[COFF] [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

[COFF] [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

[clemc]

moved to coff

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 4:29 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong at gmail.com> wrote:

> I don't recall ever seeing "open source" used as a description of the
> Unix "ecosystem" during the 90s.
>
Yes, that's my point.  The term 'open' meant was published, open available
anyone could use .. i.e. UNIX

remember the SPEC 1170 work on the 1990s -- the define the 1170 interfaces
and >>publish<< them so anyone could write code to it.



> It was in the air with the (minimal) charges Prentice-Hall charged for
> the Minix 0.x and 1.x disks and source; not dissimilar in that sense
> to the charges the FSF were charging for their tapes at the time.
>
Right...   there were fees to write magtapes (or floppies)

Which comes back to my point... 'open source' was not picking.   The whole
community is standing on the shoulders of the UNIX ecosystem that really
started to take off in the 1970s and 1980s.  But the 'free' part was even
before UNIX.

We stood on the shoulders of things before us.    There just was not (yet)
a name for what we were doing.

As Ted saids, I'll give the Debian folks credit for naming it, but the idea
really, really goes back to the early manufacturers and the early community.

FSF was a reaction to the manufacturers taking away something that some
people thought was their 'birth right.'
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[COFF] [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

[bakul]

On Feb 18, 2020, at 1:51 PM, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> As Ted saids, I'll give the Debian folks credit for naming it, but the idea really, really goes back to the early manufacturers and the early community.
> 
> FSF was a reaction to the manufacturers taking away something that some people thought was their 'birth right.'

Used to be that you would get schematics with your electrical or
electronic appliance. I used these to repair a few things, some
times by improvising. IIRC even the original IBM PC came with
schematics.

Given that experience, I felt that paid for software should
come with sources so that when something goes wrong you can
figure out what happened and may be find a way around it. I
had no problem trying to "use the source" but first they had
to provide it; the real documentation! If in the original
vendor goes out of business or decides to stop supporting a
product you bought, you're not stuck. Just as the original
Tektronix oscilloscopes continue being useful.

I do believe this should be a 'birth right'. If this was
always provided, RMS might not have come up with the copyleft!
This is a separate issue from giving away your own software
with sources or controlling what others can do with the sources
you gave away, or paying or being paid to produce such s/w.

[COFF] [TUHS] man Macro Package and pdfmark

[clemc]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 6:04 PM Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:

> Given that experience, I felt that paid for software should
> come with sources so that when something goes wrong you can
> figure out what happened and may be find a way around it. I
> had no problem trying to "use the source" but first they had
> to provide it; the real documentation! If in the original
> vendor goes out of business or decides to stop supporting a
> product you bought, you're not stuck. Just as the original
> Tektronix oscilloscopes continue being useful.
>

Ah herein is an issue.   Tektronix (when I worked for them) was suing the
US Gov because they had taken the schematics of one of their scopes (the
465 IIRC), and had someone else make a clone (Keithley IIRC).  Tek
eventually won the case, because the new instance was a duplicate that
you touch and feel.

Software gets tricky.   Franklin, of course, copied Apple's ROM and Arthur
Kahn (lead lawyer for Franklin) that they had published the sources in
their manuals and processor so designed to run it as it.  They had not
copied Apple's chip, they used different devices but they had used the same
functions, entries etc.  They had changed some things, but they had used
the sources that Apple had published as the place to start.  He almost won,
because the SW did not have a physical instance.  In the end, he was able
to set the precedent for the idea of the 'clean room' BIOS of the PC. One
group writing a specification, but the new code being implemented by a
group of people that had no knowledge of the original - only the new
specification.

BTW:  I understand where you are coming and I too miss those days.  Hey, my
own first learning in electronics was getting the schematics for a TV or a
Radio and troubleshooting them.  I also spent a number of hours, staring at
Wozinacks Apple-II sources trying to understand what he did.

The problem is that in the world were the replica is no different from the
original, it makes IP protection extremely difficult.

As I said, the issue end the end is who gets to say? The originator of the
IP or the customer/user of it?
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[COFF] man Macro Package and pdfmark

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On 18 Feb 2020 15:04 -0800, from bakul at bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah):
> IIRC even the original IBM PC came with schematics.

I'm not completely sure about the schematics, but the full, commented,
BIOS source code listing definitely was available in IBM's own
Technical Reference.

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/pc/pc/6025008_PC_Technical_Reference_Aug81.pdf
(the BIOS source code listing begins at page 192 of the PDF).

-- 
Michael Kjörling • https://michael.kjorling.se • michael at kjorling.se
 “Remember when, on the Internet, nobody cared that you were a dog?”