Caldera to Open Part of UNIX Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Tuesday August 21, 2001 @01:22AM from the taking-their-own-sweet-time dept.

Andy Tai writes: "According to this Caldera press release, Caldera is beginning to release the components of the original Unix source code under the GPL or other licenses (such as Caldera's Open Access license). While some of these Unix utilities (grep and awk) may not be very useful, since GNU equivalents have been available for many years, the original Unix tools going GPL has a big symbolic meaning--the original Unix is gradually becoming Free Software! Unix was the giant RMS aimed to replace. Now GNU is gradually taking the place of the original Unix."

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Re:GNU isn't replacing Unix by lupercalia · 2001-08-21 01:46 · Score: 4, Informative

Er, read the article. The source is not just being open sourced, but GPLed. So it *is* becoming Free Software.

It doesn't have to be official GNU software to be Free; it only has to be under a Free license.

And don't think for a moment that this would have happened without both the GNU project and the Linux kernel -- dare I say GNU/Linux? The GNU utilities have gotten better than most of their proprietary equivalents, and Linux is quickly getting better than the proprietary Unices. That's why the vendors are slowly giving way to the unstoppable Linux. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!