit of
perception I suspect.   We were tired of having to deal with VMS et al.

That said, you were tired of the UNIX wars -- which is a reasonable view.
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[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[lm]

+1 to everything Ted said, that's the world I lived in.  I have a love
hate relationship to the GPL, I'm ok with GPLv2, not so much with v3.

I just think that Clem has led a somewhat blessed life where people
knew he was someone that should not have roadblocks, the roadblocks
just limit how much goodness Clem is gonna give you.  So he had source
access without thinking about it, he had whatever he wanted, that was
"normal" for him.  For a lot of the rest of us, we were not seen as
good as Clem so we had to deal with all the asinine roadblocks so 
we could give you some goodness.  It wasn't easy.

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 05:58:24PM -0500, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> It seems that you are primarily arguing that the idea of "Open
> Systems" predates that of the Free Software and Open Source movements.
> That's no doubt true, chronologically speaking.  However, for those of
> us who came up a bit after you, from our perspective, the "Open
> Systems" movement *failed*.  Source code for Solaris, Ultrix, AIX, was
> very hard to get, and when we could get it, we were not able to make
> changes and share them with others.
> 
> I've told the story before about how MIT managed to obtain a Unix
> license without the infamous "methods and concepts" clause.  It was
> able to continue to renew it because, quite frankly, AT&T needed
> access to MIT researchers more than the other way around, so it was a
> matter of sheer power politics.  But AT&T refused to *acknowledge*
> that MIT had a Unix license to Digital, so the only way MIT Project
> Athena got access to Ultrix and OSF/1 sources was through back
> channels where MIT alumni working at DEC passed unofficial source
> tapes complete with editor backup and coredumps.  But officially, once
> AT&T refused to acknowledge that MIT had a valid Unix license (even
> though we did), MIT wasn't able to get *legal* source snapshots from
> Digital.
> 
> So this is why I don't view the Open Systems movement with quite the
> same rose colored classes as others.
> 
> It's also why I like the GPL license, because it forces people to give
> the code back.  Essentially I have *zero* trust that corporate
> entities will do anything other than maximize shareholder value, and
> if that means taking BSD licensed code, and adding their own secret
> sauce, and not returning it back to the commons --- which is part what
> led to the mess which was Solaris, HPUX, AIX, etc., that's exactly
> what companies will do.
> 
> Companies may have mission statements saying things like "don't be
> evil", but sooner or later, that phrase will quietly disappear and
> companies will start making more and more compromises in pursuit of
> the almighty dollar.  So if it helps, consider thinking of the GPL
> license as a commitment device[1] for the philosophy of Open Systems.  :-)
> 
> [1] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-me-from-myself-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/
> 
> 						- Ted
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[clemc]

I'm not 100% sure why I'm arguing other than I feel this is so wrong and so
disingenuous to those that came before.
But, you have to decide that having access to all your sources for your
system is your measure of 'success.'  My value of success is no more VMS,
Kronos, or VM/CMS or the like.   I will accept Larry's position that he had
many roadblocks that were often silly.   But I really don't think my world
was as 'charmed' as he claims and his was quite as bad as his might think
you look at it.

That said, we have deviated from what it means to be "open."  What I'm
hearing from Ted and Larry that they think open can only mean stallman's
definition.  I have said, that is not, was not the original definition, nor
is it the only case and that the UNIX technology itself was really not as
tied up as he claims.  I think Larry did have access to sources (maybe not
at his University), but like so many of us, once he got to a place that had
them (like SGI or Sun).  My point is that besides being to read about it in
books and papers, getting access to the source from AT&T or UCB was really
the norm and stating otherwise is disingenuous and trying to rewrite
history a bit.

A point Ted has made and I accept is by the time of the UNIX Wars, the old
proprietary folks were trying to keep their own versions of UNIX 'secret'
and to use Larry terms those roadblocks to >>there<< code was real.  But
the truth is that the AT&T codebase (while getting more and more expensive
as the HW dropped in cost), was always available, and people both
commercial and research had it.

The problem was that as hardware cost dropped, more and more people wanted
the sources too and that were the I think the difference in the success
metrics come.

Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
GPL'ed or otherwise.

In the end, what matters to me is the ideas, the real intellectual property
NOT the source that implements it.    This has been proven within the UNIX
community too many times.  It has been re-engineered so many times over.
Just like Fortran lives today, although it's different from what I learned
in the 1960s.  It's still Fortran.   Unix is different from what I saw in
the early 1970s, but its still Unix.

And that is because the *ideas that makeup what we call UNIX ARE open* and
the people looked at the sources, looked at the papers, talked to each
other and the community built on it.

It looks like a duck.  It quacks like a duck and even tastes like duck
(mostly) when you inside.   It's a duck.
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[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[dave]

On Tue, 18 Feb 2020, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:

> It's also why I like the GPL license, because it forces people to give
> the code back.  [...]

Which is one reason why I don't like the GPL; it compels me to do something
that for reasons of my own I may not wish to do (spread it like a virus).  The other reason is that
if I use any GPL code, my own work ends up under the GPL (like a virus) and
again I may not like that.

Here's the terms that I personally use; it's sort of a modified BSD
licence:

-----

               +---------------------------------------+
               |Simplified BSD Licence (patent pending)|
               +---------------------------------------+

Do what the hell you like with this stuff, but don't pretend that you
wrote it or remove this notice, OK?  Otherwise I *will* hunt you down
and deal with you (and I have done that before).

If you modify anything then have the guts to put your name to it so I
know who to blame and can deflect complaints accordingly, or email me
so I can incorporate your ideas (with due credit) in the next version
of this fine suite of software; fame could be yours :-)

Continued use of this software may or may not result in the agonising
death of all small furry animals within a 100ft radius, so use at own
risk; I cannot accept any responsibility for any animal-welfare group
kicking down the door in the middle of the night and dragging you off
to be vivisected with a rusty razor blade.

Copyright (C) 2018, David Ian Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) dave at horsfall.org
Don't email me without first reading http:/www.horsfall.org/spam.html

-----

-- Dave

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[lm]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 09:27:47PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> That said, we have deviated from what it means to be "open."  What I'm
> hearing from Ted and Larry that they think open can only mean stallman's
> definition.  

No open means access to it in my mind. GPL is open, BSD is open, $$$ for
roff and $5/machine is not at all open, that's a for pay thing.  Your world
was "shrug", my world was "we're not paying for that because we don't
understand what it is".

> My point is that besides being to read about it in
> books and papers, getting access to the source from AT&T or UCB was really
> the norm and stating otherwise is disingenuous and trying to rewrite
> history a bit.

Umm, couldn't disagree more.  My experience was the source was locked up
and you had to be "someone" to have access to it.  It was like that at
UW Madison, it was like that at Lachman, it was like that even at Sun
for the non SunOS stuff.  They eventually loosened up but you had to
know where v7, 32v, etc were located and that was not public knowledge.

For whatever reason, there was hesitation about giving you access to the
AT&T Bell Labs source.  BSD was what we ran at Madison and that was 
locked up.

> A point Ted has made and I accept is by the time of the UNIX Wars, the old
> proprietary folks were trying to keep their own versions of UNIX 'secret'
> and to use Larry terms those roadblocks to >>there<< code was real.  But
> the truth is that the AT&T codebase (while getting more and more expensive
> as the HW dropped in cost), was always available, and people both
> commercial and research had it.

Not at all true in my experience.

> Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
> success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
> And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
> they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
> GPL'ed or otherwise.

I agree with that.

> And that is because the *ideas that makeup what we call UNIX ARE open* and
> the people looked at the sources, looked at the papers, talked to each
> other and the community built on it.

Ideas sort of, but the source was not was not at all open.  You had
access, I had to fight like hell to get access and I'm sort of somebody,
people knew me.  Think of all the people who were not as brash as I am
and didn't get access.

The default, this is what you don't get Clem, the default was no access
for you.

Ideas, sure, but there is nothing like the mind explosion that happened
for me reading the popen() source.  I had read all the Bell Labs papers
and a bunch more but seeing that fork() in libc's popen() changed how
I thought about things.  I never would have gotten that from a paper,
maybe I'm just dumb, but that was a mind twist.  I think there are lot
more in the source, swtch() is a good one.  Interrupts are a good one.
Page faults are a good one.  There is a lot that you can talk about but
it doesn't come into focus until you walk the call stack and think about
each one.

The majority of people did not have access to the source.  You keep saying
that they did, that's just not true.  And it is a shame, you can learn so
much by just reading those early Unix versions.

Ask yourself why the Lions book was so popular, I've seen photocopies
of photocopies of photocopies to the point you can barely read it.  If
people could easily look at the source, why all the photocopies?  I know
you've seen them too.

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[davida]

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> On 19 Feb 2020, at 13:56, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 09:27:47PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:

<…>

>> Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
>> success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
>> And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
>> they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
>> GPL'ed or otherwise.
> 
> I agree with that.

This “displacement” has really only been widely true in the last 5-10 years.

“Open Systems” seemed to peak (from my recollection) around the early 90’s.  The Unix model and POSIX APIs became dominant, and VMS, NonStop, MVS, VM, etc, etc, died away, often together with their hardware.  The exception to this was Windows NT (and descendants) which killed the Open System era, and dominated the small to mid-size markets, leaving Open Systems and the remnants of proprietary OSes to large and/or specialised niches.

One factor behind the success of Windows Server was that the PC hardware market’s brutal competition led to decent quality hardware at a fraction of the price of competing platforms.  This overwhelmed the advantages of Open Systems, and the movement stalled — people were willing to buy into a proprietary OS again, because it was *cheap*, despite just recently having escaped OS lock-in with Open Systems.

Concurrent with the rise of Windows was the emergence of Linux (and early on, the *BSDs).  The PC Unices (including Linux) leveraged the PC platform like Windows did.  But it was the dotcom era, and the availability of dirt cheap virtual hosts that had to run Linux because the licensing cost of Windows Server was an order of magnitude more than the virtual hardware, which has resulted in Linux (and thus POSIX APIs and a Unix model) being almost ubiquitous today.

I think it’s a mistake to conflate Open Systems with Free/Open Source Software.  Despite eg. POSIX being the root of both, Open Systems was dead in the market well before FOSS operating systems took off outside academic environments.




d

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[tytso]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 09:27:47PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> That said, we have deviated from what it means to be "open."  What I'm
> hearing from Ted and Larry that they think open can only mean stallman's
> definition.  I have said, that is not, was not the original definition, nor
> is it the only case and that the UNIX technology itself was really not as
> tied up as he claims.

I think "Open Systems" failed *because* it failed to stop the Unix
Wars.  Or in other words, because we had proprietary system vendors
who all were implementing extensions to Unix in incompatible ways, was
a sign that the original definition of Open was hopelessly idealistic
in that it assumed the suits would allow companies to operate the same
way it did when everything was funded by things like DARPA grants at
the engineering work was done in Universities.

So I accept that the original definition was different, and to the
extent that most of the Legacy Unix systems no longer have much
commericial impact, and have now been replaced by Linux, is a strong
hint that while the *goals* of the original "Open Systems" mantra may
have worked, and while it may have allowed VMS to be displaced, in the
end, as everyone implemented their own versions of various
enhancements to Unix, and over time, as people even stopped publishing
them at Usenix conferences (with Sun being the last holdout; I was at
IBM when IBM stopped incentivizing engineers to publish at
conferences, and then given the amount of work engineers were asked to
do, it effectively meant very few papers were getting published from
industry --- especially as Usenix cranked up the work factor for
academic-quality papers), I think you may be viewing the "Unix
community" with rose-colored glasses.

> A point Ted has made and I accept is by the time of the UNIX Wars, the old
> proprietary folks were trying to keep their own versions of UNIX 'secret'
> and to use Larry terms those roadblocks to >>there<< code was real.  But
> the truth is that the AT&T codebase (while getting more and more expensive
> as the HW dropped in cost), was always available, and people both
> commercial and research had it.

The AT&T codebase by itself wasn't particularly interesting if the
hardware you had was a Ultrasparc 5; or an SGI pizza box; or DS 5100.
For that, you needed the proprietary Unix sources.  Maybe you don't
consider that to be part of "Open Systems", but I consider it all of a
piece.  And I don't see any solution to head off the Unix Wars and
"secret, proprietary sauce" strategy, *other* than the GPL.

Even if people were talking and publishing at Usenix, so all of the
ideas were out there (even if the source wasn't) consider the sheer
*waste* of having N different engineering teams all reimplementing the
exact same feature --- except it wasn't exactly the same, because each
company was trying to claim its own proprietary enhancement.  And one
solution to that was this like the POSIX standard, but that took a
huge amount of effort as well.  I consider all of that to also be a
legacy of that original "Open Systems" definition, in terms of how it
was actually implemented in the real world.

> In the end, what matters to me is the ideas, the real intellectual property
> NOT the source that implements it.    This has been proven within the UNIX
> community too many times.  It has been re-engineered so many times over.

In the Silicon Valley, one of the things they tell people who try to
make people sign NDA's before they tell people about their great idea
for a startup is, "don't stress over it"; ideas are a dime a dozen.
What matters is the execution, and the product/market fit.  While
certain ideas maybe very simple, such as for example "the setuid bit",
past a certain point, things have gotten complex enough that it's not
just about the idea.

Consider how many person years was required to create ZFS at Sun.  My
research into production quality file systems was that it requires
between 50-200 person years to create a true enterprise quality file
system, which is trusted as such.  This was confirmed from my talking
to many industry contacts about how many years were required for a
number of file systems, including advfs at Digital, GPFS at IBM, etc.
Any idiot can make a random file system prototype that mostly works;
that doesn't take long.  Creating an enterprise-ready, quality file
system, is a very different thing altogether.

I've seen the source code for projects that were written so that a
paper could get published.  I've tried to turn some them into
something that could be used in production --- and that's one of the
best places where you can see the huge gap between "the idea" and
"something which can be used in production".

> And that is because the *ideas that makeup what we call UNIX ARE open* and
> the people looked at the sources, looked at the papers, talked to each
> other and the community built on it.

Did the people who worked at SGI get to take a lot at the sources for
Digital's advfs?  How much of advfs was published?  And how much
community was there between the different file system teams for xfs,
advfs, ZFS, etc.?

Is GPL licensing perfect?  Heck no.  I'll admit it has more than a few
shortcomings.  But consider an alternate world were at the point where
AT&T was constrained by monopoly ruling, that someone had decided to
release the Unix sources under a GPL-like license?  How might have
changed how (or whether) the Unix wars would have played out?

Perhaps the community of OS developers would have been even stronger
compared to the height of the Unix Wars?  How might that have eased
application programmers who had to struggle with configure scripts to
make code that could run on N different Unix systems, which were
almost, but not quite, identical?  How might have that changed the
availability of desktop applications like Quicken and Turbo Tax and
Photoshop on Unix-like systems?

I'm not GPL extremist; there are many positions where I'm sure
Stallman and the Software Freedom Conservacy disagree very strongly.
But the licensing terms of Unix(tm) were by no means perfect --- both
the AT&T proprietary license for which you had to pay $$$ and sign
licenses containing methods and concepts clauses, and the BSD license
that came later --- and if you're going to criticize the GPL, perhaps
it's also worth considering how other licensing regimes for Unix
systems have worked out.

					- Ted

P.S.  And remember, Linux is *not* Unix(tm).  It neither has the
source code lineage, nor have people paid the $$$ to the conformance
testing labs so that it can be called Unix(tm).  And people can debate
whether or not it walks sufficiently enough like a duck that we should
consider it a duck, but while I certainly will acknowledge where Linux
owes an intellectual debt to those systems which came before, it's
also perfectly fair to point out its shortcomings.

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[imp]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:28 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

> I'm not 100% sure why I'm arguing other than I feel this is so wrong and
> so disingenuous to those that came before.
>

I think the difference is whether you were in the club or not. If you were
inside and read in, there was a vibe that was very much like open source is
today. If you read the old Australian Unix User Group newsletters, you have
window into this time... but with a weird "papers please" to prove you were
in the club. People passed things around in many of the same ways. It was
cool and different than before. And people recall this fondly. Network
Unix, for example, dominated the ARPANET from 75 to 78... and it was pure
sharing... with a catch.

Now, if you weren't in the club, or recall a time when you were excluded,
you'd have a very different remembrance. The model was better than what
came before, but not yet to where it needed to be.

The Unix Wars, imho, shot that all to shit. It set the stage for the
revolutions that happened.

I disagree the GPL was all that. It didn't force people to really do the
right thing... I have had dozens of boards that run Linux but no source.
The manufacturer doesn't care or has gone out of business. People only
comply because they think it is in their best interest.  But they do it for
BSD too... and just because it is free doesn't make it good..  linux has a
dozen Wifi stacks...

It's no wonder people have divergent interpretations of how we got here.
What myth do you but into? That will determine if you look at things one
way or another...

Warner

But, you have to decide that having access to all your sources for your
> system is your measure of 'success.'  My value of success is no more VMS,
> Kronos, or VM/CMS or the like.   I will accept Larry's position that he had
> many roadblocks that were often silly.   But I really don't think my world
> was as 'charmed' as he claims and his was quite as bad as his might think
> you look at it.
>
> That said, we have deviated from what it means to be "open."  What I'm
> hearing from Ted and Larry that they think open can only mean stallman's
> definition.  I have said, that is not, was not the original definition, nor
> is it the only case and that the UNIX technology itself was really not as
> tied up as he claims.  I think Larry did have access to sources (maybe not
> at his University), but like so many of us, once he got to a place that had
> them (like SGI or Sun).  My point is that besides being to read about it in
> books and papers, getting access to the source from AT&T or UCB was really
> the norm and stating otherwise is disingenuous and trying to rewrite
> history a bit.
>
> A point Ted has made and I accept is by the time of the UNIX Wars, the old
> proprietary folks were trying to keep their own versions of UNIX 'secret'
> and to use Larry terms those roadblocks to >>there<< code was real.  But
> the truth is that the AT&T codebase (while getting more and more expensive
> as the HW dropped in cost), was always available, and people both
> commercial and research had it.
>
> The problem was that as hardware cost dropped, more and more people wanted
> the sources too and that were the I think the difference in the success
> metrics come.
>
> Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
> success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
> And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
> they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
> GPL'ed or otherwise.
>
> In the end, what matters to me is the ideas, the real intellectual
> property NOT the source that implements it.    This has been proven within
> the UNIX community too many times.  It has been re-engineered so many times
> over.    Just like Fortran lives today, although it's different from what I
> learned in the 1960s.  It's still Fortran.   Unix is different from what I
> saw in the early 1970s, but its still Unix.
>
> And that is because the *ideas that makeup what we call UNIX ARE open*
> and the people looked at the sources, looked at the papers, talked to each
> other and the community built on it.
>
> It looks like a duck.  It quacks like a duck and even tastes like duck
> (mostly) when you inside.   It's a duck.
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>
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[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[wkt]

I'll put in my own $0.05 with my story about why TUHS was created. I fell
in love with Unix in the late 80s, first on a Pyramid 90x running OSx (dual
AT&T/BSD userland), followed by a sysadmin stint on the Pyramid and a Sun 2
box running SunOS. No access to source code, except for what I could download
from the Usenet comp.sources.* newsgroups.

Then the university I worked for purchased Minix 1.1 and I was a pig in mud:
I could look at the source, apply the patches from the Minix newsgroup and
rebuild the entire system. Still no access to Unix source code.

I took a new job (early 90s on Sun 3s) and started to pester people to try and
get a copy of V7 Unix, as I knew I wouldn't be able to get the SunOS source.
Luckily, someone sent me an RL02 disk image with (modified) V7 on it. Then I
found out that my new employer (UNSW) actually had a Unix source license.

It was at that point that I began the quest to get the "ancient" Unix sources
put under a free/cheap licence.

Cheers, Warren

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[thomas.paulsen]

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[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[lm]

Warner is spot on.  I was a little late to the party so I didn't even 
realize there was a club at the time, I just knew that it was hard to
get to the source.  Looking back, I can see there was a club and I was
not in it, I was a little late, I sort of clawed my way in a bit but
I was definitely not part of the club.  I'm annoyed by that because
not being part of it held me back a bit.

So yeah, very different memories depending on where you were.  Warner
nailed it.

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 11:11:29PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:28 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > I'm not 100% sure why I'm arguing other than I feel this is so wrong and
> > so disingenuous to those that came before.
> >
> 
> I think the difference is whether you were in the club or not. If you were
> inside and read in, there was a vibe that was very much like open source is
> today. If you read the old Australian Unix User Group newsletters, you have
> window into this time... but with a weird "papers please" to prove you were
> in the club. People passed things around in many of the same ways. It was
> cool and different than before. And people recall this fondly. Network
> Unix, for example, dominated the ARPANET from 75 to 78... and it was pure
> sharing... with a catch.
> 
> Now, if you weren't in the club, or recall a time when you were excluded,
> you'd have a very different remembrance. The model was better than what
> came before, but not yet to where it needed to be.
> 
> The Unix Wars, imho, shot that all to shit. It set the stage for the
> revolutions that happened.
> 
> I disagree the GPL was all that. It didn't force people to really do the
> right thing... I have had dozens of boards that run Linux but no source.
> The manufacturer doesn't care or has gone out of business. People only
> comply because they think it is in their best interest.  But they do it for
> BSD too... and just because it is free doesn't make it good..  linux has a
> dozen Wifi stacks...
> 
> It's no wonder people have divergent interpretations of how we got here.
> What myth do you but into? That will determine if you look at things one
> way or another...
> 
> Warner
> 
> But, you have to decide that having access to all your sources for your
> > system is your measure of 'success.'  My value of success is no more VMS,
> > Kronos, or VM/CMS or the like.   I will accept Larry's position that he had
> > many roadblocks that were often silly.   But I really don't think my world
> > was as 'charmed' as he claims and his was quite as bad as his might think
> > you look at it.
> >
> > That said, we have deviated from what it means to be "open."  What I'm
> > hearing from Ted and Larry that they think open can only mean stallman's
> > definition.  I have said, that is not, was not the original definition, nor
> > is it the only case and that the UNIX technology itself was really not as
> > tied up as he claims.  I think Larry did have access to sources (maybe not
> > at his University), but like so many of us, once he got to a place that had
> > them (like SGI or Sun).  My point is that besides being to read about it in
> > books and papers, getting access to the source from AT&T or UCB was really
> > the norm and stating otherwise is disingenuous and trying to rewrite
> > history a bit.
> >
> > A point Ted has made and I accept is by the time of the UNIX Wars, the old
> > proprietary folks were trying to keep their own versions of UNIX 'secret'
> > and to use Larry terms those roadblocks to >>there<< code was real.  But
> > the truth is that the AT&T codebase (while getting more and more expensive
> > as the HW dropped in cost), was always available, and people both
> > commercial and research had it.
> >
> > The problem was that as hardware cost dropped, more and more people wanted
> > the sources too and that were the I think the difference in the success
> > metrics come.
> >
> > Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
> > success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
> > And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
> > they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
> > GPL'ed or otherwise.
> >
> > In the end, what matters to me is the ideas, the real intellectual
> > property NOT the source that implements it.    This has been proven within
> > the UNIX community too many times.  It has been re-engineered so many times
> > over.    Just like Fortran lives today, although it's different from what I
> > learned in the 1960s.  It's still Fortran.   Unix is different from what I
> > saw in the early 1970s, but its still Unix.
> >
> > And that is because the *ideas that makeup what we call UNIX ARE open*
> > and the people looked at the sources, looked at the papers, talked to each
> > other and the community built on it.
> >
> > It looks like a duck.  It quacks like a duck and even tastes like duck
> > (mostly) when you inside.   It's a duck.
> > _______________________________________________
> > COFF mailing list
> > COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> > https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
> >

-- 
---
Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[clemc]

[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5687 bytes --]

I’m traveling so I can not really reply.  But I too think Warren is correct and it probably does come from where you started / your core experiences will taint your view. 

Clem

Sent from my Handheld - expect things to be almost but not quite. 

> On Feb 19, 2020, at 10:19 AM, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> 
> Warner is spot on.  I was a little late to the party so I didn't even 
> realize there was a club at the time, I just knew that it was hard to
> get to the source.  Looking back, I can see there was a club and I was
> not in it, I was a little late, I sort of clawed my way in a bit but
> I was definitely not part of the club.  I'm annoyed by that because
> not being part of it held me back a bit.
> 
> So yeah, very different memories depending on where you were.  Warner
> nailed it.
> 
>> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 11:11:29PM -0700, Warner Losh wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 18, 2020, 7:28 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> I'm not 100% sure why I'm arguing other than I feel this is so wrong and
>>> so disingenuous to those that came before.
>>> 
>> 
>> I think the difference is whether you were in the club or not. If you were
>> inside and read in, there was a vibe that was very much like open source is
>> today. If you read the old Australian Unix User Group newsletters, you have
>> window into this time... but with a weird "papers please" to prove you were
>> in the club. People passed things around in many of the same ways. It was
>> cool and different than before. And people recall this fondly. Network
>> Unix, for example, dominated the ARPANET from 75 to 78... and it was pure
>> sharing... with a catch.
>> 
>> Now, if you weren't in the club, or recall a time when you were excluded,
>> you'd have a very different remembrance. The model was better than what
>> came before, but not yet to where it needed to be.
>> 
>> The Unix Wars, imho, shot that all to shit. It set the stage for the
>> revolutions that happened.
>> 
>> I disagree the GPL was all that. It didn't force people to really do the
>> right thing... I have had dozens of boards that run Linux but no source.
>> The manufacturer doesn't care or has gone out of business. People only
>> comply because they think it is in their best interest.  But they do it for
>> BSD too... and just because it is free doesn't make it good..  linux has a
>> dozen Wifi stacks...
>> 
>> It's no wonder people have divergent interpretations of how we got here.
>> What myth do you but into? That will determine if you look at things one
>> way or another...
>> 
>> Warner
>> 
>> But, you have to decide that having access to all your sources for your
>>> system is your measure of 'success.'  My value of success is no more VMS,
>>> Kronos, or VM/CMS or the like.   I will accept Larry's position that he had
>>> many roadblocks that were often silly.   But I really don't think my world
>>> was as 'charmed' as he claims and his was quite as bad as his might think
>>> you look at it.
>>> 
>>> That said, we have deviated from what it means to be "open."  What I'm
>>> hearing from Ted and Larry that they think open can only mean stallman's
>>> definition.  I have said, that is not, was not the original definition, nor
>>> is it the only case and that the UNIX technology itself was really not as
>>> tied up as he claims.  I think Larry did have access to sources (maybe not
>>> at his University), but like so many of us, once he got to a place that had
>>> them (like SGI or Sun).  My point is that besides being to read about it in
>>> books and papers, getting access to the source from AT&T or UCB was really
>>> the norm and stating otherwise is disingenuous and trying to rewrite
>>> history a bit.
>>> 
>>> A point Ted has made and I accept is by the time of the UNIX Wars, the old
>>> proprietary folks were trying to keep their own versions of UNIX 'secret'
>>> and to use Larry terms those roadblocks to >>there<< code was real.  But
>>> the truth is that the AT&T codebase (while getting more and more expensive
>>> as the HW dropped in cost), was always available, and people both
>>> commercial and research had it.
>>> 
>>> The problem was that as hardware cost dropped, more and more people wanted
>>> the sources too and that were the I think the difference in the success
>>> metrics come.
>>> 
>>> Certainly, for us that lived in a 'pre-UNIX' world, UNIX was a huge
>>> success.   It did what we wanted -- it displaced the proprietary systems.
>>> And in the end, the UNIX ideas and UNIX technologies live today - because
>>> they were open and available to everyone.    It does not matter if it was
>>> GPL'ed or otherwise.
>>> 
>>> In the end, what matters to me is the ideas, the real intellectual
>>> property NOT the source that implements it.    This has been proven within
>>> the UNIX community too many times.  It has been re-engineered so many times
>>> over.    Just like Fortran lives today, although it's different from what I
>>> learned in the 1960s.  It's still Fortran.   Unix is different from what I
>>> saw in the early 1970s, but its still Unix.
>>> 
>>> And that is because the *ideas that makeup what we call UNIX ARE open*
>>> and the people looked at the sources, looked at the papers, talked to each
>>> other and the community built on it.
>>> 
>>> It looks like a duck.  It quacks like a duck and even tastes like duck
>>> (mostly) when you inside.   It's a duck.
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> COFF mailing list
>>> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
>>> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
>>> 
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Larry McVoy                     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm 

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[dave]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2020, Warren Toomey wrote:

[...]

> It was at that point that I began the quest to get the "ancient" Unix 
> sources put under a free/cheap licence.

And somewhere, I still have my Ancient Unix Licence; paid good money for 
it, too :-)

Oh, and don't forget that TUHS was born of PUPS, and I think that I 
suggested the name of COFF.

-- Dave

[COFF] Standing on the shoulders of giants, free or not

[dave]

On Wed, 19 Feb 2020, Larry McVoy wrote:

[...]

> So yeah, very different memories depending on where you were.  Warner 
> nailed it.

Working at UNSW at the time (which had a source licence) it never occurred 
to me that some people may not have the source; it wasn't until I ventured 
into the commercial sector (starting with the Lionel Singer Group) that I 
realised the awful truth :-(

-- Dave