From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: clemc@ccc.com (Clem Cole) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 15:35:27 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX") In-Reply-To: <20170315192815.GA15120@naleco.com> References: <20170314224547.GB14659@naleco.com> <20170315192815.GA15120@naleco.com> Message-ID: SVR4 On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 3:28 PM, Josh Good wrote: > On 2017 Mar 14, 21:11, Clem Cole wrote: > > > > My point is that you (and many others) equate "open" and "free" - I ask > > you to please not make that error. Open means we can talk about it and > > share it, see it. Which is exactly what we did "back in the day". But > as > > people pointed out you had to pay AT&T to be a member of the UNIX club if > > you were commercial, although any University type could be apart for > free. > > What UNIX for PC in the '90s had the option to buy a source code license > for that specific version, so that PC hackers could write drivers for > their hardware and tune the kernel internals to their liking, or be able > to fix themselves a bug in the serial port driver, etc.? > > Certainly not OpenServer, not UnixWare nor SCO Xenix. Did DELL Unix > offered a payware source code license for their product? I'm not aware > of such. > > From System V onwards, UNIX became closed source in what matters, that > is, the version running on your hardware and the version with the drivers > you are using (unless you were an employee at IBM, DEC, HP or SUN running > propietary hardware and happened to be in the right group). > > It is obvious to me that RMS's GNU movement was aimed at solving that > very problem. And if that was a problem, then the "UNIX openness" you > talk about does not seem to have been very practical at all. At least, > it was totally useless to PC hackers, like Linus Torvalds - he had to > write his own UNIX, because he was not able to get any UNIX source code > he could readily compile and run on his i386. > > -- > Josh Good > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: