From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: pechter@gmail.com (William Pechter) Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 20:05:38 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] System Economics (was is Linux "officially branded UNIX") In-Reply-To: <20170315235525.GC15120@naleco.com> References: <20170314224547.GB14659@naleco.com> <20170315192815.GA15120@naleco.com> <20170315235525.GC15120@naleco.com> Message-ID: Josh Good wrote: > On 2017 Mar 15, 15:45, Clem Cole wrote: >> SVR4 (aka UnixWare) was available for source - the problem is many people >> did like the price to see it. It was $100K. But the source was available >> it was open and many, many of people with PC and had access to it, wrote >> drivers for it etc. There were books published about it. It was hardly >> secret. > Nobody says UNIX source code was "secret". It just was not open after > UNIX began to be directly sold by AT&T post Bell-breakage. > > If UNIX source codeHa was "open" at $100K, then Windows NT source code can > also be seen as open if you have enough money to buy Microsoft. Having worked at a minicomputer company (Concurrent Computer Corporation) back in the 87 days... I can say that there was no way I could access the SysV sources without being an approved developer or support engineer. I was the IT Systems Administrator with the company managing their Xelos SysVR2 systems in the MIS department and I had no access. When I found a serious bug they looked at it. Reproduced it. Reported it to AT&T who checked the will not fix box on their ticket and closed the bug. The problem was that cron would malloc memory until it couldn't get any more and core dump. This stopped automatic backups and jobs from being scheduled reliably and was critical to my operations. The fix was I had to write a script to kill -0 cron with a sleep... and if the job was no longer there -- restart cron. AT&T support basically said "Get a machine that implements demand paged virtual memory and it won't happen." Pretty sad. I had worked for DEC and other places that would've fixed the code for a customer. Especially an OEM. Concurrent had pretty much put Unix on the back burner until they bought Masscomp. Their only OS they were pushing at the time was OS/32. Xelos was a pretty decent SVR5.2 port -- the next version even had ksh in it. I wanted to get a 3280 and see how Xelos on it compared with something equivalent on a VAX 8650. Bill Pechter at gmail.com