[TUHS] Re: Early BSD license thread

[Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Sep 22, 2022 at 3:08 AM Andy Kosela <akosela@andykosela.com> wrote:
> On Thursday, September 22, 2022, Dan Cross <crossd@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 21, 2022 at 5:50 PM Phil Budne <phil@ultimate.com> wrote:
>> > Not to excuse the failure of the BSD team to properly attribute source
>> > origin by adding only their copyright notice, but didn't AT&T try
>> > unfair turnabout by not properly attributing the origins of their
>> > TCP/IP code?
>>
>> One of my favorite copyright notices was for /bin/true in System V.
>> An empty file got turned into 7 lines of comments holding copyright
>> boilerplate and an `#ident` line with an SCCS version number:
>> progress!
>
> That reminds me of the excellent dissertation of  Gerald Holzmann on Code Inflation[1].  The situation is even worse now and honestly I don't see it will improve in the future.  My take on the code inflation problem is that today without paid "volunteers" (from IBM, Oracle, Google, etc.) a large chunk of our modern software landscape would just collapse.  It is not 90s Internet anymore where hobbyists did it for fun, because frankly back then it was fun... Nowadays... not that much.

Indeed. Ted has made this point frequently; Linux for example
basically requires corporate sponsors to get new features into
the kernel. Sure, some individual might come up with a great
idea and implementation that'll make it in, but that's the exception
rather than the norm.

The flip side is that there's a lot of load-bearing infrastructure
that is barely maintained, if at all. This xkcd seems perennially
relevant: https://xkcd.com/2347/

I suppose the situation may be summed up as extremes at both
ends. In any event, it's not great.

        - Dan C.