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SCO Makes Open Source Contributions
Ethanol writes: "SCO announced this morning that they're releasing cscope (a really, really sharp development tool for large C/C++ projects) and will soon release fur (a profiling/analysis/reordering tool for relocatable binaries that can speed up execution times quite a bit) under the BSD license. See their press release for details. "
Microsoft has just enough pride to go incorporate the source into another product (quietly), and then promote it as a feature. They (supposedly) have and will continue to use software stolen from BSD - the Win2K TCP stack apparently bears great resemblence to the OpenBSD stack. I wouldn't put it beyond them. SCO needs to remember that by entering into open-source, they trod on a fine line with competing with Microsoft on a general scale. But good for them - it shows that they truely believe that open source will previal in the end. Heck, I wouldn't even care if they kept the kernel proprietary, and their X server proprietary, and just made all of the user-land tools open-source. That'd be fine with me - I am a BeOS user.
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IIRC there was a less than 100,000 lines limit for cs. Do you know if this is a problem still?
Microsoft used to own a piece of SCO via the deal that got SCO Xenix. But Microsoft not so recently divested it's investment in SCO (I think in the past 2 or 3 years). Since then, SCO's been standing on it's own legs... But even before that, Microsofts involvement with SCO was minimal, or even non-existant.... Otherwise, NT would probably have all sorts of nifty gadgets from SCO's products, and vice versa... Unixware and Openserver would have surely included all sorts of licensed Microsoft technologies, making them 100% compatible with Windows services and breaking away from most Unix standards.
My opinion.
There has been a free version of cscope for quite a while now. It's called cs and available from ftp://cantor.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/unix/.
In my experience, cscope is much better than cs for anything but very small projects. With small projects cs is fine, but when I tried to use it to dig into the Apache source code, all I got were seg faults. Meanwhile cscope just kept on running.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Cscope is harcoded to use /usr/tmp which doesn't exist on all systems. You can either set the TMPDIR environment variable to, say /var/tmp, make a symlink from /usr/tmp to /var/tmp or modify the TMPDIR #define in common/main.c and recompile cscope to fix it once and for all. With access to the tmp dir, it works fine.
I was all over the download pages at SCO and there is no "Ancient UNIX" there (yet?). I did find products as described in the article so they are off to a good start. I am thinking my 4.4BSD-Light with a copyright date of 1994 will have to wait a while for system V neighbor; in the CD rack that is. -d
They (supposedly) have and will continue to use software stolen from BSD - the Win2K TCP stack apparently bears great resemblence to the OpenBSD stack.
Hold on a minute there. I'm no fan of MS, but to call this stealing really misses the point. The BSD license specifically allows you to use licensed code in non-open commercial apps. Even if Win2K's TCP is an exact copy of BSD, it's not "stolen", because the license says it's OK. If it was GPLed code it'd be a different matter, but how can a copy of BSD code be "stolen"?
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
Not many companies will release their core products as open source unless they feel they have nothing left to be gained by keeping them proprietary. Witness Apple. Darwin's open, because it's based on Mach and the BSD's for one, for two, their OS is so much more than a kernel, there's nothing to be gained by keeping it proprietary. But Quartz (their display technology) remains closed, because if it were opened, it could migrate to every other OS and leave apple with no compelling reasons why people should use their particular brand of software.
Be happy for the bones that are thrown... In time, maybe more companies will be more and more willing to hand more important pieces of their product line to the open source community. The chances of that plummet when people thumb their noses at them, insult them, etc...
Forget my other post about not finding the link. AND I understand, now, that it is not sys v, fine by me. -d
I agree with your reply. While I still feel like someone is throwing us a bone, I am gratefull for it and I'm looking forward to playing with it on the project I'm working on.
When I asked for the good stuff you'll notice I was being sarcastic...notice the smiley emoticon at the end of my original post.
Cheers
Cool, but where on the website are the ancient Unix versions?
When Redhat went public not so long ago, many /.ers pointed at RHAT's market cap and triumphantly stated that the first order of business should be acquiring SCO so they could release all of SCO's products under the GPL... Now SCO comes forward and starts releasing their products under even more lenient licenses and they get slapped for it?
Of course they had to attack OpenSource way back when... It was untested in the business world, and all they saw was a competitor to themselves on the x86 turf they'ed chosen to live on... They've now realized that they still have some advantages in some areas, a good name among some of their customers, and are realizing that Linux is mainly headed for a collision course with Windows, and not themselves, so they're arming Linux better for it's battle.
I say good for them! I hope that they can continue to revamp themselves to survive in the 21st century.
Please forgive my ignorance... but will this tool work with other languages?
It looks like it is matches text strings in the source files.
I haven't done much C or C++, but I work with PhP and HTML (i know it is not a language per say) daily, and PERL on occassion. And it looks like it could help me manage the larger sites i maintain.
-ms2k
...head on over to freshmeat and look up cbrowser, a nice TCL/Tk graphical front-end.
And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
(This is not flamebait, I am serious.)
Are you Cliff Stoll?
I'm not talking cut-and-paste copying, but careful adaptation to the MS environment. One of the primary reasons (I think) they switched everything to NT was that it made porting easier - much code that didn't like DOS before now compiles out-of-the box on Win2K. They'd do it. Note how much BSD and GNU software is used on BeOS, which has a completely different OS paradigm.
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Thanks
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Yes, I too use cscope quite heavily at work. Interesting where it ended up. I'm pretty sure it used to be a AT&T product. In fact I believe we bought a license for a few hundred bucks from AT&T and that included source code. As to Emacs integration...There is cscope.el. Maybe not quite as tight as etags but I find it very useful. Gary
I'll consider myself corrected, then. I've had this sig for a few weeks - I guess nobody else noticed. Thanks.
So you wouldn't correct Cliff, even if you had evidence? He seems like an OK guy, you probably would survive the experience ;)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
cool. I've been thinking for a while that one of the things that mkae programs unnecessarily slow are ordering problems in libraries, symbol resolution and other dl* magic. if this 'fur' program makes that faster, we'll have to say thanks SCO.
Hmm I'd pay many adulations to then email privately :)
The press release also states that the
"Ancient Unix Source" license is also now
at not charge -- formerly $100. With this
license you can also get BSD and Ultrix source!
Goto mckusick.org. What with this and Solaris source available, why is anyone still hacking Linux?
You might try id-utils too (check freshmeat). I use id-utils.el in Emacs a lot on code I'm unfamiliar with. If you want to see who calls the function you're on, you just hit M-x gid and you get a list of hits in the compile buffer. Then you can just iterate through the list. Pretty cool.
The thing I like about cscope, from what I've seen, is that it does more and generates the ID file dynamically. Choices are good!
Microsoft SCHEDULE 13G
According to my personal experience with Open
Source projects (http://phplib.netuse.de) it
takes at least 6 months starting with the release
of proper documentation until you get the first
developers who really grok what is going on.
It takes at least 12 months for the project
to get a proper community which is able to
self-support itself. Finding developers with
a vision who are able to develop the project
beyond its current scope depends on luck and
charisma. No time scope can ge given for that.
© Copyright 2000 Kristian Köhntopp
Secondly, I'd like to say that SCO is very brave releasing as BSD instead of GPL or a custom-designed licence deisgned to protect them. Under the BSD license, (IANAL) incorporation into proprietary products is allowed - that means that Mickeysoft could go off and take SCO's stuff and come out with Visual (insert name of SCO tool here)++. Good for them - it shows true faith in the Open Source community.
Thirdly, this might be an experiment by SCO on Open Source. Let's not let them down - further openings will be good. Let's not forget that there is some virtue to SVR4 Unix, and I'd like to see some of those tools and abilities on Linux.
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Putting aside the grammatical curiosity of how you historically preserve something, rather than preserving something historic, does this mean I can log in and look at old SYSV code, or is this something else entirely that I'm not getting?
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
Say what you will about SCO, but they have been in business for nearly/over (not sure which) 20 years. In that time they had a multi-user/multi-tasking OS called Xenix which ran on the lowly 286, at a time when MS said it couldn't be done, and before OS/2 was ever released.
I applaud this initiative, and hope that they continue to support the community.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
If I hadn't responded to this thread I'd moderate you down.
Your comment is arrogant and uncalled for. Companies have to earn money. SCO is in the Unix business. Why bash them for a good deed?
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
One of the big things Open Source advocates have been asking companies to do is BSD or GPL applications that they plan to drop support for. If they no longer plan to profit off them, why not allow the users to keep, maintain, and improve them. The real answer is the upgrade treadmill, but no need to discuss that.
I am not terribly familiar with this product, but obviously this is a good thing, you can learn something from any sample of code.
What I wonder, is when companies release their source code like this, how much do users pick it up, redistribute, etc.? I mean, Darwin and Mozilla looked dead for a while, but then they picked open some help (I know Mozilla did, did Darwin?). Mozilla and Darwin were HUGE projects, it makes sense that users took a while to jump in there. On the otherhand, will a project like this be picked up and improved by proponents of open source, or will we just say, "finally, they get it" take their software and run?
I mean, the idea is, according to RMS, we have a fundamental right to copy digital data, and that licenses that prohibit this are fundamentally immoral, so he'll write a free OS that we can copy.
The Linux community says, we'll work with corporate interests, because they can sell support. We'll help improve the product, and you can sell support for it and make lots of money.
Now, is the latter true? Are we helping the companies that are releasing their source code with the promise that we will help, or are we grabbing their code and adding the useful bits into our pet GPL projects?
Alex
-cibrPLUR
Now all we need is lint...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This is bound to start a flamewar of some sort, but it's a question that I've wondered about for a while and the nifty GUI to this inspires it: I've found that Tcl/Tk is great for whipping up interfaces to C code but I remember that there were a lot of hard words spoken about the licensing by RMS. Is there still considered to be a problem with this for Free projects? If so then what other routes do people take for easily-portable GUI'ed software? Python+mxWindows? Qt? Gtk? I don't really like the last two options because of what I perceive as the amount of work involved in becoming familiar with them, but perhaps I'm wrong?
<offtopic> Also, does anyone know how to get around the size limit using etags? < /offtopic >
I run
So- don't get all excited/agitated/irritated just yet.
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Many of you look at the BSD license, and say, well, companies can use the code and adapt it to their propietary products. Well, DUH! that's the whole point. For most of it's life, the BSD camp has been focused on improving computer design overall, not only their system.
;)
;)
In most applications, you cannot just cut and paste code, you need to adapt it to fit your frame work, which makes it quite different. All that is left is the ideal on the design, which like standards, should be shared. The importance and the competitive edge is gained by the better implementation, well sometimes at least.
The BSD camp practically fueled the used of the tcp/ip protocol, greatly due to their fact that's their tcp/ip stack was freely available for others to build on, and oddly enouhg, it is still arguably the fastest performer.
Need i mention bind or apache? both improved by corporations despite their BSD license. The BSD license allows a greater corporate appeal to OSS. Great designs need to be shared
And for those who some how believe that th elinux ip stack is catching up... heh, try packet capture/shaping on a linux tcp/ip stock.... not fun... the reasons why anyoen doing serious network software would not choose the linux tcp/ip stack... ask junipernetworks why their choose freebsd
Well, those where my $0.25... before you blabbler away.. read a bit on the BSD mentality at freebsd.org
I care. I don't use SCO but my opinion of this act of donation is that they did a damn good thing. I love this tool and appreciate the release, Thank you SCO.
grope (GNU Rope) was gonna be a tool that does what it sounds like fur does, ie. re-order chunks of machine code in an executable to move bits of code that get used together next to each other, using profiling and what not. I got all excited about it, and then never heard of it again. Anyone out there know what happened to his project?
fish and pipes
Why is it only 13.0? The latest version available from AT&T is 13.7, I think. I had a copy of 13.3 at a previous job, and I "ported" it to linux as well (there were maybe 2 minor changes needed). There is a commercial release available at http://www.gtlinc.com/Products/Cscope/cscope.html, which they call 14.0.
It will be a very welcome addition to have cscope join the ranks of code management tools - it's something I use at work a lot to navigate very quickly through a vast amount of code, and it has different strengths and weakness when compared with etags (Emacs Tags for the uninitiated).
From my experience, cscope wins over Etags for navigation because it produces lists of likely jump points, whereas etags invoke with a tags search can leave you at some first level define which is not necessarily where you want to be (multiple #ifdef #define ... type calls muck up the etag reference lists). Cscope is also pretty speedy with its reference database, and can be stacked inside an editor, so you can do cscope -> editor -> cscope -> editor and then you can work back out by quiting the chosen level which makes it nice for chasing ideas through the code.
On the other hand, the tight integration between etags and Emacs means that etags still comes in very useful for traversal of source files - it just doesn't quite offer the same flexibility that cscope does.
Of course, I may have just started a major holy war, but such is life ...!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
SCO (Santa Cruz Organization) ... is owned by Microsoft ... in some way, or were, at one point. I'm not really sure since Im a Linux zealot, not a UNIX expert.
spam, spam, spam, spam, e-mail, news and spam.
There has been a free version of cscope for quite a while now. It's called cs and available from ftp://cantor.informatik.rwth-aache n.de/pub/unix/.
Both versions work with the graphical tcl/tk interface cbrowser.
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MS OWNS part of SCO, so they are probably able to get what they want anyways.
Through Open Desktop 3.0, SCO bundled a Unix port of Microsoft C (ODT2 got C5.1, and ODT3 got C6). Microsoft also created a port of (DOS) MS Word 5.0 for SCO Unix. It ran on ASCII terminals and under X.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
**Of course they had to attack OpenSource way back when... **
:)
I respectfully disagree. Instead of viewing it as competition they could have viewed it as free promotion for *nix and embraced it. Linux was the media darling. You couldn't click on a website without seeing Linux. That was the marketing opportunity of a lifetime. All they had to do was come out and pay lip service to Linux for a ton of free PR. They had to realize that people were going to try Linux regardless of what they said. Why shoot yourself in the foot?
I don't wish any ill-will on them but I think you will see them slowly go away (they already are) as Linux becomes more enterprise ready.
Also...this looks like a nifty tool, but it seems like they are just throwing us a bone. Come on guys, if you want to do something for the Linux community give us the good stuff
cscope + xvi (vi in an xterm) is the only IDE I need. And since I've discovered this week that you can query cscope non-interactively from the command line, I use it when writing scripts to parse code rather than having to build that intelligence into my scripts. It isn't perfect (especially when you combine c code and assembly) but it's usually close enough that you can find the spot you're looking for.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
me-me-me sounds more like a conservative ideology than a liberal one.