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Domain: tuhs.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to tuhs.org.
Stories · 4
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The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix
riverat1 writes "After AT&T dropped the Multics project in March of 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs continued to work on the project, through a combination of discarded equipment and subterfuge, eventually writing the first programming manual for System I in November 1971. A paper published in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM on Unix brought a flurry of requests for copies. Since AT&T was restricted from selling products not directly related to telephones or telecommunications, they released it to anyone who asked for a nominal license fee. At conferences they displayed the policy on a slide saying, 'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.' From that grew an ecosystem of users supporting users much like the Linux community. The rest is history." -
Back To SCO
wampl3r writes " Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens deliver a great response to SCO's recent Letter to the Open Source Community. Their response does a good job of presenting many of the finer points we have been arguing about around here, but it's nice to see them in such a formal, well-thought-out letter." Munchola adds "Meanwhile, ComputerWire, from where McBride misquoted Perens in the first place, sets the record straight: 'In his statement McBride appears to have attributed a ComputerWire paraphrase as a quote from Perens.'" stefan points to this response to McBride's letter from Kevin Bedell, LinuxWorld Magazine's Editor. Below, find one reader's idea about the "stolen lines" SCO claims are in the Linux kernel, and one expert's claim that SCO might not know some of its own source code very well.VikingBrad writes "The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on Dr Warwick Toomey of The Unix Heritage Society claiming that SCO may not know the origin of code in System V, including claims that there is a lot of BSD software in Sys V."
Alex writes "I wondered where the 100k+ lines of copied code in the linux kernel would come from in comparison to the SCO Unixware stuff. Then a thought popped up in my head: what if they just compared linewise? All those empty lines in the code would have the same content. But how many empty lines are in the Linux Kernel Code? This small shell script counts them for you:
emptylines=0; function parse_dir () { for file in $1/*; do if [ -d "$file" ]; then parse_dir $file; else while read line; do if [ "$line" = "" ]; then emptylines=$[$emptylines+1]; echo $emptylines; fi; done
Kernel 2.4.22, yet cleaned of the code which SCO claimed was stolen, has still 733140 empty lines, probably copied and pasted by the bad, bad kernel developers from the good, good SCO guys..." -
Caldera releases original unices under BSD license
q[alex] writes "Caldera International has done a very good thing. They have released the "Ancient" Unices they inherited when they purchased SCO under a "BSD-style" license. The license is available here, instructions on finding the source are here. Caldera (and before that SCO) had required people to obtain a free (as in beer) but somewhat restrictive license in order to get these old sources. The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool." -
Caldera releases original unices under BSD license
q[alex] writes "Caldera International has done a very good thing. They have released the "Ancient" Unices they inherited when they purchased SCO under a "BSD-style" license. The license is available here, instructions on finding the source are here. Caldera (and before that SCO) had required people to obtain a free (as in beer) but somewhat restrictive license in order to get these old sources. The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool."