Re: [COFF] [TUHS] 386BSD released

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> writes:

> On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 3:33 PM Theodore Y. Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> > So back to my basic point ... while giving the *behavior* a name, the
>> *idea
>> > *of "Open Source" is really not anything new.
>>
>> I do think there is something which is radically new --- which is that
>> it's not a single company publishing all of the source code for a
>> particular OS, whether it's System/360 or the PDP-8 Disk Operating
>> System, or whatever.
>
>
> Ted - that *is what* Doug pointed out!!!  They did not create anything that
> was new.  SHARED / DECUS / USENIX and the like were providing that exact
> same function starting in the late 1950s!!!  Companies and Universities all
> pooled their resources to make things better and to get new and improved
> solutions.

I hate to admit it, but I contributed to the vax86a DECUS tape:

  http://mail.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vax86a/ncar/aaareadme.txt

It was a fundamentally different experience.  It showed that the desire
to share software was alive and well, but DECUS tapes were full of dead
offerings.  You could take them or leave them, but there was no overall
effort to integrate or improve that code or to make a coherent offering
out of it.  I know people used that code but nobody ever sent me an
improvement to it.  It was an ornament I could hang on DEC's tree.

DECUS, X Consortium, USENET, etc. all laid a lot of the groundwork for
what came after, but Linux was, for me at least, the first opportunity
to get my hands on the whole system in a setting where nobody had
privileged access.  That, I think, was fundamentally different.

jon
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