Re: [TUHS] [COFF] 386BSD released

[Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>]

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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.    Sometimes they started with things that come from the
original OEM.  Also often they created their own technology and made it
available to everyone.  Sometime they combine both.  And it was a
'bazaar where everyone had access and you chose to use it to not.  Sounds
pretty familiar, BTW.

What >>has<< changed (dramatically) was the *method* and *ability* to
*distribute* your work and/or the manner you *obtained* someone else's
efforts.  Today we download via the Web (much less ftp from a public area),
which is much more convenient than becoming a member of an organization and
having to obtain (typically for a small $50-$100 trape copying fee) a
9-track distribution tape.  But even the concept of 'free' is really not
new as I said.   Things like UCB's ILO used that model for a long time.
 MIT, CMU, Stanford, Univerity of Waterloo, Cambridge, et al, just made
their work to any interested parties.

But due to the new way of being *interconnected *and a *much better
distribution scheme* that indeed is a huge feature.  But please understand
'open source and collective sharing/working together is not a new thing
that just appeared with the Gnu project and was accelerated and taken to a
new level with the Linux work.

I personally blame esr's book for that beginning of the rewriting of
history/kicking the previous generations in the shins, as readers of it, or
worse readers of summations of it, miss the big picture instead of the
reality of standing on other shoulders.

I do want to give create for the cool and important things that have come.
I just want to make sure we don't forget the success of the modern world is
100% dependent on two important things: moore's law to make things more
economic and the hard work of a lot of people that came before (now and
before me for that matter).
ᐧ

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