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

[lm at mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

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.
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> >

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