* [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM @ 2021-04-01 14:50 Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Josh Good @ 2021-04-01 14:50 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs I read the news, and I could not believe it. It's April 1st, ain't it? But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real. Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/ The PDF also is dated March 31: https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/31/xinuos_complaint.pdf It's hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of writing 57 pages of legalese just to make a damn joke. " Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the name UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for alleged copyright and antitrust law violations. "First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that stolen property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos itself," the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint [PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their growing market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and innovation itself." The complaint further contends that after the two companies conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to solidify its position. SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and UnixWare operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its contractual obligations by distributing Linux code. That case dragged on for years, and drew a fair amount of attention when SCO Group said it would sue individual Linux users for infringement. Though SCO filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and some of the claims have been dismissed, its case against IBM remains unresolved. There was a status report filed on February 16, 2018, details remaining claims and counterclaims. And in May last year, Magistrate Judge Paul Warner was no longer assigned to oversee settlement discussions. But SCO Group v. IBM is still open. " Either way, some one if fooling us hard. PS: OK, it seems it's for real: https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/ I need to check my stock of pop corn, then... My take: it's obvious they want to be a nuisance so that IBM settles the case, so they then can go back home with some fresh cash. I hope IBM goes ballistic on them to the bitter end, and finally sends the zombie back to its grave. But then, IBM now has its new RedHat business to protect, so it can get interesting. -- Josh Good ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 14:50 [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Josh Good @ 2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good 2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish 2021-04-02 5:41 ` David Arnold 2021-04-02 16:40 ` Boyd Lynn Gerber 2 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2021-04-01 15:12 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josh Good; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3526 bytes --] The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. Their copyright claims look to be a bit different than the old SCO lawsuit. Reading their complaint, it is somewhat different than the old suit... FreeBSD is mentioned like 34 times too, since Xinuos based their products based on it. And their product is locked out of the IBM/Redhat cloud platform/ecosystem. The copyright stuff seems almost an afterthought... Warner On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:51 AM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote: > I read the news, and I could not believe it. > > It's April 1st, ain't it? > > But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real. > > Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/ > > The PDF also is dated March 31: > https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/31/xinuos_complaint.pdf > > It's hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of writing 57 pages of > legalese just to make a damn joke. > > " > Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the name > UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's > long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for > alleged copyright and antitrust law violations. > > "First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that > stolen > property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos > itself," > the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint > [PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat > illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their > growing > market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and > innovation itself." > > The complaint further contends that after the two companies > conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to > solidify its position. > > SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It > argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and UnixWare > operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were > unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its > contractual obligations by distributing Linux code. > > That case dragged on for years, and drew a fair amount of attention > when SCO Group said it would sue individual Linux users for > infringement. Though SCO filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and some of > the claims have been dismissed, its case against IBM remains > unresolved. > > There was a status report filed on February 16, 2018, details > remaining claims and counterclaims. And in May last year, > Magistrate > Judge Paul Warner was no longer assigned to oversee settlement > discussions. But SCO Group v. IBM is still open. > " > > Either way, some one if fooling us hard. > > PS: OK, it seems it's for real: > https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/ > > I need to check my stock of pop corn, then... > > My take: it's obvious they want to be a nuisance so that IBM settles the > case, so they then can go back home with some fresh cash. I hope IBM goes > ballistic on them to the bitter end, and finally sends the zombie back to > its grave. But then, IBM now has its new RedHat business to protect, so it > can get interesting. > > -- > Josh Good > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4572 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh @ 2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy ` (2 more replies) 2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish 1 sibling, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Josh Good @ 2021-04-01 15:27 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On 2021 Apr 1, 09:12, Warner Losh wrote: > The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and > Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, > including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. I don't think IBM has a dominant position in the cloud business. Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS are the dominant forces in the cloud business. I don't see merit on that claim from XinuOS. They are just firing in all directions to find out if by chance they hit some target with money to milk. -- Josh Good ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good @ 2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-01 16:14 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-01 17:54 ` Thomas Paulsen 2021-04-01 16:27 ` Nemo Nusquam 2021-04-02 2:16 ` Kevin Bowling 2 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-01 15:33 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josh Good; +Cc: tuhs On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 05:27:40PM +0200, Josh Good wrote: > On 2021 Apr 1, 09:12, Warner Losh wrote: > > The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and > > Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, > > including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. > > I don't think IBM has a dominant position in the cloud business. Microsoft's > Azure and Amazon's AWS are the dominant forces in the cloud business. > > I don't see merit on that claim from XinuOS. They are just firing in all > directions to find out if by chance they hit some target with money to milk. And the real joke is that they haven't done any serious work so far as I can tell. The original SCO sucked and then they release SVr<something> but so far as I know, there wasn't a decent development team. When I was doing the TCP/IP port I worked with Jeff Radik a bunch but I never got the sense there were big projects at SCO, it was mostly out sourcing. That was a long time ago so who knows. All I know is that Sun did orders of magnitude more work to the kernel, libraries, at the rest of user space. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-01 16:14 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-01 16:26 ` John Cowan 2021-04-01 17:54 ` Thomas Paulsen 1 sibling, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Kevin Bowling @ 2021-04-01 16:14 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: tuhs, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1525 bytes --] On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:34 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 01, 2021 at 05:27:40PM +0200, Josh Good wrote: > > On 2021 Apr 1, 09:12, Warner Losh wrote: > > > The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and > > > Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, > > > including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. > > > > I don't think IBM has a dominant position in the cloud business. > Microsoft's > > Azure and Amazon's AWS are the dominant forces in the cloud business. > > > > I don't see merit on that claim from XinuOS. They are just firing in all > > directions to find out if by chance they hit some target with money to > milk. > > And the real joke is that they haven't done any serious work so far as I > can > tell. The original SCO sucked and then they release SVr<something> but so > far as I know, there wasn't a decent development team. When I was doing > the TCP/IP port I worked with Jeff Radik a bunch but I never got the sense > there were big projects at SCO, it was mostly out sourcing. That was a > long time ago so who knows. My understanding is SCO was known for good company with good engineers in the early ‘90s. Do we not have any alumni on this list? > > All I know is that Sun did orders of magnitude more work to the kernel, > libraries, at the rest of user space. I think amongst other problems they got fragmented too early with three unix forks for that small a company. > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2628 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 16:14 ` Kevin Bowling @ 2021-04-01 16:26 ` John Cowan 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: John Cowan @ 2021-04-01 16:26 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Kevin Bowling; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 738 bytes --] On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 12:15 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling@kev009.com> wrote: > I think amongst other problems they got fragmented too early with three > unix forks for that small a company. > That's a reasonable approach for a legacy-support company that can pick up the code for what they are supporting, since no one else wants it anyhow. For an OS company, not so much. I think "Xinuos" should be pronounced "sinuous", as in the movement of a snake. You heard it here first. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org It was impossible to inveigle Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Into offering the slightest apology For his Phenomenology. --W. H. Auden, from "People" (1953) [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2223 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-01 16:14 ` Kevin Bowling @ 2021-04-01 17:54 ` Thomas Paulsen 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Thomas Paulsen @ 2021-04-01 17:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: tuhs, pepe > I never got the sense there were big projects at SCO, it was mostly out sourcing. > That was a long time ago so who knows. Ok, they were far ahead time as out sourcing is normal economic behavior today. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-01 16:27 ` Nemo Nusquam 2021-04-02 2:16 ` Kevin Bowling 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Nemo Nusquam @ 2021-04-01 16:27 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On 2021-04-01 11:27, Josh Good wrote: > On 2021 Apr 1, 09:12, Warner Losh wrote: >> The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and >> Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, >> including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. > I don't think IBM has a dominant position in the cloud business. Microsoft's > Azure and Amazon's AWS are the dominant forces in the cloud business. > > I don't see merit on that claim from XinuOS. They are just firing in all > directions to find out if by chance they hit some target with money to milk. Merit notwithstanding, a lot of time, effort, and money needs to be spent on preparing defences. (Sigh) N. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-01 16:27 ` Nemo Nusquam @ 2021-04-02 2:16 ` Kevin Bowling 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Kevin Bowling @ 2021-04-02 2:16 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josh Good; +Cc: TUHS main list On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:28 AM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote: > > On 2021 Apr 1, 09:12, Warner Losh wrote: > > The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and > > Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, > > including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. > > I don't think IBM has a dominant position in the cloud business. Microsoft's > Azure and Amazon's AWS are the dominant forces in the cloud business. > > I don't see merit on that claim from XinuOS. They are just firing in all > directions to find out if by chance they hit some target with money to milk. Yup, it seems flimsy IBM arranged over $100k a few years ago at my request to do the initial FreeBSD bringup on powernv in addition to time and hooking us up with Eldorado Institute. Had there been a commercial deployment there would have been a lot more help and PR. They have and use pfsense in the IBM cloud. It seems like the lawyers didn't do any discovery. It will be interesting to watch. This list will enjoy digging through this http://tenox.pdp-11.ru/monterey/ -- whoever made these business decisions to dump Monterey/IA64 before shipping was good at decision making in a way I haven't seen in my own career. I've long suspected the purchase of Sequent was the real downfall to working with SCO. That too was a great decision. Regards, Kevin > -- > Josh Good > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good @ 2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish 2021-04-02 5:26 ` Kevin Bowling ` (2 more replies) 1 sibling, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Wesley Parish @ 2021-04-02 3:52 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Warner Losh; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good Which isn't how I remember things. From what I remember, Linux had the impetus in the late nineties that FreeBSD didn't have - the *BSD were still recovering from the AT&T case, which is why O'Reilly had to issue a 4.4BSD-Lite Cd-ROM when I suspect, they would've preferred to have issued a 4.4BSD complete disc. So from IBM's POV, they could support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370 and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? At any rate, by the time IBM formally joined the Linux club, it was already (unofficial) host to at least one unofficial port to one of its historic mainframes, and official host to an officlal SkunkWorks port to its then-current mainframes. Experience counts. None of the *BSD had nearly as big a presence in the IBM world, and none of the earlier IBM Unix ports, some 4.*BSD, as far as I can remember, ever had the presence of Linux as both a platform and - thanks to Caldera-later-aka-The Sco Group - as a cause. I had hoped that Xinuos was an honest attempt to provide support for remaining SCO sites, but it seems they've fallen to the Dark Side and the Easy Buck again. Sic transit gloria mundi ... Wesley Parish On 4/2/21, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote: > The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and > Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, > including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. > > Their copyright claims look to be a bit different than the old SCO lawsuit. > > Reading their complaint, it is somewhat different than the old suit... > FreeBSD is mentioned like 34 times too, since Xinuos based their products > based on it. And their product is locked out of the IBM/Redhat cloud > platform/ecosystem. The copyright stuff seems almost an afterthought... > > Warner > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:51 AM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote: > >> I read the news, and I could not believe it. >> >> It's April 1st, ain't it? >> >> But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real. >> >> Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/ >> >> The PDF also is dated March 31: >> https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/31/xinuos_complaint.pdf >> >> It's hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of writing 57 pages >> of >> legalese just to make a damn joke. >> >> " >> Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the >> name >> UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's >> long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for >> alleged copyright and antitrust law violations. >> >> "First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that >> stolen >> property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos >> itself," >> the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint >> [PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat >> illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their >> growing >> market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and >> innovation itself." >> >> The complaint further contends that after the two companies >> conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to >> solidify its position. >> >> SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It >> argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and >> UnixWare >> operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were >> unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its >> contractual obligations by distributing Linux code. >> >> That case dragged on for years, and drew a fair amount of >> attention >> when SCO Group said it would sue individual Linux users for >> infringement. Though SCO filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and some of >> the claims have been dismissed, its case against IBM remains >> unresolved. >> >> There was a status report filed on February 16, 2018, details >> remaining claims and counterclaims. And in May last year, >> Magistrate >> Judge Paul Warner was no longer assigned to oversee settlement >> discussions. But SCO Group v. IBM is still open. >> " >> >> Either way, some one if fooling us hard. >> >> PS: OK, it seems it's for real: >> https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/ >> >> I need to check my stock of pop corn, then... >> >> My take: it's obvious they want to be a nuisance so that IBM settles the >> case, so they then can go back home with some fresh cash. I hope IBM goes >> ballistic on them to the bitter end, and finally sends the zombie back to >> its grave. But then, IBM now has its new RedHat business to protect, so >> it >> can get interesting. >> >> -- >> Josh Good >> >> > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish @ 2021-04-02 5:26 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 2:46 ` Adam Thornton 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Kevin Bowling @ 2021-04-02 5:26 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Wesley Parish; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 6458 bytes --] On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote: > Which isn't how I remember things. From what I remember, Linux had the > impetus in the late nineties that FreeBSD didn't have - the *BSD were > still recovering from the AT&T case, which is why O'Reilly had to > issue a 4.4BSD-Lite Cd-ROM when I suspect, they would've preferred to > have issued a 4.4BSD complete disc. So from IBM's POV, they could > support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370 > and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe > iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of > the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? You’ve compressed quite a bit of history. IBM didn’t engage with Linux in a serious way until Jan 2000. It took a bit longer for things to really become corporate, but the fall of the first dot com bubble definitely started skewing toward Linux and away from commercial unix, windows, BSD, whatever. Red Hat (and many of its variants like Amazon Linux, CentOS) and Ubuntu emerged as early winners in the corporate and cloud market. I think Ubuntu discredits a lot of the claims. IBM is a major contributor to Ubuntu. > At any rate, by the time IBM formally joined the Linux club, it was > already (unofficial) host to at least one unofficial port to one of > its historic mainframes, and official host to an officlal SkunkWorks > port to its then-current mainframes. Experience counts. > > None of the *BSD had nearly as big a presence in the IBM world, and > none of the earlier IBM Unix ports, some 4.*BSD, as far as I can > remember, ever had the presence of Linux as both a platform and - > thanks to Caldera-later-aka-The Sco Group - as a cause. > Yes IBM shipped 4.3 BSD as AOS, Academic Operating System (the name which is kind of funny). There’s definitely BSD code in every OS they ship, including os/400 by way of PASE (this is somewhat ironic because IBM went to great lengths to keep unix influences out of os/400). > I had hoped that Xinuos was an honest attempt to provide support for > remaining SCO sites, but it seems they've fallen to the Dark Side and > the Easy Buck again. Sic transit gloria mundi ... > The case looks flimsy. Some lawyers will make money regardless, I’d be surprised if anyone would take something like this on without immediate remuneration. > Wesley Parish > > On 4/2/21, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote: > > The other set of claims made, which may be stronger, was that IBM and > > Redhat used their dominant position to lock out OSes other than Linux, > > including FreeBSD from their cloud platform. > > > > Their copyright claims look to be a bit different than the old SCO > lawsuit. > > > > Reading their complaint, it is somewhat different than the old suit... > > FreeBSD is mentioned like 34 times too, since Xinuos based their products > > based on it. And their product is locked out of the IBM/Redhat cloud > > platform/ecosystem. The copyright stuff seems almost an afterthought... > > > > Warner > > > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:51 AM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote: > > > >> I read the news, and I could not believe it. > >> > >> It's April 1st, ain't it? > >> > >> But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real. > >> > >> Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/ > >> > >> The PDF also is dated March 31: > >> https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/03/31/xinuos_complaint.pdf > >> > >> It's hard to believe someone would go to the trouble of writing 57 pages > >> of > >> legalese just to make a damn joke. > >> > >> " > >> Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the > >> name > >> UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing > SCO's > >> long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for > >> alleged copyright and antitrust law violations. > >> > >> "First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that > >> stolen > >> property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos > >> itself," > >> the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint > >> [PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat > >> illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their > >> growing > >> market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, > and > >> innovation itself." > >> > >> The complaint further contends that after the two companies > >> conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to > >> solidify its position. > >> > >> SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It > >> argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and > >> UnixWare > >> operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were > >> unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its > >> contractual obligations by distributing Linux code. > >> > >> That case dragged on for years, and drew a fair amount of > >> attention > >> when SCO Group said it would sue individual Linux users for > >> infringement. Though SCO filed for bankruptcy in 2007 and some > of > >> the claims have been dismissed, its case against IBM remains > >> unresolved. > >> > >> There was a status report filed on February 16, 2018, details > >> remaining claims and counterclaims. And in May last year, > >> Magistrate > >> Judge Paul Warner was no longer assigned to oversee settlement > >> discussions. But SCO Group v. IBM is still open. > >> " > >> > >> Either way, some one if fooling us hard. > >> > >> PS: OK, it seems it's for real: > >> https://www.xinuos.com/xinuos-sues-ibm-and-red-hat/ > >> > >> I need to check my stock of pop corn, then... > >> > >> My take: it's obvious they want to be a nuisance so that IBM settles the > >> case, so they then can go back home with some fresh cash. I hope IBM > goes > >> ballistic on them to the bitter end, and finally sends the zombie back > to > >> its grave. But then, IBM now has its new RedHat business to protect, so > >> it > >> can get interesting. > >> > >> -- > >> Josh Good > >> > >> > > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 8927 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish 2021-04-02 5:26 ` Kevin Bowling @ 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-02 16:11 ` Larry McVoy ` (3 more replies) 2021-04-04 2:46 ` Adam Thornton 2 siblings, 4 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-02 16:03 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Wesley Parish; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2209 bytes --] On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote: > I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of > the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? > No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s. Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2 for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously. A for AIX/370 a quick history which Charlie can fill in more from the IBM side, was that in the last 60s and early 70s, IBM had a strange hold on the education/research market with the S/360; but lost it because of the lack of timesharing to DEC and PDP-10 based systems as IBM was more and more focused on the commercial sector where there was much more money to be made. But ... there was a drive in the IBM educational/research team to be able to reenter that market and Locus was hired to develop AIX/370 (and later PS2) as it was felt that UNIX was considered an important offering for those customers. After it was released as a product, it turned out purchasing AIX/370 was exceedingly difficult (for a number of reasons), although it was extremely well received by those that ran it, but getting it was difficult. In fact, I have been told by folks that there at the time, that using TCF was an important feature here at Intel for the success of the simulation for the 486 and Pentium. Again, Charlie can tell you the history but IBM also developed AIX for the RS/6000 which was the same OS (only different) from IBM Austin (no TCF, but supported DS which was cool in its own right). Locus was actually contracted to develop a UNIX subsystem for the AS/400 also, but I'm not sure if that ever shipped. I had left Locus and had gone to DEC by then. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3896 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-02 16:11 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-02 16:39 ` Heinz Lycklama ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-02 16:11 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 12:03:41PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of > > the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? > > > No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s. > > Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much > less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2 > for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was > mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great > deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM > called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you > could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either > ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously. It's really a shame that TCF didn't get more widespread usage/traction. That's exactly what BitMover wanted to do, I wanted to scale small cheap SMPs in a cluster with a TCF layer on it. I gave some talks about it, it obviously went nowhere but might have if we had TCF as a starting point. TCF was cool. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-02 16:11 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-02 16:39 ` Heinz Lycklama 2021-04-02 17:14 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-02 17:17 ` [TUHS] AIX repeat [was " Charles H Sauer 2021-04-03 1:24 ` [TUHS] " Wesley Parish 3 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Heinz Lycklama @ 2021-04-02 16:39 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2753 bytes --] The first version of AIX for the IBM RT PC was developed by INTERACTIVE Systems Corp. under contract to IBM. The second version of AIX was developed by Locus Computing. Some brief history can be found here: 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX#IBM_RT_PC Heinz On 4/2/2021 9:03 AM, Clem Cole wrote: > > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com > <mailto:wobblygong@gmail.com>> wrote: > > I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of > the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? > > No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s. > > Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< > much less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 > (and AIX/PS2 for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The > user-space was mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 > originally) pluis a great deal of customization, including of course > the Locus OS work, which IBM called TCF - the transparent computing > facility. It was very cool you could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from > >>any<< node run a program of either ISA. It has been well discussed > in this forum, previously. > > A for AIX/370 a quick history which Charlie can fill in more from the > IBM side, was that in the last 60s and early 70s, IBM had a strange > hold on the education/research market with the S/360; but lost it > because of the lack of timesharing to DEC and PDP-10 based systems as > IBM was more and more focused on the commercial sector where there was > much more money to be made. But ... there was a drive in the IBM > educational/research team to be able to reenter that market and Locus > was hired to develop AIX/370 (and later PS2) as it was felt that UNIX > was considered an important offering for those customers. After it > was released as a product, it turned out purchasing AIX/370 was > exceedingly difficult (for a number of reasons), although it was > extremely well received by those that ran it, but getting it was > difficult. In fact, I have been told by folks that there at the time, > that using TCF was an important feature here at Intel for the success > of the simulation for the 486 and Pentium. > > Again, Charlie can tell you the history but IBM also developed AIX for > the RS/6000 which was the same OS (only different) from IBM Austin(no > TCF, but supported DS which was cool in its own right). Locus was > actually contracted to develop a UNIX subsystem for the AS/400 also, > but I'm not sure if that ever shipped. I had left Locus and hadgoneto > DEC by then. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6069 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 16:39 ` Heinz Lycklama @ 2021-04-02 17:14 ` Clem Cole 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-02 17:14 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Heinz Lycklama; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1756 bytes --] Mei culpa/my apologies -- I left out the ISC part of the story and I was not trying to rewrite history in any way. In fact, to the rest of the list, ISC did the first 386 port of UNIX - which for UNIX history is extremely significant. One of my favorite pieces of salesmanship - Heinz, Peter, and Phil Shevrin managed to convince both AT&T and Intel to separately pay for the 386 port (and I thought IBM was in that mix somehow too). Then ISC brought it out as a separate product that I think Sun ended up with at some later time yet. If I recall, ISC did the original work on the RT (which redates the RS/6000) and the ISC folks had their own product for VM before IBM released AIX/370 as a product. Heinz and Charlie would know more details on those ports. That said, the comment that I was originally replying to was about IBM getting interested in BSD UNIX and my point was simply, AIX/370 was BSD-based and was shipping as an *IBM produc*t years before Linus even started working on what would become Linux for his 386 based machine; much less any attempt to get it running on the 370. Also, if we are to be complete. Tom Lyons did the original 360/370 C/UNIX work at Princeton & AT&T long before any of that, starting in the mid-1970s but I'll let Tom fill you in there. On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 12:40 PM Heinz Lycklama <heinz@osta.com> wrote: > The first version of AIX for the IBM RT PC was developed by INTERACTIVE > Systems Corp. > under contract to IBM. The second version of AIX was developed by Locus > Computing. > Some brief history can be found here: > 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_Systems_Corporation > 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AIX#IBM_RT_PC > > Heinz > ᐧ [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3018 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] AIX repeat [was Re: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-02 16:11 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-02 16:39 ` Heinz Lycklama @ 2021-04-02 17:17 ` Charles H Sauer 2021-04-03 1:24 ` [TUHS] " Wesley Parish 3 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Charles H Sauer @ 2021-04-02 17:17 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs I'm not sure that I have anything to add beyond repeating citation to https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2017/03/08/lets-start-at-the-very-beginning-801-romp-rtpc-aix-versions/. It credits ISC and LCC appropriately. AIX involvement with SCO, if any, would have been after I left IBM. I find it hard to imagine what that involvement would have been. Charlie On 4/2/2021 11:03 AM, Clem Cole wrote: > > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com > <mailto:wobblygong@gmail.com>> wrote: > > I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of > the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? > > No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s. > > Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< > much less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and > AIX/PS2 for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The > user-space was mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 > originally) pluis a great deal of customization, including of course the > Locus OS work, which IBM called TCF - the transparent computing > facility. It was very cool you could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from > >>any<< node run a program of either ISA. It has been well discussed > in this forum, previously. > > A for AIX/370 a quick history which Charlie can fill in more from the > IBM side, was that in the last 60s and early 70s, IBM had a strange hold > on the education/research market with the S/360; but lost it because of > the lack of timesharing to DEC and PDP-10 based systems as IBM was more > and more focused on the commercial sector where there was much more > money to be made. But ... there was a drive in the IBM > educational/research team to be able to reenter that market and Locus > was hired to develop AIX/370 (and later PS2) as it was felt that UNIX > was considered an important offering for those customers. After it was > released as a product, it turned out purchasing AIX/370 was exceedingly > difficult (for a number of reasons), although it was extremely well > received by those that ran it, but getting it was difficult. In fact, I > have been told by folks that there at the time, that using TCF was an > important feature here at Intel for the success of the simulation for > the 486 and Pentium. > > Again, Charlie can tell you the history but IBM also developed AIX for > the RS/6000 which was the same OS (only different) from IBM Austin(no > TCF, but supported DS which was cool in its own right). Locus was > actually contracted to develop a UNIX subsystem for the AS/400 also, but > I'm not sure if that ever shipped. I had left Locus and hadgoneto DEC > by then. -- voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer@technologists.com fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/ Facebook/Google/Skype/Twitter: CharlesHSauer ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2021-04-02 17:17 ` [TUHS] AIX repeat [was " Charles H Sauer @ 2021-04-03 1:24 ` Wesley Parish 3 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Wesley Parish @ 2021-04-03 1:24 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good Thanks. I knew IBM had had some involvement with 4.*BSD, but lacked the details. Wesley Parish On 4/3/21, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 11:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote: > >> I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of >> the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? >> > No. BSD was very much on IBM's radar in the late 1970s and 1980s. > > Long before Linus released Linux into the wild in 1990 for the >>386<< much > less any other ISA, IBM had been shipping as a product AIX/370 (and AIX/PS2 > for the 386); which we developed at Locus for them. The user-space was > mostly System V, the kernel was based on BSD (4.1 originally) pluis a great > deal of customization, including of course the Locus OS work, which IBM > called TCF - the transparent computing facility. It was very cool you > could cluster 370s and PS/2 and from >>any<< node run a program of either > ISA. It has been well discussed in this forum, previously. > > A for AIX/370 a quick history which Charlie can fill in more from the IBM > side, was that in the last 60s and early 70s, IBM had a strange hold on the > education/research market with the S/360; but lost it because of the lack > of timesharing to DEC and PDP-10 based systems as IBM was more and more > focused on the commercial sector where there was much more money to be > made. But ... there was a drive in the IBM educational/research team to > be able to reenter that market and Locus was hired to develop AIX/370 (and > later PS2) as it was felt that UNIX was considered an important offering > for those customers. After it was released as a product, it turned out > purchasing AIX/370 was exceedingly difficult (for a number of reasons), > although it was extremely well received by those that ran it, but getting > it was difficult. In fact, I have been told by folks that there at the > time, that using TCF was an important feature here at Intel for the success > of the simulation for the 486 and Pentium. > > Again, Charlie can tell you the history but IBM also developed AIX for the > RS/6000 which was the same OS (only different) from IBM Austin (no TCF, but > supported DS which was cool in its own right). Locus was actually > contracted > to develop a UNIX subsystem for the AS/400 also, but I'm not sure if that > ever shipped. I had left Locus and had gone to DEC by then. > ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish 2021-04-02 5:26 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 2:46 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-04 2:50 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-04 3:41 ` [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Gregg Levine 2 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Adam Thornton @ 2021-04-04 2:46 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Wesley Parish; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2630 bytes --] On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote: > So from IBM's POV, they could > support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370 > and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe > iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of > the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? > This is not how I remember it going down. There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that IBM was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a sudden there was an IBM port to S/390. Clearly (well, *I* thought it was clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced their hand. (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground). I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM to advise them how we thought they should proceed. They seemed to take much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very crazy. (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine Associates. They're still around.) I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM had bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different. Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver. Alas, IBM tightened the screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer from Oracle in its back pocket. But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port going." So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned out differently. Adam [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3244 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 2:46 ` Adam Thornton @ 2021-04-04 2:50 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-04 5:29 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) G. Branden Robinson 2021-04-04 3:41 ` [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Gregg Levine 1 sibling, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Adam Thornton @ 2021-04-04 2:50 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Wesley Parish; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2906 bytes --] Misremembered the year. That conference was October 2000. I just found the bookbag I got as swag from it. On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 7:46 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote: > >> So from IBM's POV, they could >> support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370 >> and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe >> iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of >> the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? >> > > This is not how I remember it going down. > > There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that IBM > was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a > sudden there was an IBM port to S/390. Clearly (well, *I* thought it was > clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced > their hand. (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of > my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground). > > I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible > Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s > I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM > to advise them how we thought they should proceed. They seemed to take > much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very > crazy. (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine > Associates. They're still around.) > > I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM had > bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different. > Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot > of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver. Alas, IBM tightened the > screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer > from Oracle in its back pocket. > > But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in the > late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went > by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a > development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your > so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in > hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not > offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, > cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port > going." > > So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is > all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had > its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a > jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned > out differently. > > Adam > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3729 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-04 2:50 ` Adam Thornton @ 2021-04-04 5:29 ` G. Branden Robinson 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 23:30 ` A. P. Garcia 0 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: G. Branden Robinson @ 2021-04-04 5:29 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4442 bytes --] At 2021-04-03T19:50:51-0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > > But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta > > in the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I > > actually went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you > > guys up with a development virtual machine," and what I got was an > > earful about "your so-called portability" from someone who was > > clearly much more invested in hating Linux than in, you know, > > saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not offering me cycles on a > > super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, cool, here's who > > you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port going." > > > > So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, > > is all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which > > already had its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't > > staffed its booth with a jackass still trying to fight the Unix > > Wars, that story might have turned out differently. > > Misremembered the year. That conference was October 2000. I just > found the bookbag I got as swag from it. I think you're remembering the Atlanta Linux Showcase. I was at the same event. I also think I know exactly the person you're talking about: Charles Hannum, with whom I had a similar experience on a different topic. Instead of insisting that I was stupid and wrong for using Linux instead of (NetBSD) in his view, I was stupid and wrong for using software licensed under the GNU GPL instead of the "BSD" license (which variant of the latter is not, all these years later, a matter I recall coming up). I mention this so that Mr. Hannum's reputation on this list risks no blackening among those who share his hostility to copyleft. ;-) ALS was a terrific experience and, for me, lived up to the praise I had heard about it as a venue for getting engineers talking to each other. Regrettably enough, the conference was acquired by a firm. It was held one final time the next year in Atlanta, officially rebranded the "Annual Linux Showcase", and, as I recall, permanently mothballed thereafter, with the dot-com bubble-burst as either a direct reason or as an excuse. I have seen other technical conferences over the years steadily morph from a technical/engineering focus to an orientation around sales and "strategy", or more bluntly--propaganda. The emphasis is no longer on technological improvement and evaluation (i.e., how to achieve and measure "solutions"), but on promotion, rationalization, and boosterism. I suppose that one of the reasons this happens is that good conferences grow, and companies sending delegations find themselves with growing expense bills for doing so. Engineers are a cost center. When they come back from the event, they will almost never have anything to "show for it". At best they'll be excited about something they can "integrate" or some new idea they can realize after months of development time. In other words, you _might_ have a competitive advantage after spending _even more_ money. By contrast, sales people can bring you orders you can book the day they get back, or even before the conference is over, thanks to the magic power of accrual accounting, a practice which persists even after the glorious examples of Enron and other gigantic bankruptcies of the 2000s. That's the demand side. On the supply side, conferences have governance; it takes people to solicit papers, book speakers, and put talks on the schedule and into proceedings. Conference sponsorship is a neat way of closing the gap between demand and supply on the back end; be a "gold" or "platinum" level sponsor and obtain influence, likely through direct seating of representatives on the committees that perform the foregoing organizational roles. Note the entrenchment and persistence of precious metals as metaphors for status; we would not name the tiers after the decreasing scale of photolithographic processes, for example. Historically, it's been a lot easier to motivate a guy with a checkbook in the C suite who drives a Lamborghini Gallardo with the word "platinum" than "5 nm". I'm too young to know--did USENIX follow the trajectory of reorienting its focus from engineering and research to sales? Why does it no longer occupy the premier place it once did? Regards, Branden [-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --] [-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 833 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-04 5:29 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) G. Branden Robinson @ 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 20:54 ` Richard Salz ` (3 more replies) 2021-04-04 23:30 ` A. P. Garcia 1 sibling, 4 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 18:22 UTC (permalink / raw) To: G. Branden Robinson; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 6222 bytes --] Note: These are my opinions/experiences not necessarily those of the association or my employer. And, yes, I am a former BOD member as well as ex-President of same, as are a number of folks on this list. On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 1:30 AM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote: > > I'm too young to know--did USENIX follow the trajectory of reorienting > its focus from engineering and research to sales? Actually, quite the opposite, USENIX was getting more and more academic and research-oriented and less 'trade show.' The key is that USENIX and ALS should have been an excellent match, unfortunately, some of the personalities involved were at odds with each other. IMO: it was more of a crash of personalities/control issues - the details do not need to be repeated or aired again. Note: I was on the BOD at that time and in fact on the PC for that specific conference. Ted may have been on the BOD at the same time. > Why does it no longer occupy the premier place it once did? > As they say on Quora, "*never ask a question based on a false premise*." Sadly, this is a false statement. USENIX is extremely well respected in the systems research and security community in particular. And even during these Covid times has continued to have some of the premier conferences on the same; al biet virtual (more in a minute). An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had evolved into "two foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected places to publish papers/develop their tenure files. USENIX had moved from its earlier (anything goes) - pure practitioner origins - which were also researchers, so at a meeting in a classroom at NYU, you told people you had something to say and came and did it, to a more structured (research) approach with program committees, submitted papers, and vetting and a hotel. Along the way, because it had both types of people and these were the folks that influenced the buying patterns, vendors started to show up to show off what they had. At the time of the ALS conference you mentioned, the things happening in the FOSS community - was much more like the origins of USENIX. What had for years separated USENIX from IEEE/ACM was it was where the two foci were really a single one, and thus had been together and actually considered what was potential as well as practical. In fact, USENIX was noted as the place where some of the most influential papers of the time had shown (numerous storage papers including Rusty's NFS and my EFS paper in the same session, just about any important security papers, numerous other system papers -- I could go a few pages here). Part of the issue was ACM's SOSP was every 2 years and there was too much good stuff going on in the system world (BTW - USENIX eventually created OSDI on alternate years because ACM was just going to do it). But USENIX also published less formal papers. In fact, one of my all-time favorite practitioner papers is from another member of this list -- Tom Lyon's "*All the Chips that Fit*" from the 1985 Summer USENIX [which if you have never read, send me an email, offline and I'll send you a scanned PDF -- note to Tom if you still have the original bits I bet USENIX would like them]. I suspect that such a paper would never have been acceptable in any of the IEEE or ACM conferences. Also unlike ACM/IEEE (and frankly the thing that happen at USENIX when I was President that I am most proud of) is that they do not have a paywall. Anything they published from the time when all proceedings were electronic is available and slowly some of the older papers are being scanned or reprinted from the source - as needed/possible. As much as possible, all of USENIX's papers <https://www.usenix.org/publications/proceedings> are available to anyone [which was a huge thing to do - as it cut down a lot of revenue for them -- a paywall for papers is one of the things other associations use]. A number of good things happened at the time you mentioned, as well as some bad. Knowing the parties involved both today and at that time, if today's BOD and Executive Director was given the same choices that they had at the time of the action, I suspect we might have had a different outcome. IMO to the demise of FREENIX and ALS were two of the not-so-good choices that were made, but I understand why those conferences did go away at that point in history. If it makes you feel any better, as a former PC Chair for a couple of FREENIX (which was caught with the same bullet), and as I said a member of the PC of ALS, I was very sad to see that happen and I personally fought against it. But, I was on the losing side of that argument. Unfortunately, that ship sailed, and reviving them is unlikely to be possible although I believe it has been discussed a number of times since I left the BOD. Back to your point, USENIX may have stopped being as important to many practitioners, particularly ones in the FOSS community. Which I do find sad, but I understand the issues on both sides and why that might be so. For instance, Keith Packard of X11 fame, Steinhart, and I were all talking about "whence USENIX" at a Hackers conferences a few years back. So, if you come from that side of the world, you may not value membership or the results (BTW: my own now hacker daughter, who is a Googler, dropped her membership last year as she felt it was of less value to her); but so far USENIX has continued to be important to a large part of the research community and a set of some practitioners. That said, I also believe in 2021, that the USENIX BOD and their ED is struggling with a financial model that works for them when they do not have the conference revenue as they had before CV-19. I hope for their sake, the current treading water situation can find a way to bring them back to what they were pre-CV-19 because the conferences they traditionally have held, are excellent (premier in your words) and I would hate to see that really go away because they have had a lot of value and so far have continued to provide it. Respectfully -- my 2 cents. Clem [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 10261 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 20:54 ` Richard Salz 2021-04-04 21:11 ` Clem Cole ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Richard Salz @ 2021-04-04 20:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 332 bytes --] Clem's note is great, and accurate, of course. (I used to be proud of my membership number, I2048 :) I think he understates how influential Usenix's "open access" policy is has been (e.g., the Univ of California system requiring open access). In my field, Usenix is still the premier set of conferences for security and privacy. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 401 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 20:54 ` Richard Salz @ 2021-04-04 21:11 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 0:36 ` John Cowan 2021-04-05 14:05 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) Theodore Ts'o 3 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 21:11 UTC (permalink / raw) To: G. Branden Robinson; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 6564 bytes --] typo: OSDI on alternate years because ACM was just not going to do it On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:22 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > Note: These are my opinions/experiences not necessarily those of the > association or my employer. And, yes, I am a former BOD member as well as > ex-President of same, as are a number of folks on this list. > > On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 1:30 AM G. Branden Robinson < > g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> I'm too young to know--did USENIX follow the trajectory of reorienting >> its focus from engineering and research to sales? > > Actually, quite the opposite, USENIX was getting more and more academic > and research-oriented and less 'trade show.' The key is that USENIX and > ALS should have been an excellent match, unfortunately, some of the > personalities involved were at odds with each other. IMO: it was more of a > crash of personalities/control issues - the details do not need to be > repeated or aired again. Note: I was on the BOD at that time and in fact on > the PC for that specific conference. Ted may have been on the BOD at the > same time. > > > > > >> Why does it no longer occupy the premier place it once did? >> > As they say on Quora, "*never ask a question based on a false premise*." > Sadly, this is a false statement. > > USENIX is extremely well respected in the systems research and security > community in particular. And even during these Covid times has continued > to have some of the premier conferences on the same; al biet virtual (more > in a minute). An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had > evolved into "two foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS > community and LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for > respected places to publish papers/develop their tenure files. > > USENIX had moved from its earlier (anything goes) - pure practitioner > origins - which were also researchers, so at a meeting in a classroom at > NYU, you told people you had something to say and came and did it, to a > more structured (research) approach with program committees, submitted > papers, and vetting and a hotel. Along the way, because it had both types > of people and these were the folks that influenced the buying > patterns, vendors started to show up to show off what they had. At the > time of the ALS conference you mentioned, the things happening in the FOSS > community - was much more like the origins of USENIX. What had for years > separated USENIX from IEEE/ACM was it was where the two foci were really a > single one, and thus had been together and actually considered what was > potential as well as practical. In fact, USENIX was noted as the place > where some of the most influential papers of the time had shown (numerous > storage papers including Rusty's NFS and my EFS paper in the same session, > just about any important security papers, numerous other system papers -- I > could go a few pages here). > > Part of the issue was ACM's SOSP was every 2 years and there was too much > good stuff going on in the system world (BTW - USENIX eventually created > OSDI on alternate years because ACM was just going to do it). But > USENIX also published less formal papers. In fact, one of my all-time > favorite practitioner papers is from another member of this list -- Tom > Lyon's "*All the Chips that Fit*" from the 1985 Summer USENIX [which if > you have never read, send me an email, offline and I'll send you a scanned > PDF -- note to Tom if you still have the original bits I bet USENIX would > like them]. I suspect that such a paper would never have been acceptable > in any of the IEEE or ACM conferences. Also unlike ACM/IEEE (and > frankly the thing that happen at USENIX when I was President that I am most > proud of) is that they do not have a paywall. Anything they published from > the time when all proceedings were electronic is available and slowly some > of the older papers are being scanned or reprinted from the source - as > needed/possible. As much as possible, all of USENIX's papers > <https://www.usenix.org/publications/proceedings> are available to anyone > [which was a huge thing to do - as it cut down a lot of revenue for them -- > a paywall for papers is one of the things other associations use]. > > A number of good things happened at the time you mentioned, as well as > some bad. Knowing the parties involved both today and at that time, if > today's BOD and Executive Director was given the same choices that they had > at the time of the action, I suspect we might have had a different outcome. > IMO to the demise of FREENIX and ALS were two of the not-so-good choices > that were made, but I understand why those conferences did go away at that > point in history. If it makes you feel any better, as a former PC Chair > for a couple of FREENIX (which was caught with the same bullet), and as I > said a member of the PC of ALS, I was very sad to see that happen and I > personally fought against it. But, I was on the losing side of that > argument. Unfortunately, that ship sailed, and reviving them is unlikely to > be possible although I believe it has been discussed a number of times > since I left the BOD. > > Back to your point, USENIX may have stopped being as important to many > practitioners, particularly ones in the FOSS community. Which I do find > sad, but I understand the issues on both sides and why that might be so. > For instance, Keith Packard of X11 fame, Steinhart, and I were all > talking about "whence USENIX" at a Hackers conferences a few years back. > So, if you come from that side of the world, you may not value membership > or the results (BTW: my own now hacker daughter, who is a Googler, dropped > her membership last year as she felt it was of less value to her); but so > far USENIX has continued to be important to a large part of the research > community and a set of some practitioners. > > That said, I also believe in 2021, that the USENIX BOD and their ED is > struggling with a financial model that works for them when they do not have > the conference revenue as they had before CV-19. I hope for their sake, > the current treading water situation can find a way to bring them back to > what they were pre-CV-19 because the conferences they traditionally have > held, are excellent (premier in your words) and I would hate to see that > really go away because they have had a lot of value and so far have > continued to provide it. > > Respectfully -- my 2 cents. > > Clem > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 10852 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 20:54 ` Richard Salz 2021-04-04 21:11 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-05 0:36 ` John Cowan 2021-04-05 2:19 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-05 7:48 ` [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference] arnold 2021-04-05 14:05 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) Theodore Ts'o 3 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: John Cowan @ 2021-04-05 0:36 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1023 bytes --] On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had evolved into "two > foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and > LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected > places to publish papers/develop their tenure files. > I think this is a long and accelerating trend, and not just at conferences. There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or presentations any more, which doesn't bother me directly, but bothers me very much indirectly, because I love engineering papers and have to read academic papers, ummm, very selectively. (In particular, anything labeled "formal semantics" just gets skipped.) John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, he saw only two aged hands withering in flame. --"The Pyre of Denethor" [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2433 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-05 0:36 ` John Cowan @ 2021-04-05 2:19 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-05 18:07 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference John Gilmore 2021-04-05 7:48 ` [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference] arnold 1 sibling, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2021-04-05 2:19 UTC (permalink / raw) To: John Cowan; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1417 bytes --] On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 6:37 PM John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote: > > > On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > > >> An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had evolved into "two >> foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and >> LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected >> places to publish papers/develop their tenure files. >> > > I think this is a long and accelerating trend, and not just at > conferences. There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or > presentations any more, which doesn't bother me directly, but bothers me > very much indirectly, because I love engineering papers and have to read > academic papers, ummm, very selectively. (In particular, anything labeled > "formal semantics" just gets skipped.) > It's the main reason I've not had a USENIX paper published in about 15 years... The other issue that I've run into is that the reviewers of the papers often times don't understand the systems they are commenting on, so often I got comments that made no sense at all... :(. Warner > > > John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org > And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, > unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, > he saw only two aged hands withering in flame. --"The Pyre of Denethor" > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3207 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 2:19 ` Warner Losh @ 2021-04-05 18:07 ` John Gilmore 2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-06 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: John Gilmore @ 2021-04-05 18:07 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Warner Losh; +Cc: TUHS main list > > There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or > > presentations any more... > > It's the main reason I've not had a USENIX paper published in about 15 > years... I'm an engineer, not an academic. The only time I submitted a paper to USENIX, it was about my 1988 project with CSRG to convert the BSD distribution to using GCC rather than PCC. The project itself was an interesting tour through C language history, turning up ancient code that used ints as pointers, for example. The paper was rejected by the program committee, on the objection that "ports aren't research". So the pro-academic, anti-engineering mindset was already in place back then. Though I was disappointed to have the paper rejected, at the time I thought (like an engineer!) that the reason for rejection was a bit of a positive comment -- "Our software is becoming portable enough that it doesn't take imagination, genius, or innovation to make it run on a completely different architecture or toolchain." (I posted the 1988 draft paper to this TUHS list in May 2020, in a thread with the subject "History of popularity of C".) John ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 18:07 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference John Gilmore @ 2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz ` (2 more replies) 2021-04-06 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall 1 sibling, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-05 19:30 UTC (permalink / raw) To: John Gilmore; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4039 bytes --] On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 2:08 PM John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> wrote: > The paper was rejected by the program committee, on the objection that > "ports aren't research". So > the pro-academic, anti-engineering mindset was already in place back then. > John - to be honest, I think the attempt to make the standard for paper acceptance had started before 1988. I was on PCs in the early 1983s and pressure was already on the PCs (and authors) to use 'academic standards'. I think Ted described the issue well. The fact is a paper like the one you describe, I do think would not have been as interesting to some (maybe even many) in the USENIX audience, although I clearly agree with you that it would have been for others. The problem was that paper like that was not going to help people that were working on a tenure file and the PCs wanted to fil the sessions with them. To USENIX's credit, by the mid to late the 1980s, a USENIX was considered by many academic committees. The issue for the USENIX BOD had always been getting butts in the seats to pay the bills. Academics had a path, so following what IEEE and ACM did was well-trod and understood. Get the more pure hackers like yourself, even the engineers inside of places like Sun or Masscomp was often difficult and we know was not well understood. USENIX was hardly the only firm/org that made some bets in those days that in the long run might not have been the best. As Ted referred, at the time a compromise was created. First, LISA became the primary sys admin conferences and was and still is successful. It has always had a good mix of both practice and academic papers. As Ted, pointed out things like FREENIX, USELINUX, ALS, and the like were created with a different set of requirements. In the end, conferences like these three fell out of favor. As someone that lived it at the time and argued to try to keep/invest in them, I personally think there was more a crash of personality as much as anything else. They were a lot more work for the USENIX staff to produce and that did not help the argument. And in 1988, USENIX itself had the gold as UNIX and the UNIX marketplace was at its height. I suspect some bad behavior did come through that favored one view over another. I personally think the org did attempt to do better in serving this population, but ultimately did not do as well as many people would have liked. As more and, more $s in the market moved into the FOSS community and away from what was then called the OpenSystems community, it allowed the folks in FOSS like yourself to be served by others than USENIX. IMHO, USENIX walked away from a group that they should have been trying to cultivate. I'll give Mad Dog and Ted creds for at least trying to educate that BOD in those days that what was being done/not done was not going to work for that community. The problem is that what was proposed (what was needed) did not fit the model that the BOD and the then ED had in mind. Given some of the personalities, folks (on both sides) stopped trying. A big problem (IMO) was that USELINUX and FREENIX needed a conference organization model more like the Hackers Conference or AMW, ... but ... the personalities running USENIX at the time understood the traditional (more academic) scheme. It was a failure to communicate at a minimum, and certainly had large portions of a control problem. So where we are today is that the freshwater is long since over the dam, and by now well mixed into the salted ocean. Replaying the acts and complaining of what should have happened is not going to help here. Unfortunately, it is true that the actions of some people in those days bruised some egos, and feelings were hurt. I wish that were not true, but I know it happened. The key for all of us, in this list and else where in the reset of the UNIX industry is to try to avoid rewriting history, but to understand what went down and accept it, and move on. ᐧ [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6674 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz 2021-04-05 20:42 ` William Cheswick 2021-04-06 4:37 ` Ed Bradford 2021-04-05 20:39 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-06 15:39 ` Theodore Ts'o 2 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Richard Salz @ 2021-04-05 20:34 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 428 bytes --] On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 3:32 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > > The key for all of us, in this list and else where in the reset of the > UNIX industry is to try to avoid rewriting history, but to understand what > went down and accept it, and move on. > In that light, let's start a new thread: "My Favorite Usenix Papers." Change the subject line. No fair including one of your own on the list :) > ᐧ > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1392 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz @ 2021-04-05 20:42 ` William Cheswick 2021-04-06 4:37 ` Ed Bradford 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: William Cheswick @ 2021-04-05 20:42 UTC (permalink / raw) Cc: TUHS main list > On Apr 5, 2021, at 4:34 PM, Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote: > > No fair including one of your own on the list :) Why? You won’t let Whitten and Tygar name their own paper?! ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz 2021-04-05 20:42 ` William Cheswick @ 2021-04-06 4:37 ` Ed Bradford 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Ed Bradford @ 2021-04-06 4:37 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1069 bytes --] To old BTL or AT&T folks or anyone else who might know. I wonder. IBM introduced the IBM PC in August of 1981. That was years after a non-memory managed version of Unix was created by Heinze Lycklama, LSX. Is anyone on this list familiar with Bell Labs management thoughts on selling IBM on LSX rather than "dos"? While the anti-trust settlement was a couple years in the future, someone at AT&T must have been thinking about possibilities after a breakup. Ed On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 3:36 PM Richard Salz <rich.salz@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 3:32 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > >> >> The key for all of us, in this list and else where in the reset of the >> UNIX industry is to try to avoid rewriting history, but to understand what >> went down and accept it, and move on. >> > > In that light, let's start a new thread: "My Favorite Usenix Papers." > Change the subject line. No fair including one of your own on the list :) > >> ᐧ >> > -- Advice is judged by results, not by intentions. Cicero [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2594 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz @ 2021-04-05 20:39 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-05 21:11 ` Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-06 15:39 ` Theodore Ts'o 2 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-05 20:39 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 03:30:25PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 2:08 PM John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com> wrote: > > The paper was rejected by the program committee, on the objection that > > "ports aren't research". So > > the pro-academic, anti-engineering mindset was already in place back then. > IMHO, USENIX walked away from a group that they should have been > trying to cultivate. In 1999 I was program committee chair for Linux Expo which was trying to sort of be Usenix for Linux. I had been a paper reviewer for a number of Usenix conferences (I still have my review notes for those papers, I was a cocky pain in the ass that was full of myself, dunno why anyone put up with my nonsense but they did). I had the pleasure of reviewing this: http://mcvoy.com/lm/papers/rtlmanifesto.pdf The summary is Victor slipped a real time kernel underneath Linux and ran all of Linux, kernel and userspace, as the real time idle process. It worked fantastically well and was really clever. If you understand time sharing and you understand hard real time, trying to shovel hard real time into a time sharing system is like trying to prove 1 + 1 != 2. They are trying to do two completely different things and if you are good at one, you'll be bad at the other. Victor showed a way to have your cake and eat it too, it was brilliant. The paper was rejected and I believe it was partially because Victor wasn't well known in Unix circles, he wasn't "in the club". If Bill Joy had written the same paper I'm 100% sure it would have been published. Which lead to me campaigning for blind reviews. Back to Linux expo, it was a success, some of the papers weren't up to Usenix standards, but many of them were (I can dig up the proceedings if anyone cares). Whoever was running Usenix contacted me after seeing the success of Linux Expo and begged me to bring those people to Usenix. I was offered a board seat, I could be reviewer for life, anything I wanted. All I asked for was blind reviews. Didn't ask anything for myself, just blind reviews so you could be a nobody and get judged on the quaility of your work rather than your name. Apparently, I could get anything I wanted except that. I've had nothing to do with Usenix ever since. Clem came after whoever it was and has told me he cleaned things up quite a bit. If I had known him back then maybe I would have come back. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 20:39 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-05 21:11 ` Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-05 21:17 ` Dan Cross 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Theodore Ts'o @ 2021-04-05 21:11 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: TUHS main list On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 01:39:54PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > Whoever was running Usenix contacted me after seeing the success of > Linux Expo and begged me to bring those people to Usenix. I was offered > a board seat, I could be reviewer for life, anything I wanted. > > All I asked for was blind reviews. Didn't ask anything for myself, just > blind reviews so you could be a nobody and get judged on the quaility of > your work rather than your name. FAST reviews are blind. ATC conferences are (as of the last time I was on an ATC PC a year or two ago) are still not blinded. - Ted ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 21:11 ` Theodore Ts'o @ 2021-04-05 21:17 ` Dan Cross 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Dan Cross @ 2021-04-05 21:17 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Theodore Ts'o; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 781 bytes --] On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 5:14 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote: > On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 01:39:54PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > Whoever was running Usenix contacted me after seeing the success of > > Linux Expo and begged me to bring those people to Usenix. I was offered > > a board seat, I could be reviewer for life, anything I wanted. > > > > All I asked for was blind reviews. Didn't ask anything for myself, just > > blind reviews so you could be a nobody and get judged on the quaility of > > your work rather than your name. > > FAST reviews are blind. ATC conferences are (as of the last time I > was on an ATC PC a year or two ago) are still not blinded. > Ok, I'll bite: why not? That seems like a no-brainer way to weed out a lot of bias. - Dan C. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1168 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz 2021-04-05 20:39 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-06 15:39 ` Theodore Ts'o 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Theodore Ts'o @ 2021-04-06 15:39 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 03:30:25PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > The issue for the USENIX BOD had always been getting butts in the seats to > pay the bills. Academics had a path, so following what IEEE and ACM did > was well-trod and understood. Get the more pure hackers like yourself, > even the engineers inside of places like Sun or Masscomp was often > difficult and we know was not well understood. USENIX was hardly the only > firm/org that made some bets in those days that in the long run might not > have been the best. In some ways, this was in large respect a great example of the innovator's dilemma. In the mid '90's, before the .com crash of '98, Unix sales were starting to trend down, but they were still quite respectable, and while Linux had a huge amount of buzz, a lot of that was because Linux was cheap as in beer --- which means that when it came down to the trade show floor revenues at an ATC conference event, Unix was still bringing in healthy amounts of $$$ at least as compared with Linux. And similarly, there were still some --- but not as many as before, during the "Golden Age" --- decent industry papers getting published at ATC. I sometimes suspect (although I have no proof of this) that one of the reasons why ATC papers were not double blinded ala FAST was because if there was an important paper from Sun, even if it didn't meet the high standards of a tenure-track conference, it was desirable to let a few such papers "slip through". For the most part, those industry papers were still better (from the let's not embarass the tenure-track professors) perspective than a typical Linux paper, but papers which were *really* not written to the academic style would certainly either get rejected, or there would be strong pressure placed on the writers to make them seem more "academic". Ultimately, ATC (with or without its USELINUX track) was trying to serve two masters, and while there were some techniques such as having invited talks track which worked at least moderately well, at the end of the day, if one of the goals of an attendee who happens to be a Linux developer is to be able to meet a critical mass of other Linux developers, it was always going to be hard for ATC to be able to serve that need as well as the needs of Usenix's other constiuents --- which were, after all, far more established within Usenix. - Ted ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference 2021-04-05 18:07 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference John Gilmore 2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-06 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2021-04-06 5:49 UTC (permalink / raw) To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society On Mon, 5 Apr 2021, John Gilmore wrote: > I'm an engineer, not an academic. [...] The paper was rejected by the > program committee, on the objection that "ports aren't research". This of course will come as news to those of us who had to port Unix to a different architecture... Especially when the hardware didn't work as documented :-( I think the most egregious example was DEC's Unibus; the specs were vague enough that 3rd-party cards wouldn't work (timing issues) so DEC could turn around and say that you ought to use our gear (which of course observed the undocumented precise timing). -- Dave ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference] 2021-04-05 0:36 ` John Cowan 2021-04-05 2:19 ` Warner Losh @ 2021-04-05 7:48 ` arnold 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: arnold @ 2021-04-05 7:48 UTC (permalink / raw) To: cowan, clemc; +Cc: tuhs This hits home with me very hard. I have been a Usenix member since the around 1984. Almost 40 years. I am finally letting my membership drop, now that ";login:" is going soft-copy. But for several years now I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the research nature of most of the articles. Very few of them are actually useful (or even interesting) to me in a day-to-day sense. And this saddens me; I used to be proud to be a Usenix member; I no longer feel like I get any added value. Especially as I live out of the US, attending conferences is impossible. (The last annual conference I went to was in 2004.) Ah well. The only constant in the world is change. Arnold John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:23 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > > > An issue during the time you are discussing, USENIX had evolved into "two > > foci" between the practitioners (which included both FOSS community and > > LISA types) and the more academic-oriented folks looking for respected > > places to publish papers/develop their tenure files. > > > > I think this is a long and accelerating trend, and not just at > conferences. There simply are no venues for "engineering" papers or > presentations any more, which doesn't bother me directly, but bothers me > very much indirectly, because I love engineering papers and have to read > academic papers, ummm, very selectively. (In particular, anything labeled > "formal semantics" just gets skipped.) > > John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org > And it was said that ever after, if any man looked in that Stone, > unless he had a great strength of will to turn it to other purpose, > he saw only two aged hands withering in flame. --"The Pyre of Denethor" ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2021-04-05 0:36 ` John Cowan @ 2021-04-05 14:05 ` Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-05 22:26 ` David Arnold 3 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Theodore Ts'o @ 2021-04-05 14:05 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list On Sun, Apr 04, 2021 at 02:22:22PM -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > > Actually, quite the opposite, USENIX was getting more and more academic and > research-oriented and less 'trade show.' The key is that USENIX and ALS > should have been an excellent match, unfortunately, some of the > personalities involved were at odds with each other. IMO: it was more of a > crash of personalities/control issues - the details do not need to be > repeated or aired again. Note: I was on the BOD at that time and in fact on > the PC for that specific conference. Ted may have been on the BOD at the > same time. A lot of the conflicts were over the writing style. There many ways you can write papers. For example: (a) academic papers suitable for tenure-track publications (b) technical industry paper meant for other industry practitioners (c) white papers written by and for sales/marketing folks Usenix at the time was trying very hard to make sure its conferences would be taken seriously by tenure committees, and so there was a strong sense that any paper published by Usenix had to be super high quality from the perspective of (a). Most of the Linux programmers had absolutely no interest in getting tenure, and with much prodding, you might be able to get them to strive for (b). But there were a lot of people who were volunteering for Usenix program committees, even for things like USELINUX, who were convinced that (a) was the only way to write quality papers. There was a bit of, "well, we'll give you a kiddy-pool track called USELINUX, but maybe someday you'll grow up and write real papers." That condescension was probably responsible for a lot of the personality issues. There was a lot of other things going on around that time; which others have written about or observed --- the passing (into retirement, or being kicked up into senior management) of technical leaders at companies who would encourage their engineers to publish at conferences. IBM stopped paying financial incentives for people to publish papers at conferences, and it became clear it didn't really help ones career prospects, with the possible exception of once you were trying for DE; another company with which I have a lot of personal experience strongly discouraged people from publishing because there was a slow, bureaucratic process required to get publication permission lest that company's "secret sauce" get exposed, etc. Interestingly, that process only applies to *papers*; but if you give a *talk* at a Linux conference, it was a lot easier to bypass the bureaucracy. > But USENIX also published less formal papers. In fact, one of my > all-time favorite practitioner papers is from another member of this > list -- Tom Lyon's "*All the Chips that Fit*" from the 1985 Summer > USENIX [which if you have never read, send me an email, offline and > I'll send you a scanned PDF -- note to Tom if you still have the > original bits I bet USENIX would like them]. I suspect that such a > paper would never have been acceptable in any of the IEEE or ACM > conferences. Yeah, that was the 80's. By the time the 90's rolled around, people were trying *really* hard to become much more formal. And if you compare papers from a conference like, say, FAST, I'd say they are at the same level as many ACM/IEEE papers. I will be the first to say this is a really good thing, but it does have some engineering tradeoffs. > Back to your point, USENIX may have stopped being as important to > many practitioners, particularly ones in the FOSS community. Which I > do find sad, but I understand the issues on both sides and why that > might be so. For instance, Keith Packard of X11 fame, Steinhart, > and I were all talking about "whence USENIX" at a Hackers > conferences a few years back. So, if you come from that side of the > world, you may not value membership or the results (BTW: my own now > hacker daughter, who is a Googler, dropped her membership last year > as she felt it was of less value to her); but so far USENIX has > continued to be important to a large part of the research community > and a set of some practitioners. Everyone has the best of intentions, but reality is that the incentives for academic researchers and industry practitioners have widened over time. Everyone has a limited amount of time and budget, and if you're an industry practitioner, you are primarily graded on your ability for you to deliver technically difficult projects that have great impact on the company --- and the easist ways for impact to be judged by a promotion committee is by saving the company $XXX million over 5 years, or bringing in $XXX million. If you are an academic, the deliverables by which you are judged are graduate students and publications. And if you don't have tenure yet, those had better be publications that are taken seriously by tenure committees. So creating a conference which meets the primary goals of these two populatations is... hard. Quite frankly, it's a lot easier for me to make a case to go to Usenix conferences to (a) harvest ideas for me to take back to the company, and (b) harvest graduate students for the hiring pipeline. It's not to contribute to the conference; I might do that on my own time, but realistically, when I spend 80-100 hours working on a program commitee, that mostly comes out of my own personal time --- not really out of time paid for by my company. At best my company will tolerate my time to attend a PC meeting, and pay for my travel. But that's really about it. And so to spend a huge amount of time writing a paper which is suitable for a program commitee which has been giving its marching orders by the conference's steering committee to make sure that the proceedings will be taken seriously by a tenure commitee? Nope, not the best use my time. Cheers, - Ted ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-05 14:05 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) Theodore Ts'o @ 2021-04-05 22:26 ` David Arnold 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: David Arnold @ 2021-04-05 22:26 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Theodore Ts'o; +Cc: TUHS main list > On 6 Apr 2021, at 00:05, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote: > > A lot of the conflicts were over the writing style. There many ways > you can write papers. For example: > > (a) academic papers suitable for tenure-track publications > (b) technical industry paper meant for other industry practitioners > (c) white papers written by and for sales/marketing folks One reason you don’t get more of (b) at USENIX these days is that the value to writer is basically nil. Compare writing a USENIX conference paper with crafting a decent blog post: the latter gets immediate distribution, a flurry of comments and feedback from peers, and can often kick off new software projects, define new industry-wide nomenclature, to say nothing of the career benefits of building your professional “brand”. All the things a paper *used* to do, when people attended conferences and read papers as a means of information exchange. The pre-publication peer review process, and the annual (or longer) cadence means it’s just not the right venue for a fast-moving field, for the majority of topics. Sometimes, it makes sense to turn a successful blog post into a paper, to get some formal recognition, or to explore an idea more rigorously, but most of the time, things have moved on by then, and for an industrial worker (vs. academic), there’s very little incentive: you’re much better off getting another high-profile blog post than working through and writing up a paper. It’d be great to see USENIX rejoin this conversation as an essential forum, but it’s hard to see how: disintermediation has done its thing. d ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) 2021-04-04 5:29 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) G. Branden Robinson 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 23:30 ` A. P. Garcia 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: A. P. Garcia @ 2021-04-04 23:30 UTC (permalink / raw) To: G. Branden Robinson; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5812 bytes --] >> Misremembered the year. That conference was October 2000. I just >> found the bookbag I got as swag from it. > I think you're remembering the Atlanta Linux Showcase. I was at the same event. I also think I know exactly the person you're talking about: Charles Hannum, with whom I had a similar experience on a different topic. ALS '99 was a fun conference. I didn't attend in 2000. I'm going to stick my neck out just a little bit and say that my experience with him was quite different. We talked a little about the differences between Linux and BSD, both userland and kernel space, and the history of NetBSD, including an unfortunate occurrence with Bill Jolitz at a different conference. Charles was cordial with me. That same day, I went to the cafeteria area when I got hungry, and I saw what looked like two kids sitting around a laptop working intently on something. I was curious, so I asked them what they were hacking on. It turned out to be Miguel de Icaza, now a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, and Nat Friedman, who I believe is now CTO of GitHub (also owned by Microsoft). They sort of blew me off, but to be fair, they were working on a presentation they were about to deliver. On Sun, Apr 4, 2021, 1:31 AM G. Branden Robinson < g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote: > At 2021-04-03T19:50:51-0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > > > But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta > > > in the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I > > > actually went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you > > > guys up with a development virtual machine," and what I got was an > > > earful about "your so-called portability" from someone who was > > > clearly much more invested in hating Linux than in, you know, > > > saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not offering me cycles on a > > > super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, cool, here's who > > > you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port going." > > > > > > So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, > > > is all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which > > > already had its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't > > > staffed its booth with a jackass still trying to fight the Unix > > > Wars, that story might have turned out differently. > > > > Misremembered the year. That conference was October 2000. I just > > found the bookbag I got as swag from it. > > I think you're remembering the Atlanta Linux Showcase. I was at the > same event. I also think I know exactly the person you're talking > about: Charles Hannum, with whom I had a similar experience on a > different topic. > > Instead of insisting that I was stupid and wrong for using Linux instead > of (NetBSD) in his view, I was stupid and wrong for using software > licensed under the GNU GPL instead of the "BSD" license (which variant > of the latter is not, all these years later, a matter I recall coming > up). I mention this so that Mr. Hannum's reputation on this list risks > no blackening among those who share his hostility to copyleft. ;-) > > ALS was a terrific experience and, for me, lived up to the praise I had > heard about it as a venue for getting engineers talking to each other. > Regrettably enough, the conference was acquired by a firm. It was held > one final time the next year in Atlanta, officially rebranded the > "Annual Linux Showcase", and, as I recall, permanently mothballed > thereafter, with the dot-com bubble-burst as either a direct reason or > as an excuse. > > I have seen other technical conferences over the years steadily morph > from a technical/engineering focus to an orientation around sales and > "strategy", or more bluntly--propaganda. The emphasis is no longer on > technological improvement and evaluation (i.e., how to achieve and > measure "solutions"), but on promotion, rationalization, and boosterism. > > I suppose that one of the reasons this happens is that good conferences > grow, and companies sending delegations find themselves with growing > expense bills for doing so. Engineers are a cost center. When they > come back from the event, they will almost never have anything to "show > for it". At best they'll be excited about something they can > "integrate" or some new idea they can realize after months of > development time. In other words, you _might_ have a competitive > advantage after spending _even more_ money. > > By contrast, sales people can bring you orders you can book the day they > get back, or even before the conference is over, thanks to the magic > power of accrual accounting, a practice which persists even after the > glorious examples of Enron and other gigantic bankruptcies of the 2000s. > > That's the demand side. On the supply side, conferences have > governance; it takes people to solicit papers, book speakers, and put > talks on the schedule and into proceedings. Conference sponsorship is a > neat way of closing the gap between demand and supply on the back end; > be a "gold" or "platinum" level sponsor and obtain influence, likely > through direct seating of representatives on the committees that perform > the foregoing organizational roles. Note the entrenchment and > persistence of precious metals as metaphors for status; we would not > name the tiers after the decreasing scale of photolithographic > processes, for example. Historically, it's been a lot easier to > motivate a guy with a checkbook in the C suite who drives a Lamborghini > Gallardo with the word "platinum" than "5 nm". > > I'm too young to know--did USENIX follow the trajectory of reorienting > its focus from engineering and research to sales? Why does it no longer > occupy the premier place it once did? > > Regards, > Branden > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6919 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 2:46 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-04 2:50 ` Adam Thornton @ 2021-04-04 3:41 ` Gregg Levine 2021-04-04 3:57 ` Adam Thornton 1 sibling, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Gregg Levine @ 2021-04-04 3:41 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Adam Thornton; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good Hello! Adam? Seriously? That was the case when I visited them at one year's LinuxWorld. (I think it was the one when we met.) And yes at the System Z Council meetings I would catch up with them. Larry? It is funny, but earlier on I did mention all of that in a completely different thread. But why would the <DELETED!> characters at what was SCO start this stupidity all over again? I seem to be missing something. ----- Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 10:48 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> So from IBM's POV, they could >> support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370 >> and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe >> iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of >> the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? > > > This is not how I remember it going down. > > There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that IBM was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of a sudden there was an IBM port to S/390. Clearly (well, *I* thought it was clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced their hand. (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground). > > I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM to advise them how we thought they should proceed. They seemed to take much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very crazy. (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine Associates. They're still around.) > > I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM had bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different. Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver. Alas, IBM tightened the screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer from Oracle in its back pocket. > > But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port going." > > So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned out differently. > > Adam ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 3:41 ` [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Gregg Levine @ 2021-04-04 3:57 ` Adam Thornton 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Adam Thornton @ 2021-04-04 3:57 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Gregg Levine; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3651 bytes --] It’s possible I am conflating two conferences in my head and the NetBSD thing was NYC not Atlanta. On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 8:42 PM Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello! > Adam? Seriously? That was the case when I visited them at one year's > LinuxWorld. (I think it was the one when we met.) And yes at the > System Z Council meetings I would catch up with them. > > Larry? It is funny, but earlier on I did mention all of that in a > completely different thread. > > But why would the <DELETED!> characters at what was SCO start this > stupidity all over again? I seem to be missing something. > ----- > Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com > "This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again." > > On Sat, Apr 3, 2021 at 10:48 PM Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > > > > On Thu, Apr 1, 2021 at 8:54 PM Wesley Parish <wobblygong@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> > >> So from IBM's POV, they could > >> support Linux - which by then had already been ported to the VM/370 > >> and there was already talk of porting it to the later mainframe > >> iterations. I don't think anybody was even thinking of porting any of > >> the *BSD to IBM mainframes till much later, am I right? > > > > > > This is not how I remember it going down. > > > > There was an external-to-IBM "Bigfoot" port to S/390 (not S/370) that > IBM was ignoring until it got alarmingly close to booting, and then all of > a sudden there was an IBM port to S/390. Clearly (well, *I* thought it was > clear) they'd had a skunkworks project for some time and Bigfoot forced > their hand. (Unix v7 *did* run on S/370, and resurrecting that is one of > my hobby projects that hasn't really gotten off the ground). > > > > I was the system administrator of the first publicly-accessible > Linux-on-S/390 machine--penguinvm.princeton.edu--and indeed in the late 90s > I and my mentor David Boyes met with some pretty high-level people at IBM > to advise them how we thought they should proceed. They seemed to take > much of our advice, but then again I don't think we said anything very > crazy. (At the time, and for years thereafter, I was with Sine Nomine > Associates. They're still around.) > > > > I also later managed the port of OpenSolaris to zSeries, which, if IBM > had bought Sun rather than Oracle, would have made my life very different. > Neale Ferguson did most of the heavy lifting on that port, but I did a lot > of the tool porting and wrote a disk driver. Alas, IBM tightened the > screws a little too far and apparently didn't know that Sun had an offer > from Oracle in its back pocket. > > > > But back to the S/390 port--I went to a Linux conference in Atlanta in > the late 90s ('99, I think) to speak about Linux on S390/Z, and I actually > went by the NetBSD booth to say, "hey, I can maybe hook you guys up with a > development virtual machine," and what I got was an earful about "your > so-called portability" from someone who was clearly much more invested in > hating Linux than in, you know, saying, "wow, OK, I realize you're not > offering me cycles on a super-awesome machine, but, yeah, it's not nothing, > cool, here's who you should talk to if you're interested in getting a port > going." > > > > So I don't think you can lay all the blame on BSD inaction on Linux, is > all I'm saying. By '99, I think it was, maybe if NetBSD, which already had > its reputation for spectacular portability, hadn't staffed its booth with a > jackass still trying to fight the Unix Wars, that story might have turned > out differently. > > > > Adam > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4450 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 14:50 [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh @ 2021-04-02 5:41 ` David Arnold 2021-04-02 6:09 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 16:40 ` Boyd Lynn Gerber 2 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: David Arnold @ 2021-04-02 5:41 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josh Good; +Cc: TUHS > Xinuos Reverse that, and with some squinting, you get something that sounds like “Sue ‘nix”. Perhaps it’s a long running joke after all? d ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 5:41 ` David Arnold @ 2021-04-02 6:09 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 7:00 ` arnold 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Steve Nickolas @ 2021-04-02 6:09 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 487 bytes --] On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, David Arnold wrote: > >> Xinuos > > Reverse that, and with some squinting, you get something that sounds like “Sue ‘nix”. > > Perhaps it’s a long running joke after all? Maybe with some luck they, too, will go broke and there'll be so little left of them that even someone like me could buy their charred remains. Hopefully we can get to a point where there can be a truly unclouded free and open release of the Ancient Unix/Research Unix sources. -uso. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 6:09 ` Steve Nickolas @ 2021-04-02 7:00 ` arnold 2021-04-02 9:53 ` Steve Nickolas 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: arnold @ 2021-04-02 7:00 UTC (permalink / raw) To: usotsuki, TUHS Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote: > Hopefully we can get to a point where there can be a truly unclouded free > and open release of the Ancient Unix/Research Unix sources. This there already is. They're in the TUHS archives. Arnold ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 7:00 ` arnold @ 2021-04-02 9:53 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 10:26 ` arnold 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Steve Nickolas @ 2021-04-02 9:53 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, arnold@skeeve.com wrote: > Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote: > >> Hopefully we can get to a point where there can be a truly unclouded free >> and open release of the Ancient Unix/Research Unix sources. > > This there already is. They're in the TUHS archives. > > Arnold > There's still a cloud over Caldera's release, because the current license relies on assuming Caldera owned the copyright at the time (pretty sure the courts said they didn't). -uso. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 9:53 ` Steve Nickolas @ 2021-04-02 10:26 ` arnold 2021-04-02 14:02 ` Josh Good 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: arnold @ 2021-04-02 10:26 UTC (permalink / raw) To: usotsuki, TUHS Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote: > There's still a cloud over Caldera's release, because the current license > relies on assuming Caldera owned the copyright at the time (pretty sure > the courts said they didn't). > > -uso. The cat's been out of the bag since ~ 2002, almost 20 years. In effect, it's too late anyway. Arnold ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 10:26 ` arnold @ 2021-04-02 14:02 ` Josh Good 2021-04-02 14:17 ` Steve Nickolas 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Josh Good @ 2021-04-02 14:02 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On 2021 Apr 2, 04:26, arnold@skeeve.com wrote: > Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote: > > > There's still a cloud over Caldera's release, because the current license > > relies on assuming Caldera owned the copyright at the time (pretty sure > > the courts said they didn't). > > The cat's been out of the bag since ~ 2002, almost 20 years. In effect, > it's too late anyway. The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded licence to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own the copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by a judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source. In fact, it seems that SCO/Caldera/TSG just bought from Novell the "Unix business" without the UNIX copyrights, and in that vein Old-SCO had a contract with Novell to collect the UNIX royalties and then to pay said royalties to Novell keeping a cut of them "for the collecting services". So the key point here is "unclouded license". Look what is happening now to IBM because their matter with Caldera/TSG still had clouds of doubt about it. I have the suspicion that if Caldera/TSG/XinuOS is allowed to exist, they will use all and any cloud of doubt to drag to court any UNIX user who happens to have plenty of money and lacks a UNIX license directly gotten from the old AT&T or the old UNIX Labs. They are undead money-sucking vampires. -- Josh Good ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 14:02 ` Josh Good @ 2021-04-02 14:17 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Steve Nickolas @ 2021-04-02 14:17 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Josh Good wrote: > On 2021 Apr 2, 04:26, arnold@skeeve.com wrote: >> Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote: >> >>> There's still a cloud over Caldera's release, because the current license >>> relies on assuming Caldera owned the copyright at the time (pretty sure >>> the courts said they didn't). >> >> The cat's been out of the bag since ~ 2002, almost 20 years. In effect, >> it's too late anyway. > > The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded licence > to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own the > copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by a > judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source. This was what I was pointing at, and why I used as many terms as I could to make it unambiguous what I meant. A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a court of law). Sure, it's possible one could go for years or decades without being sued, but with what I intended to do with the code, unless there were an unclouded free/open license (anything from Toybox to MIT to 4BSD to LGPL to GPL3, I don't really care) it would legally be like painting a bullseye on myself. I think this is why, although some of the BSDs did reintegrate the 32V and V7 stuff, others stayed clear. There's enough of a cloud over the release that it's still not really safe. "It's out there" isn't good enough. SunOS 4 is "out there" - nobody in their right mind would integrate that into a freely available OS distro because Oracle would come down on them like a megaton of bricks! -uso. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 14:17 ` Steve Nickolas @ 2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-02 15:28 ` Fabio Scotoni 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-02 15:25 ` Josh Good 2021-04-03 3:10 ` John Cowan 2 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-02 15:16 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Steve Nickolas; +Cc: tuhs On Fri, Apr 02, 2021 at 10:17:51AM -0400, Steve Nickolas wrote: > A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is > NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a > court of law). Sure, it's possible one could go for years or decades > without being sued, but with what I intended to do with the code, unless > there were an unclouded free/open license (anything from Toybox to MIT to > 4BSD to LGPL to GPL3, I don't really care) it would legally be like painting > a bullseye on myself. So I get that playing with v6 in an emulator is fun, it's a trip down memory lane. What I don't get is why on God's Green Earth you would contemplate building any sort of product on ancient Unix. > "It's out there" isn't good enough. SunOS 4 is "out there" - nobody in > their right mind would integrate that into a freely available OS distro > because Oracle would come down on them like a megaton of bricks! SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and is basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work). So other than walking down memory lane, why would you want that code? ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-02 15:28 ` Fabio Scotoni 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Fabio Scotoni @ 2021-04-02 15:28 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: tuhs On 02.04.21 17:16, Larry McVoy wrote: > So I get that playing with v6 in an emulator is fun, it's a trip down memory > lane. What I don't get is why on God's Green Earth you would contemplate > building any sort of product on ancient Unix. While I'm not aware of any examples of anything building on ancient UNIX as a whole, I would like to note that parts of ancient UNIX have made their way into other systems. For example, FreeBSD and OpenBSD src/usr.bin/diff/diffreg.c are derived from Ancient UNIX diff(1) source code, namely 7th Edition UNIX. (There is some amount of irony in Xinuos forking FreeBSD and basically importing their own licensing issue indirectly.) Various pieces of documentation under the Caldera license also permeate the BSDs. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-02 15:28 ` Fabio Scotoni @ 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-03 1:55 ` Warner Losh ` (3 more replies) 1 sibling, 4 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2021-04-03 1:50 UTC (permalink / raw) To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: > SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and > is basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work > to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the > hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work). SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits were in charge instead of the real workers. We never had a need for SMP, so we didn't miss it. -- Dave ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2021-04-03 1:55 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-03 2:23 ` Larry McVoy ` (2 subsequent siblings) 3 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2021-04-03 1:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dave Horsfall; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 735 bytes --] On Fri, Apr 2, 2021, 7:51 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote: > On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and > > is basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work > > to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the > > hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work). > > SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the > decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits > were in charge instead of the real workers. > > We never had a need for SMP, so we didn't miss it. > OS/MP from Solbourne gave you both: SMP and SonOS 4.1.x. Warner > > -- Dave > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1340 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-03 1:55 ` Warner Losh @ 2021-04-03 2:23 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-03 2:34 ` Earl Baugh 2021-04-03 6:16 ` Dan Stromberg 2021-04-04 1:48 ` David Arnold 3 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-03 2:23 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dave Horsfall; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 12:50:20PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: > > >SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and is > >basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work to get > >that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the hat layer > >from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work). > > SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the > decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits > were in charge instead of the real workers. A little known story is that Scooter did the deal with AT&T because Sun was in trouble financially. As I remember AT&T bought $200M of Sun stock at 35% over market but the price was we had to dump SunOS and go to SVr4. I worked for Ken Okin at the time, senior VP of all server hardware. Ken paid me to argue with the execs for 6 months to try and reverse this decision so Ken didn't know the details either. SunOS 4.x was the bees knees, it was the most well thought out Unix ever. I got there around 4.1 or just past 4.0 and I didn't know shit. They made me do POSIX conformance which made me go through every code path. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and one day it was like the fog cleared and I saw what they were trying to say. And it was pretty cool, SunOS 4.x was pretty object oriented without all the nonsense, just the good stuff. SunOS was the only Unix that just made sense, I could guess what the kernel would do and 90% of the time I guessed right. I miss it. That said, Sun never made that OS SMP. Real SMP. Warner says Solbourne did, I'd still like to, or get Dock Williams or Anil, to talk to the people that made the VM system scale. --lm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-03 2:23 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-03 2:34 ` Earl Baugh 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Earl Baugh @ 2021-04-03 2:34 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Just FYI - I have a Sun 3/110 that I still fire up. I’d be interested in the 4.X source ( I believe it still ran on it - I have 3.2 on it now ) to be able to patch a few things to keep it going. I’ve not looked for it, as I didn’t think it was readily available. Earl Sent from my iPhone > On Apr 2, 2021, at 10:25 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 12:50:20PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote: >>> On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: >>> >>> SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and is >>> basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work to get >>> that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the hat layer >>> from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work). >> >> SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the >> decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits >> were in charge instead of the real workers. > > A little known story is that Scooter did the deal with AT&T because Sun > was in trouble financially. As I remember AT&T bought $200M of Sun stock > at 35% over market but the price was we had to dump SunOS and go to SVr4. > > I worked for Ken Okin at the time, senior VP of all server hardware. > Ken paid me to argue with the execs for 6 months to try and reverse this > decision so Ken didn't know the details either. > > SunOS 4.x was the bees knees, it was the most well thought out Unix ever. > I got there around 4.1 or just past 4.0 and I didn't know shit. They made > me do POSIX conformance which made me go through every code path. Nothing, > nothing, nothing, and one day it was like the fog cleared and I saw what > they were trying to say. And it was pretty cool, SunOS 4.x was pretty > object oriented without all the nonsense, just the good stuff. SunOS was > the only Unix that just made sense, I could guess what the kernel would > do and 90% of the time I guessed right. I miss it. > > That said, Sun never made that OS SMP. Real SMP. Warner says Solbourne > did, I'd still like to, or get Dock Williams or Anil, to talk to the people > that made the VM system scale. > > --lm ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-03 1:55 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-03 2:23 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-03 6:16 ` Dan Stromberg 2021-04-04 16:18 ` Tony Finch 2021-04-04 1:48 ` David Arnold 3 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Dan Stromberg @ 2021-04-03 6:16 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dave Horsfall; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1468 bytes --] On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 6:51 PM Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote: > On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > SunOS 4, though I love it more than most people, is ancient history and > > is basically under one big lock for SMP. It was a huge amount of work > > to get that code to scale in Solaris (they lifted the VM system and the > > hat layer from SunOS 4 to 5 and then went to work). > > SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the > decades); then Slowaris came along and trashed the joint because the suits > were in charge instead of the real workers. > This drives me bonkers. SunOS 5 was fine, and quickly became a big improvement over 4.1.x. I felt like Sun caught heck over the change because they were the last major vendor to make the switch from BSD to SysV, and all the BSD fans had moved to SunOS 4.1.x to get their BSD fix. Please see https://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/why-solaris.html for a list of benefits of 5.5 over 4.1.x. That said, I have little inclination to run Solaris today. My computers all run Debian, Ubuntu or Mint, though I do have a Windows Virtual Machine, and a Haiku Virtual Machine too. I'm slowly migrating most of my machines to running Debian. We never had a need for SMP, so we didn't miss it. > Sun really needed SMP, because their CPU's were slower than they used to be compared to other vendors, but they could get parallel performance numbers that weren't horrible. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2158 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-03 6:16 ` Dan Stromberg @ 2021-04-04 16:18 ` Tony Finch 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Tony Finch @ 2021-04-04 16:18 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dan Stromberg; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society Dan Stromberg <drsalists@gmail.com> wrote: > > Please see https://stromberg.dnsalias.org/~strombrg/why-solaris.html for a > list of benefits of 5.5 over 4.1.x. A few of those are distinctly mixed blessings :-) I learned about Solaris's in-kernel telnet the hard way, trying to debug a system on which telnet would not work properly after rebooting. I think I worked it out by trussing telnetd, which showed me that it was trying to load a kernel module, and failing because we had chrooted it. A bit of searching around told me what the module was for. The Solaris automounter was neat - we did clever things with the userland part, and it mostly performed well because the fast path was in the kernel. Except that it didn't have a cache for ENOENT directory entries, so requests for nonexistent paths always took a trip to userland, and (as far as I could tell) these requests were serialized, and if you managed to overload the automounter it would start returning bogus errors - I think it was EPERM. Our Apache httpd started randomly returning 403 errors when it tried to access a missing .htaccess (which it did on every request!) and got EPERM instead. The name service cache was also problematic. It was probably useful for getpwnam() etc. on systems using NIS, but it behaved very badly on systems that sent a lot of DNS queries through nscd. It worked much better for us if we simply prevented it from running at all. And I'm not entirely sure it was all that great for NIS: another problem I heard of second hand was password files getting truncated when lots of users were trying to change their passwords at the same time. My colleagues fixed that by ensuring all password changes happened on the NIS master with suitable locking, and the password files were periodically replicated with rdist instead of using more normal NIS machinery. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <dot@dotat.at> https://dotat.at/ Shetland Isles: West 7 or gale 8, veering northwest gale 8 or severe gale 9, occasionally storm 10 later. Moderate or rough, becoming very rough in sheltered east, otherwise very rough becoming high or very high. Rain then squally snow showers. Moderate or poor, occasionally good. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall ` (2 preceding siblings ...) 2021-04-03 6:16 ` Dan Stromberg @ 2021-04-04 1:48 ` David Arnold 2021-04-04 2:23 ` Larry McVoy 3 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: David Arnold @ 2021-04-04 1:48 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dave Horsfall; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society > On 3 Apr 2021, at 12:51, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote: ... > SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the decades); I used to tell people the same thing: my memory of it was very positive. And then I booted up my 4.1.1 tape on my 3/260 and .. it was very ordinary. The headers were missing a bunch of declarations, the tools didn’t have a lot of the options I’ve since come to rely on: it felt half-done and oddly amateurish compared to a recent Linux or BSD. I was surprised. I tried Ultrix 4.4, Irix 5.3, and NeXT 3.3 (which I had more or less at hand) and they were all pretty awful. The world has moved on, and my bar is a lot higher now. I don’t doubt SunOS was great at the time but it’s absolutely obsolete now. d ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 1:48 ` David Arnold @ 2021-04-04 2:23 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good 2021-04-05 13:37 ` Theodore Ts'o 0 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-04 2:23 UTC (permalink / raw) To: David Arnold; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society On Sun, Apr 04, 2021 at 11:48:57AM +1000, David Arnold wrote: > > > On 3 Apr 2021, at 12:51, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote: > > ... > > > SunOS 4.1 was the best *ix I have ever used (and I've used lots over the decades); > > I used to tell people the same thing: my memory of it was very positive. And then I booted up my 4.1.1 tape on my 3/260 and .. it was very ordinary. > > The headers were missing a bunch of declarations, the tools didn???t have a lot of the options I???ve since come to rely on: it felt half-done and oddly amateurish compared to a recent Linux or BSD. > > I was surprised. I tried Ultrix 4.4, Irix 5.3, and NeXT 3.3 (which I had more or less at hand) and they were all pretty awful. > > The world has moved on, and my bar is a lot higher now. I don???t doubt SunOS was great at the time but it???s absolutely obsolete now. I'm the biggest SunOS 4.x fan boy and I agree. It was ~30 years ago. Back then, all the open source stuff, or closed source stuff, took a ton of work to make it work. It just worked on SunOS. I can't tell you how many times I've brought up X10 or X11 on all sorts of systems (it was a good learning experience, you learned to figure out that this is part of my graphics card, this and that and that and that is not, just ifdef that out and keep going). At the time, SunOS 4.x was what everyone wanted. Because Sun (me included) was doing everything they could do to make that the best dev system ever. I get that it is nothing now but back then, you wanted a Sun machine because everything just worked. And it was fun. SunOS was fun, maybe I'm a nut but there are OS that are fun and then there are OS that are not fun. VMS. Not fun. The IBM stuff, not fun. A lot of vendor Unix, not fun. SunOS 4.x was fun, it was just great. I get that it is old but at the time, it was way more fun than what other vendors had. Way more fun. I did lint libraries for SunOS, BSD, the various SysV, I had a huge arguement with Rob Gingell (he was the god at that time, I lived in fear of pissing Rob off), I wanted to ship those lint libraries, he pushed back because it was 40Kb more in the install image. I pushed for it because I wanted SunOS to be the dev platform even if you were developing for a different platform. I had to threaten to quit and Rob shipped them. That was me being stupid, we shipped those lint libraries but I don't think anyone used them. Whatever, that's a little taste of the passion that was there. I'm retired, did a bunch of stuff, changed the world in a few ways, all these years later, the best part of my career was at Sun. Sun was the Bell Labs of my generation. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 2:23 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good 2021-04-04 14:43 ` Michael Parson ` (2 more replies) 2021-04-05 13:37 ` Theodore Ts'o 1 sibling, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Josh Good @ 2021-04-04 8:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On 2021 Apr 3, 19:23, Larry McVoy wrote: > all these years later, the best part of my career was at Sun. Sun > was the Bell Labs of my generation. Yes, it looks like in those years inferior Unix vendors were playing a game of lock-in with their customers, while Sun was playing the opposite game: attracting users and developers with features, openness and by providing a more joyful user/developer experience. Those who could, used Sun kit. Those not so fortunate, aspired to use it. -- Josh Good ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good @ 2021-04-04 14:43 ` Michael Parson 2021-04-04 15:36 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-04 20:08 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Michael Parson @ 2021-04-04 14:43 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On 2021-04-04 03:55, Josh Good wrote: > On 2021 Apr 3, 19:23, Larry McVoy wrote: > >> all these years later, the best part of my career was at Sun. Sun >> was the Bell Labs of my generation. > > Yes, it looks like in those years inferior Unix vendors were playing a > game > of lock-in with their customers, while Sun was playing the opposite > game: > attracting users and developers with features, openness and by > providing a > more joyful user/developer experience. > > Those who could, used Sun kit. Those not so fortunate, aspired to use > it. In 1993, when we spun up our first Linux box, we named it 'mercury', since it was the closest to a Sun we were going to get at our little community college. It was a re-purposed Novell server, a 486DX-50, 32 MB RAM and 1 Gig HD, pretty beefy system for the time, and the CS dept was ecstatic that they now had access to a Unix-like system in addition to the VAX/VMS that they'd been using up until then. -- Michael Parson Pflugerville, TX KF5LGQ ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good 2021-04-04 14:43 ` Michael Parson @ 2021-04-04 15:36 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-04 16:15 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 20:08 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) 2 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Warner Losh @ 2021-04-04 15:36 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josh Good; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 853 bytes --] On Sun, Apr 4, 2021, 2:57 AM Josh Good <pepe@naleco.com> wrote: > On 2021 Apr 3, 19:23, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > all these years later, the best part of my career was at Sun. Sun > > was the Bell Labs of my generation. > > Yes, it looks like in those years inferior Unix vendors were playing a game > of lock-in with their customers, while Sun was playing the opposite game: > attracting users and developers with features, openness and by providing a > more joyful user/developer experience. > > Those who could, used Sun kit. Those not so fortunate, aspired to use it. > A lot of the early open source used to recreate the SunOS commands and args. It's what people were used to. Docs were also accessible in a way that POSIX wouldn't be for a decade .. after that, it grew from there and SunOS started to feel dated. Warner -- > Josh Good > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1502 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 15:36 ` Warner Losh @ 2021-04-04 16:15 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 22:25 ` David Arnold 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 16:15 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Warner Losh; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3486 bytes --] At the risk of belaboring a point, that in heart I want us to move to a different topic and not fight yet another way of who had the best or who is in the lead, etc... I would like to see the forum, try to stick to what happened and what we all can learn from those experiences. On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 11:37 AM Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote: > > A lot of the early open source used to recreate the SunOS commands and > args. It's what people were used to. Docs were also accessible in a way > that POSIX wouldn't be for a decade .. after that, it grew from there and > SunOS started to feel dated. > It was even more than that. SunOS has some extensions (thread in particular) that pre-dated pthreads. A number of us had built pthreads packages because of Posix, but found ourselves building threading packages in the key of SunOS and later Solaris - why because the ISV's were using Sun's threading scheme. The "why" is simple --- ISV capture for your target was (and still is) the most important driver of selling new platforms. The better job you do in making it easy for someone that has an application, the more attractive your target becomes. Ted sometimes has mentioned the other "Golden rule" about "he who has the gold." As the creator/supplier, it is hard to be magnanimous when you are ahead and it is often difficult to acknowledge real reason >>why<< you are ahead. Plus the people on the other side of the tech delivery (the users), are more driven by basic economics - what is the most cost-effective way to get your job done [* i.e. *this is a classic Christensen disruption]. IBM lost the Research/Universities to DEC which started out being very open and easy to work with and extremely cost-effective. As more $s piled in the market, DEC started to be more and more protective (and moved more and more upscale). To many at the time, DEC compared to IBM (Mainframe S/360 vs. PDP-6/9/10) again -- worse technology, but 'good enough' (and a new growing customer base). The Unix Workstations come out - again 68K vs. Vax (story repeats). Sun eventually taking the lead from DEC. As Larry points out, Sun certainly started being extremely friendly to the same group -- again cost-effective and leading tech. Sun went upscale and the Intel/Microsoft alliance was good enough to a lot of people. I supposed there is the pride of owner/developer-ship; but to me, but the whole Linux vs. BSD (or SunOS or MacOS for that matter) is a silly argument (and wish people would get over it/themselves). *Linux (particularly on INTEL*64) is the current (popular) and cost-effective implementation of Ken, Dennis, Doug, et al. ideas. * No more, no less. Thank goodness it is cost-effective and accessible to all of us and available for us to use to do what we need and want to do. But let's stand on each other's shoulders, not step on toes for some injustice (believed or truly real). *A lot of us and in a number of different places go us to where we are today.* For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold." [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 5521 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 16:15 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 22:25 ` David Arnold 2021-04-04 22:55 ` Clem Cole ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: David Arnold @ 2021-04-04 22:25 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2279 bytes --] > On 5 Apr 2021, at 02:15, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: <…> > IBM lost the Research/Universities to DEC which started out being very open and easy to work with and extremely cost-effective. As more $s piled in the market, DEC started to be more and more protective (and moved more and more upscale). To many at the time, DEC compared to IBM (Mainframe S/360 vs. PDP-6/9/10) again -- worse technology, but 'good enough' (and a new growing customer base). The Unix Workstations come out - again 68K vs. Vax (story repeats). Sun eventually taking the lead from DEC. As Larry points out, Sun certainly started being extremely friendly to the same group -- again cost-effective and leading tech. Sun went upscale and the Intel/Microsoft alliance was good enough to a lot of people. To your earlier point, Unix lost the developers to DOS, and later Windows, because they were more “developer friendly”. I think the dominant factor was simple: cost. You could get a DOS PC with BASIC, and later eg. Turbo Pascal, for a fraction of what a Unix system cost. And while the OS barely warranted the name, it was accessible in a way that Unix wasn’t. Over a quite short time, the third-party documentation, language support, editors, tools, etc, quickly outpaced Unix systems, and Windows provided a smooth (and still vastly cheaper) upgrade path. Unix (in the form of Linux) only recruited a significant audience again when its developer cost (nothing, hard to beat) and ease of remote operation outpaced Windows in the late Internet/early Cloud era. <…> > For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year old basic abstractions are the same. d [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3794 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 22:25 ` David Arnold @ 2021-04-04 22:55 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 2:30 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-04 23:00 ` Bakul Shah 2021-04-04 23:34 ` Josh Good 2 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 22:55 UTC (permalink / raw) To: David Arnold; +Cc: TUHS main list, Josh Good [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2976 bytes --] +1 Your right in both cases.The only thing I will point out about the mobile systems have a unix core - it is extremely hidden and made to be in accessible which to me is exactly what unix was originally working against. Instead of “access methods” of the 60s we have frameworks. We lost simplicity, clarity, and direct access for dancing colors on the LCD and a GUI. Yes they sell a lot of devices but I’m not sure we are better off. On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 6:26 PM David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote: > On 5 Apr 2021, at 02:15, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > > > <…> > > IBM lost the Research/Universities to DEC which started out being very > open and easy to work with and extremely cost-effective. As more $s piled > in the market, DEC started to be more and more protective (and moved more > and more upscale). To many at the time, DEC compared to IBM (Mainframe > S/360 vs. PDP-6/9/10) again -- worse technology, but 'good enough' (and a > new growing customer base). The Unix Workstations come out - again 68K vs. > Vax (story repeats). Sun eventually taking the lead from DEC. As Larry > points out, Sun certainly started being extremely friendly to the same > group -- again cost-effective and leading tech. Sun went upscale and the > Intel/Microsoft alliance was good enough to a lot of people. > > > To your earlier point, Unix lost the developers to DOS, and later Windows, > because they were more “developer friendly”. > > I think the dominant factor was simple: cost. You could get a DOS PC with > BASIC, and later eg. Turbo Pascal, for a fraction of what a Unix system > cost. And while the OS barely warranted the name, it was accessible in a > way that Unix wasn’t. Over a quite short time, the third-party > documentation, language support, editors, tools, etc, quickly outpaced Unix > systems, and Windows provided a smooth (and still vastly cheaper) upgrade > path. > > Unix (in the form of Linux) only recruited a significant audience again > when its developer cost (nothing, hard to beat) and ease of remote > operation outpaced Windows in the late Internet/early Cloud era. > > <…> > > For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own > history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next > Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people > writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I > understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile > target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market > behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” > > > I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems > are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year > old basic abstractions are the same. > > > > > d > > -- Sent from a handheld expect more typos than usual [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 4344 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 22:55 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-05 2:30 ` Dave Horsfall 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2021-04-05 2:30 UTC (permalink / raw) To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 532 bytes --] On Sun, 4 Apr 2021, Clem Cole wrote: > Instead of “access methods” of the 60s we have frameworks. We lost > simplicity, clarity, and direct access for dancing colors on the LCD and > a GUI. Yes they sell a lot of devices but I’m not sure we are better > off. Ahh, BSAM etc... That brings back memories! Incidentally my MacBook spends most of its time running various Terminals into my FreeBSD server; I rarely use Spotlight or that Finder thing (or whatever it's called); gimme a shell prompt any day! -- Dave ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 22:25 ` David Arnold 2021-04-04 22:55 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 23:00 ` Bakul Shah 2021-04-04 23:33 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 23:34 ` Josh Good 2 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Bakul Shah @ 2021-04-04 23:00 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1616 bytes --] > On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote: > >> For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” > > I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year old basic abstractions are the same. Except Unix is kind of hard to see. It wasn't just the hierarchical file system but the idea of composability. Even now we whip up a shell "one-liners" to perform some task we just thought of. All that is lost. And not just on mobile devices. For example search through email messages for something in an email "app". And no UI composability. We have to use extremely heavyweight IDEs such as X-Code weighing at 15GB (even "du -s /Application/X-code" takes tens of seconds!) to painstakingly construct a UI. We can't just whip up a dashboard to measure & display some realtime changing process/entity. There may be equally heavyweight third party tools but there has been no Bell Labs like research crew to distill it down to the essence of composable UI and ship it with every copy. The idea that users too can learn to "program" if given the right tools. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3432 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 23:00 ` Bakul Shah @ 2021-04-04 23:33 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 1:34 ` Bakul Shah 2021-04-05 20:44 ` Kevin Bowling 0 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 23:33 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Bakul Shah; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3558 bytes --] On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote: > > > On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote: > > For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own > history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next > Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people > writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I > understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile > target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market > behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” > > > I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems > are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year > old basic abstractions are the same. > > > Except Unix is kind of hard to see. It wasn't just the hierarchical file > system but the idea of composability. Even now we whip up a shell > "one-liners" to perform some task we just thought of. All that is lost. And > not just on mobile devices. For example search through email messages for > something in an email "app". And no UI composability. We have to use > extremely heavyweight IDEs such as X-Code weighing at 15GB (even "du -s > /Application/X-code" takes tens of seconds!) to painstakingly construct a > UI. We can't just whip up a dashboard to measure & display some realtime > changing process/entity. There may be equally heavyweight third party tools > but there has been no Bell Labs like research crew to distill it down to > the essence of composable UI and ship it with every copy. The idea that > users too can learn to "program" if given the right tools. > Exactly my point. The only difference I suspect is I just don't bother with the IDE (Xcode or VS). Frankly, vi/emacs, or as we discussed a few days ago, ed is still way more preferable when I'm programming. I mentioned in another email Intel's new development suite - OneAPI. Absolutely speaking for myself here, I am a bit at odds with management WRT to much of it, as I feel the direction is a bit miss guided. But I do understand why Intel is doing it/trying. Everyone in the industry seems to be saying "use my Framework, my language, my solution and I will solve your problem." "You will sell more copies of the program if you use my portal, *etc*." Intel to compete, needs to do the same things. To me, it seems a bit like fairy dust - a promise that will work for a set of people, and of course, some firms like my own employer will keep making money (or in the words of the Dr. Sueuss Lorax character: "Biggering and Biggering." As I said in the previous message, it is driven by the other golden rule. What I always felt made UNIX powerful was that it did not seem like the BTL folks were trying to sell anything. They were trying to solve real problems they and the folks at AT&T had when it came to realistically building and deploying systems. Yes, there were hidden from the profit motive at the time because of the unique rules of the 1956 consent degree and we all were winners because of it because they say -- sure here you can use it too. Now that we are back to a winner take all market, (OSVM/360 *vs.* VMS *vs.* winders ...) I think we have traded away designing for the sake of getting the job done properly, for designing to sell as many as possible (*i.e.* be sexy and capture a market, not be simple and do the job well). [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6163 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 23:33 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-05 1:34 ` Bakul Shah 2021-04-05 2:58 ` Kenneth Goodwin 2021-04-05 20:44 ` Kevin Bowling 1 sibling, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Bakul Shah @ 2021-04-05 1:34 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 4541 bytes --] On Apr 4, 2021, at 4:33 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > > > On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org <mailto:bakul@iitbombay.org>> wrote: > > >> On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold <davida@pobox.com <mailto:davida@pobox.com>> wrote: >> >>> For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” >> >> I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year old basic abstractions are the same. > > Except Unix is kind of hard to see. It wasn't just the hierarchical file system but the idea of composability. Even now we whip up a shell "one-liners" to perform some task we just thought of. All that is lost. And not just on mobile devices. For example search through email messages for something in an email "app". And no UI composability. We have to use extremely heavyweight IDEs such as X-Code weighing at 15GB (even "du -s /Application/X-code" takes tens of seconds!) to painstakingly construct a UI. We can't just whip up a dashboard to measure & display some realtime changing process/entity. There may be equally heavyweight third party tools but there has been no Bell Labs like research crew to distill it down to the essence of composable UI and ship it with every copy. The idea that users too can learn to "program" if given the right tools. > > Exactly my point. The only difference I suspect is I just don't bother with the IDE (Xcode or VS). Frankly, vi/emacs, or as we discussed a few days ago, ed is still way more preferable when I'm programming. Many things are easier to convey visually. It would be neat if unix paradigms can be extended to visual design as well. And you certainly can't do visual design easily in vi/emacs. Just like in Autocad you need both interactivity and programmability for creating visual elements. > I mentioned in another email Intel's new development suite - OneAPI. Absolutely speaking for myself here, I am a bit at odds with management WRT to much of it, as I feel the direction is a bit miss guided. But I do understand why Intel is doing it/trying. Everyone in the industry seems to be saying "use my Framework, my language, my solution and I will solve your problem." "You will sell more copies of the program if you use my portal, etc." Intel to compete, needs to do the same things. To me, it seems a bit like fairy dust - a promise that will work for a set of people, and of course, some firms like my own employer will keep making money (or in the words of the Dr. Sueuss Lorax character: "Biggering and Biggering." As I said in the previous message, it is driven by the other golden rule. IMHO a bigger need is some discipline on storage. As things stand, it is hard to extract data from applications for legitimate uses but not so hard to extract for illegitimate uses. If app A for some specific domain dies, there is no guarantee that app B for the same domain can use A's data. > What I always felt made UNIX powerful was that it did not seem like the BTL folks were trying to sell anything. They were trying to solve real problems they and the folks at AT&T had when it came to realistically building and deploying systems. Yes, there were hidden from the profit motive at the time because of the unique rules of the 1956 consent degree and we all were winners because of it because they say -- sure here you can use it too. Similar conditions existed and exist to a certain extent in research orgs of some companies but I think that is a necessary condition, not sufficient. The right research crew can bring in another kind of interactivity -- in creativity, in trying out and critiquing each others' ideas and building on them. And you still need the right key people. > Now that we are back to a winner take all market, (OSVM/360 vs. VMS vs. winders ...) I think we have traded away designing for the sake of getting the job done properly, for designing to sell as many as possible (i.e. be sexy and capture a market, not be simple and do the job well). [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 8164 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-05 1:34 ` Bakul Shah @ 2021-04-05 2:58 ` Kenneth Goodwin 2021-04-05 12:35 ` John Cowan 0 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Kenneth Goodwin @ 2021-04-05 2:58 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Bakul Shah; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 5238 bytes --] On storage discipline- UNIX derived systems deliberately don't enforce file formats. In the UNIX philosophy Everything is a file. Inter program portability can be achieved in a multitude of ways. Pure ascii format with either defined field widths or the more common "special character" delimited fields. Ie pipe delimited or comma or : delimited. xml formatted. There are several conversion programs available as well as write your own. On Sun, Apr 4, 2021, 9:36 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote: > On Apr 4, 2021, at 4:33 PM, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > > > > On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote: > >> >> >> On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote: >> >> For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own >> history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next >> Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people >> writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I >> understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile >> target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market >> behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” >> >> >> I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems >> are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year >> old basic abstractions are the same. >> >> >> Except Unix is kind of hard to see. It wasn't just the hierarchical file >> system but the idea of composability. Even now we whip up a shell >> "one-liners" to perform some task we just thought of. All that is lost. And >> not just on mobile devices. For example search through email messages for >> something in an email "app". And no UI composability. We have to use >> extremely heavyweight IDEs such as X-Code weighing at 15GB (even "du -s >> /Application/X-code" takes tens of seconds!) to painstakingly construct a >> UI. We can't just whip up a dashboard to measure & display some realtime >> changing process/entity. There may be equally heavyweight third party tools >> but there has been no Bell Labs like research crew to distill it down to >> the essence of composable UI and ship it with every copy. The idea that >> users too can learn to "program" if given the right tools. >> > > Exactly my point. The only difference I suspect is I just don't bother > with the IDE (Xcode or VS). Frankly, vi/emacs, or as we discussed a few > days ago, ed is still way more preferable when I'm programming. > > > Many things are easier to convey visually. It would be neat if unix > paradigms can be extended to visual design as well. And you certainly can't > do visual design easily in vi/emacs. Just like in Autocad you need both > interactivity and programmability for creating visual elements. > > I mentioned in another email Intel's new development suite - OneAPI. > Absolutely speaking for myself here, I am a bit at odds with management WRT > to much of it, as I feel the direction is a bit miss guided. But I do > understand why Intel is doing it/trying. Everyone in the industry seems > to be saying "use my Framework, my language, my solution and I will solve > your problem." "You will sell more copies of the program if you use my > portal, *etc*." Intel to compete, needs to do the same things. To > me, it seems a bit like fairy dust - a promise that will work for a set of > people, and of course, some firms like my own employer will keep making > money (or in the words of the Dr. Sueuss Lorax character: "Biggering and > Biggering." As I said in the previous message, it is driven by the other > golden rule. > > > IMHO a bigger need is some discipline on storage. As things stand, it is > hard to extract data from applications for legitimate uses but not so hard > to extract for illegitimate uses. If app A for some specific domain dies, > there is no guarantee that app B for the same domain can use A's data. > > What I always felt made UNIX powerful was that it did not seem like the > BTL folks were trying to sell anything. They were trying to solve real > problems they and the folks at AT&T had when it came to realistically > building and deploying systems. Yes, there were hidden from the profit > motive at the time because of the unique rules of the 1956 consent degree > and we all were winners because of it because they say -- sure here you can > use it too. > > > Similar conditions existed and exist to a certain extent in research orgs > of some companies but I think that is a necessary condition, not > sufficient. The right research crew can bring in another kind of > interactivity -- in creativity, in trying out and critiquing each others' > ideas and building on them. And you still need the right key people. > > Now that we are back to a winner take all market, (OSVM/360 *vs.* VMS > *vs.* winders ...) I think we have traded away designing for the sake of > getting the job done properly, for designing to sell as many as possible ( > *i.e.* be sexy and capture a market, not be simple and do the job well). > > > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 8460 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-05 2:58 ` Kenneth Goodwin @ 2021-04-05 12:35 ` John Cowan 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: John Cowan @ 2021-04-05 12:35 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Bakul Shah; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 189 bytes --] On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote: Except Unix is kind of hard to see. See the Unix Power Classic (incomplete) at http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan/upc/ [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 623 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 23:33 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 1:34 ` Bakul Shah @ 2021-04-05 20:44 ` Kevin Bowling 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Kevin Bowling @ 2021-04-05 20:44 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: Bakul Shah, TUHS main list On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 4:34 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote: > > > > On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 7:01 PM Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org> wrote: >> >> >> >> On Apr 4, 2021, at 3:25 PM, David Arnold <davida@pobox.com> wrote: >> >> For us UNIX historians, we need to be careful and learn from our own history here -- the Cell Phone/Mobile target is the engine for the next Christenian style disruption. It is by far the #1 target for people writing new programs (which I find a little sad personally - but I understand and accept -- time has marched on). In the end, a small mobile target will be the tech on top, and available will be driven by market behavior and those suppliers will be "who has the gold.” >> >> >> I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year old basic abstractions are the same. >> >> >> Except Unix is kind of hard to see. It wasn't just the hierarchical file system but the idea of composability. Even now we whip up a shell "one-liners" to perform some task we just thought of. All that is lost. And not just on mobile devices. For example search through email messages for something in an email "app". And no UI composability. We have to use extremely heavyweight IDEs such as X-Code weighing at 15GB (even "du -s /Application/X-code" takes tens of seconds!) to painstakingly construct a UI. We can't just whip up a dashboard to measure & display some realtime changing process/entity. There may be equally heavyweight third party tools but there has been no Bell Labs like research crew to distill it down to the essence of composable UI and ship it with every copy. The idea that users too can learn to "program" if given the right tools. > > > Exactly my point. The only difference I suspect is I just don't bother with the IDE (Xcode or VS). Frankly, vi/emacs, or as we discussed a few days ago, ed is still way more preferable when I'm programming. > > I mentioned in another email Intel's new development suite - OneAPI. Absolutely speaking for myself here, I am a bit at odds with management WRT to much of it, as I feel the direction is a bit miss guided. But I do understand why Intel is doing it/trying. Everyone in the industry seems to be saying "use my Framework, my language, my solution and I will solve your problem." "You will sell more copies of the program if you use my portal, etc." Intel to compete, needs to do the same things. To me, it seems a bit like fairy dust - a promise that will work for a set of people, and of course, some firms like my own employer will keep making money (or in the words of the Dr. Sueuss Lorax character: "Biggering and Biggering." As I said in the previous message, it is driven by the other golden rule. > > What I always felt made UNIX powerful was that it did not seem like the BTL folks were trying to sell anything. They were trying to solve real problems they and the folks at AT&T had when it came to realistically building and deploying systems. Yes, there were hidden from the profit motive at the time because of the unique rules of the 1956 consent degree and we all were winners because of it because they say -- sure here you can use it too. > > Now that we are back to a winner take all market, (OSVM/360 vs. VMS vs. winders ...) I think we have traded away designing for the sake of getting the job done properly, for designing to sell as many as possible (i.e. be sexy and capture a market, not be simple and do the job well). You guys are onto an interesting thread. If you have time read this https://danluu.com/essential-complexity/ . One thing I find interesting about this article is Dan, who externally seems at least a magnitude smarter and more productive than me, seems to miss that the approach he uses to debunk Brooks is largely a failure of design that probably predates his entry to the problem by layering ever more accidental complexity instead of solving the essential complexity. For instance, a circular buffer of arbitrary size (to the hardware and monetary constraints of his example) could be used to efficiently hold resource usage and drive important business or engineering decisions. A cascading set of buffers could be used to hold higher fidelity data at the top level and decreasing fidelity for longer time series intervals. It doesn't match his approach, which allows finding signal fidelity in extremely noisy data, but that's a problem of its own creation. The non-UNIX approach to things (IDEs, frameworks, big overlay APIs, microservices etc) definitely help with certain things people are willing to pay a lot of money for. However they lend themselves to creating and fixing ever more accidental complexity with ever more accidental complexity. I guess the thing we really like about UNIX, historically, was that it did a good job at exposing the programmer to the essential complexity. If you need to make things go fast, it's right there in your face. If you need to do resource accounting or just about any other task, there's a way to do it on fundamentally limited hardware. Big hardware and lots of people haven't made the essential complexity easier. UNIX, which was developed with discipline, still exerts a positive effect on the essential complexity in systems development when embraced. When not embraced, it becomes a liability (15GB Xcode). Regards, Kevin ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 22:25 ` David Arnold 2021-04-04 22:55 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 23:00 ` Bakul Shah @ 2021-04-04 23:34 ` Josh Good 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Josh Good @ 2021-04-04 23:34 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On 2021 Apr 5, 08:25, David Arnold wrote: > > I feel I should point out that both the dominant mobile operating systems > are Unix-hased. The UI is necessarily new, but astonishingly the 50 year > old basic abstractions are the same. Imagine XinuOS suing Apple and Google for the UNIX "traces" on their mobile platforms, wouldn't that be a sight? -- Josh Good ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good 2021-04-04 14:43 ` Michael Parson 2021-04-04 15:36 ` Warner Losh @ 2021-04-04 20:08 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) 2021-04-04 21:00 ` Jon Steinhart 2 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) @ 2021-04-04 20:08 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Josh Good; +Cc: tuhs Josh Good writes: > Yes, it looks like in those years inferior Unix vendors were playing a game > of lock-in with their customers, while Sun was playing the opposite game: > attracting users and developers with features, openness and by providing a > more joyful user/developer experience. Yes, but weren't they also the first to unbundle the C compiler? Until that point Sun had been doing a good job of elbowing out DEC where I was working. When the C compiler went away we damned near mutinied to become a wall-to-wall Ultrix shop (on the BSD side). Personally, I think Sun's unbundling of C did more to launch the GNU project into the mainstream than anything. Once gcc and binutils became defacto on SunOS systems, GNU's future was set. --lyndon ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 20:08 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) @ 2021-04-04 21:00 ` Jon Steinhart 2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole ` (2 more replies) 0 siblings, 3 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2021-04-04 21:00 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) writes: > Josh Good writes: > > more joyful user/developer experience. Joy-ful? > Yes, but weren't they also the first to unbundle the C compiler? Until Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 21:00 ` Jon Steinhart @ 2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 21:54 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) 2021-04-04 21:58 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 23:48 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-07 5:15 ` Dan Stromberg 2 siblings, 2 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 21:40 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jon Steinhart; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2291 bytes --] On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 5:01 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote: > Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris. > Hey Larry/Rob is that true? I thought the unbundling happened @ Sun when they created a compiler group and finally wrote their own production quality compilers like Masscomp, Apollo, and DEC had at the time. They really needed their own by the time Sun switched from 68K to SPARC. The original SunOS 68K C compiler was based on the MIT RTS compiler that I think Jack Test did the original back end for the Johnson compiler (and Tom Teixeira wrote the assembler). I know it was a couple of years before Sun invested in their own compiler technology. But Sun, (like Masscomp and Apollo), had a lot of ex-DEC folks in Marketing/Sales. DEC had always looked at the compiler has a revenue source [which I have always said is why C beat out BLISS -- C came with UNIX, BLISS cost $5K/cpu for VMS]. I do agree with Lyndon Nerenberg's comment, that Sun start to charge for the C compiler was the biggest help/legitimization that gcc ever got. At Masscomp we had our had own compiler by the second year (which was the primary reason why we won all the performance tests. Our marking weenies wanted to charge for it also. Tom and I were the primary ones that fought it and said, with UNIX you get a C compiler (plus we needed to compile conf.c and a few other things at the customer site for a custom kernel). What sales wanted to s was supply the RTS compiler for free and then charge for the better compiler. We won that skirmish, although I actually think it might have been that the Roger Gourd realized that compiler folk would have had to continue to support the old C compiler, too. So in the end, Fortran and Pascal were unbundled, although I think most (>90%) of the customer base did buy the Fortran system and probably about ⅓ bought Pascal too. Clem FYI - those same ex-DECies took the same ideas to Intel. It's only take me 10-15 years, but some of us finally won that war there. Check out: Download the Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit - you can get icx and ifx for free these days for Linux and Mac. <https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/tools/oneapi/base-toolkit/download.html> [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 6010 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 21:54 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) 2021-04-04 22:02 ` Jon Steinhart 2021-04-04 21:58 ` Clem Cole 1 sibling, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) @ 2021-04-04 21:54 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Clem Cole; +Cc: TUHS main list Clem Cole writes: > Hey Larry/Rob is that true? I thought the unbundling happened @ Sun when > they created a compiler group and finally wrote their own production > quality compilers I'm sure it predated Solaris (SunOS 5). My few remaining brain cells from that era say "4.1." --lyndon ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 21:54 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) @ 2021-04-04 22:02 ` Jon Steinhart 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Jon Steinhart @ 2021-04-04 22:02 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) writes: > Clem Cole writes: > > > Hey Larry/Rob is that true? I thought the unbundling happened @ Sun when > > they created a compiler group and finally wrote their own production > > quality compilers > > I'm sure it predated Solaris (SunOS 5). My few remaining brain cells > from that era say "4.1." My SparcStation-20 that runs SunOS has whatever Sun shipped with the OS. My Ultra-60 that runs Solaris has the Sun compiler that I had to purchase separately and their annoying broken license manager that often kept it from running. Gcc became useful before I stopped using that machine so I switched to that. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 21:54 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) @ 2021-04-04 21:58 ` Clem Cole 1 sibling, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 21:58 UTC (permalink / raw) To: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 759 bytes --] This begs another Sun History question for one of the Sun alums like Larry or Rob. I know with SunOS, Sun shipped the UCB Pascal System from BSD. Did Sun ever develop/buy/ship a real ISO Pascal? As I said, I know that Sun wrote their own C and Fortran eventually [I'm not sure if they did their own front-ends for either but they did do the back ends in-house, as I knew a couple of the folks had once been Susan Graham's students from our UCB days]. Masscomp wrote its own C Front-End but bought the Fortran Front-End from Massachusetts Compilers Corp in Andover and for Pascal, like Apollo, bought a complete compiler for Pascal [IIRC they both bought it from Friberghouse in Framingham - which did the compilers for Prime and DEC's PL/1 Front-End]. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 1211 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 21:00 ` Jon Steinhart 2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole @ 2021-04-04 23:48 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-04 23:53 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-07 5:15 ` Dan Stromberg 2 siblings, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Dave Horsfall @ 2021-04-04 23:48 UTC (permalink / raw) To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society On Sun, 4 Apr 2021, Jon Steinhart wrote: >> Yes, but weren't they also the first to unbundle the C compiler? Until > > Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris. And it cost an arm and a leg, so we ended up using GCC instead. -- Dave ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 23:48 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2021-04-04 23:53 ` Larry McVoy 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-04 23:53 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Dave Horsfall; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 09:48:38AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote: > On Sun, 4 Apr 2021, Jon Steinhart wrote: > > >>Yes, but weren't they also the first to unbundle the C compiler? Until > > > >Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris. > > And it cost an arm and a leg, so we ended up using GCC instead. The funny thing is Sun paid Michael Tiemann to work on g++. And he worked out a deal that it was all open source. Life is weird. ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 21:00 ` Jon Steinhart 2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 23:48 ` Dave Horsfall @ 2021-04-07 5:15 ` Dan Stromberg 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Dan Stromberg @ 2021-04-07 5:15 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Jon Steinhart; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 361 bytes --] On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 2:01 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote: > Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) writes: > > Josh Good writes: > > Yes, but weren't they also the first to unbundle the C compiler? Until > > Yes, that really sucked but that wasn't until Solaris. > Actually, the SunOS 4.1.x cc wasn't used for anything on my systems but building gcc. [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 707 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-04 2:23 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good @ 2021-04-05 13:37 ` Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-07 1:52 ` Adam Thornton 1 sibling, 1 reply; 86+ messages in thread From: Theodore Ts'o @ 2021-04-05 13:37 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Larry McVoy; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 07:23:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > I'm the biggest SunOS 4.x fan boy and I agree. It was ~30 years ago. > Back then, all the open source stuff, or closed source stuff, took a > ton of work to make it work. It just worked on SunOS. I can't tell > you how many times I've brought up X10 or X11 on all sorts of systems > (it was a good learning experience, you learned to figure out that this > is part of my graphics card, this and that and that and that is not, > just ifdef that out and keep going). To be fair, a lot of that was because there's a lot of crappy userspace software out there who assumed that all the world's a Sun (running SunOS). Previously it was Vax running BSD 4.x, and it's been superceded these days with "all the world's Linux (running on x86_64)". I'm a big Linux fan boy, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that that there's a lot of cr*p that uses slow, maddening autoconf and automake build systems, yet have so many Linux'isms in it that won't build anywhere else. The fact that a lot of software easily brings up on a particular OS doesn't mean that it's inherently better; just that it has the dominant mindshare. - Ted ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-05 13:37 ` Theodore Ts'o @ 2021-04-07 1:52 ` Adam Thornton 0 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Adam Thornton @ 2021-04-07 1:52 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Theodore Ts'o, The Eunuchs Hysterical Society [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1851 bytes --] Fortunately, we were once again saved from a monoculture by....mobile phones. Now it has to run on Linux on x86_64 *and* arm64. And because Apple has managed to nail down its brand as The Lifestyle Phone For Rich People, it also has to build in a vaguely-BSD userland for arm (disclaimer: writing this on an M1 Macbook Air, with an iPhone beside me on my desk--but all my real work happens on Linux/x86_64 on Someone Else's Computer, usually Google's but sometimes Amazon's or NCSA's). Adam On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 6:46 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 03, 2021 at 07:23:56PM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote: > > > > I'm the biggest SunOS 4.x fan boy and I agree. It was ~30 years ago. > > Back then, all the open source stuff, or closed source stuff, took a > > ton of work to make it work. It just worked on SunOS. I can't tell > > you how many times I've brought up X10 or X11 on all sorts of systems > > (it was a good learning experience, you learned to figure out that this > > is part of my graphics card, this and that and that and that is not, > > just ifdef that out and keep going). > > To be fair, a lot of that was because there's a lot of crappy > userspace software out there who assumed that all the world's a Sun > (running SunOS). Previously it was Vax running BSD 4.x, and it's been > superceded these days with "all the world's Linux (running on x86_64)". > > I'm a big Linux fan boy, but that doesn't blind me to the fact that > that there's a lot of cr*p that uses slow, maddening autoconf and > automake build systems, yet have so many Linux'isms in it that won't > build anywhere else. > > The fact that a lot of software easily brings up on a particular OS > doesn't mean that it's inherently better; just that it has the > dominant mindshare. > > - Ted > [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2404 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 14:17 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy @ 2021-04-02 15:25 ` Josh Good 2021-04-03 3:10 ` John Cowan 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Josh Good @ 2021-04-02 15:25 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On 2021 Apr 2, 10:17, Steve Nickolas wrote: > > A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is > NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a > court of law). Indeed. > I think this is why, although some of the BSDs did reintegrate the 32V and > V7 stuff, others stayed clear. There's enough of a cloud over the release > that it's still not really safe. Let no one think they are free from Caldera/TSG/XinuOS money thirst. As long as they remain "alive", they will drag to court anyone with enough money to milk in the BSD/Unix/Linux ecosystem. Think I'm being too dramatic? Well, consider this old news from 2003: Why SCO will Soon be Going After BSD Submitted by Alex Alvarez 2003-11-18 SCO 85 Comments “Since they cannot show infringement of SCO Unix code, SCO now plans to challenge the 9-year-old settlement between AT&T and BSD. If it can successfully do that, then its claims that Linux contains tainted code can be substantiated. If it can’t, SCO is dead meat.” Says NewsForge. *Updated*More SCO news: SCO is planning to block Novell’s acquisition of SUSE Linux on the grounds that it has a non-compete agreement with Novell dating back to its purchase of Unix. https://www.osnews.com/story/5169/why-sco-will-soon-be-going-after-bsd/ BSD people be aware: XinuOS has you next in their hit list. Zombified money-sucking vampires, they will not stop until they are put to rest for good. -- Josh Good ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-02 14:17 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-02 15:25 ` Josh Good @ 2021-04-03 3:10 ` John Cowan 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: John Cowan @ 2021-04-03 3:10 UTC (permalink / raw) To: Steve Nickolas; +Cc: TUHS main list [-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1439 bytes --] On Fri, Apr 2, 2021 at 10:18 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co> wrote: > On Fri, 2 Apr 2021, Josh Good wrote: > > > The source for ancient/research UNIX is out of the bag. An unclouded > licence > > to freely use it, that is quite another thing. If Caldera/TSG didn't own > the > > copyright for UNIX, and Novell did (and that has indeed been asserted by > a > > judge in court), then Caldera/TSG had no title to relicense that source. > > This was what I was pointing at, and why I used as many terms as I could > to make it unambiguous what I meant. > > A license to use code copyrighted by Caldera is meaningless if the code is > NOT copyrighted by Caldera, but by Novell (as has been established in a > court of law). Not so fast. What the court said was that Novell did not transfer the copyrights to Caldera *using a specific legal instrument at a specific time*. There is no judicial opinion saying either that Novell did, or Novell did not, transfer the copyright on some other occasion. So the Caldera license is clouded but not ipso facto void. (See .sig below) Remember also that in litigation a fact is any point on which both (or all) sides agree, and its factuality by ordinary standards is irrelevant. John Cowan http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org The first thing you learn in a lawin' family is that there ain't no definite answers to anything. --Calpurnia in To Kill A Mockingbird [-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2639 bytes --] ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM 2021-04-01 14:50 [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-02 5:41 ` David Arnold @ 2021-04-02 16:40 ` Boyd Lynn Gerber 2 siblings, 0 replies; 86+ messages in thread From: Boyd Lynn Gerber @ 2021-04-02 16:40 UTC (permalink / raw) To: tuhs On Thursday 2021-04-01 16:50, Josh Good wrote: > I read the news, and I could not believe it. > > It's April 1st, ain't it? > > But then, this looks like is dated March 31. So it could be for real. > > Behold: https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/ibm_redhat_xinuos/ I do know that AIX was extended by the SCO code. I know that being an outsider doing MISC... on the AIX Development under a NDA. I was suprised how much AIX was enhanced with the code base of SCO. Just a FYI -- Boyd Gerber <gerberb@zenez.com> 801 849-0213 ZENEZ 1042 East Fort Union #135, Midvale Utah 84047 ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 86+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2021-04-07 5:16 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 86+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2021-04-01 14:50 [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:12 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-01 15:27 ` Josh Good 2021-04-01 15:33 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-01 16:14 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-01 16:26 ` John Cowan 2021-04-01 17:54 ` Thomas Paulsen 2021-04-01 16:27 ` Nemo Nusquam 2021-04-02 2:16 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-02 3:52 ` Wesley Parish 2021-04-02 5:26 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-02 16:03 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-02 16:11 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-02 16:39 ` Heinz Lycklama 2021-04-02 17:14 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-02 17:17 ` [TUHS] AIX repeat [was " Charles H Sauer 2021-04-03 1:24 ` [TUHS] " Wesley Parish 2021-04-04 2:46 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-04 2:50 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-04 5:29 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) G. Branden Robinson 2021-04-04 18:22 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 20:54 ` Richard Salz 2021-04-04 21:11 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 0:36 ` John Cowan 2021-04-05 2:19 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-05 18:07 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference John Gilmore 2021-04-05 19:30 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 20:34 ` Richard Salz 2021-04-05 20:42 ` William Cheswick 2021-04-06 4:37 ` Ed Bradford 2021-04-05 20:39 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-05 21:11 ` Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-05 21:17 ` Dan Cross 2021-04-06 15:39 ` Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-06 5:49 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-05 7:48 ` [TUHS] Whither Usenix [was How To Kill A Technical Conference] arnold 2021-04-05 14:05 ` [TUHS] How to Kill a Technical Conference (was: Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM) Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-05 22:26 ` David Arnold 2021-04-04 23:30 ` A. P. Garcia 2021-04-04 3:41 ` [TUHS] Zombified SCO comes back from the dead, brings trial back to life against IBM Gregg Levine 2021-04-04 3:57 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-02 5:41 ` David Arnold 2021-04-02 6:09 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 7:00 ` arnold 2021-04-02 9:53 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 10:26 ` arnold 2021-04-02 14:02 ` Josh Good 2021-04-02 14:17 ` Steve Nickolas 2021-04-02 15:16 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-02 15:28 ` Fabio Scotoni 2021-04-03 1:50 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-03 1:55 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-03 2:23 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-03 2:34 ` Earl Baugh 2021-04-03 6:16 ` Dan Stromberg 2021-04-04 16:18 ` Tony Finch 2021-04-04 1:48 ` David Arnold 2021-04-04 2:23 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-04 8:55 ` Josh Good 2021-04-04 14:43 ` Michael Parson 2021-04-04 15:36 ` Warner Losh 2021-04-04 16:15 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 22:25 ` David Arnold 2021-04-04 22:55 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 2:30 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-04 23:00 ` Bakul Shah 2021-04-04 23:33 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-05 1:34 ` Bakul Shah 2021-04-05 2:58 ` Kenneth Goodwin 2021-04-05 12:35 ` John Cowan 2021-04-05 20:44 ` Kevin Bowling 2021-04-04 23:34 ` Josh Good 2021-04-04 20:08 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) 2021-04-04 21:00 ` Jon Steinhart 2021-04-04 21:40 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 21:54 ` Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) 2021-04-04 22:02 ` Jon Steinhart 2021-04-04 21:58 ` Clem Cole 2021-04-04 23:48 ` Dave Horsfall 2021-04-04 23:53 ` Larry McVoy 2021-04-07 5:15 ` Dan Stromberg 2021-04-05 13:37 ` Theodore Ts'o 2021-04-07 1:52 ` Adam Thornton 2021-04-02 15:25 ` Josh Good 2021-04-03 3:10 ` John Cowan 2021-04-02 16:40 ` Boyd Lynn Gerber
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