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Caldera to Open Part of UNIX Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on 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."

4 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. GNU isn't replacing Unix by brianvan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Rather, GNU is slowly becoming irrelevant as people decide to release free software on their own terms.

    Besides, just cause the source is being opened doesn't mean that Unix is becoming free. It's just becoming open source. This seems to be the same ghastly mistake that I've seen many people modded down for. Surely such an error should be clarified on the front page... unless it's really that confusing and we should just admit that the ideologies so highly regarded (and viciously defended) here are arranged as a house of cards similar to Microsoft's own source code.

    Hey, at least "embrace, extend, crush to death" is easy to follow along with.

  2. Not useful? by castlan · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I would say this is indeed very useful, if you have any Legacy UNIX machines still operating. Now their (in some cases) ancient software can be updated or bugfixed where they were previously unsupported. Similar programs, like grep, can be comprehensively compared for differences in functionality. They can also be generally compared for efficiency of code, and (in the case of GNU compatible licensing) even be possibly merged with their GNU equivalents.

    This is, for many I'll guess, more than just symbolic.

    And I'll bet that RMS feels damn fuzzy inside...

  3. On their own terms? Bwahahahaha.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Please, Mr. Insightful, please tell me with a straight face that this is happening on their own terms. Please tell me this would have happened in the absence of Linux/BSD.


    I'm not saying it's a completely bad thing, just take off the rose colored glasses. OSS copied Unix, mostly replaced it, and this is an attempt by Caldera to try and get some market share back, or just throw out some (now irrelevant) code that won't do them any good any more, thanks to Linux et al. They were #1 in servers, you guys copied their functionality and gutted their customer base, so what should they do now?


    And it is 'free' but hardly on their own terms.

  4. Re:GNU isn't even close to becoming irrelevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    A quick review of sourceforge finds 25,460 projects, 25,400 of which are skinnable graphical front ends for MP3 players.

    The rest are logfile manipulation perl scripts.

    Get real, guys.