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

[clemc at ccc.com (Clem Cole)]

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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