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."

Comments

Yes!

[tanuki_x]

Now we can see how these "unix" thingies work and write one that works on PCs!

Re:Yes!

[alexburke]

Now we can see how these "unix" thingies work

The whole point is that eunuchs' thingies don't work.

*whispering*

Oh, uhh, I mean... never mind.

Great!

[twilight30]

Never would have thought Caldera would have done something as community-oriented as this, given their history of late.

However, a big thank-you from this Slashdot reader for their act. I appreciate it, and I know I'm not alone...

Why is this cool?

[SpookComix]

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.

I don't mean to sound like a stick in the mud here, but why exactly is this cool? This source code was obviously available before, for people who actually needed it. Why, then, is the simple fact that anyone can get to it now a "cool" thing?

Will this spawn development of breakthrough products? Will this help administrators of these old system finally take control of their network?

Or is this just another geek trophy to have, print, wave around over coffee, and ultimately collect dust on shelves full of other useless time-wasting trinkets?

--SC

Re:Why is this cool?

[twilight30]

Historical purposes. Developmental and teaching purposes, more importantly.

Re:Why is this cool?

[Stan Chesnutt]

It is great to have this available for study. And, this might inspire a whole new generation of PDP-11 emulators so you can sit down and actually run the original bits (emulation of an ASR-33 not considered mandatory).

Computer Science would also be served well if the original Multics sources/binaries were released. Although it would be much harder to write a Honeywell emulator!

Re:Why is this cool?

[supabeast!]

"Will this spawn development of breakthrough products? Will this help administrators of these old system finally take control of their network?"

Yes and yes. Now developers can do just about anything with the code, and the being able to do so will allow for bettered versions of the original code to replace some of the still antiquated code out there with newer, better versions, as well as improving interoperability with those ancient programs and newer stuff.

Re:Why is this cool?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, in order to partially emulate an ASR-33, you could perhaps connect an IBM selectric up to your computer while running a looped recording of gunfight and an idling 58 chevy with one blown piston. For the final touch, you could replace the room's light switch with a dimmer switch and wiggle it back and forth whenever you are printing something out.

Re:Why is this cool?

[chris_sawtell]

This is a tiny fragment of Multics Source

It's only 20 years old, surely we can find more of it?

Re:Why is this cool?

[Dr. Tom]

This is why it's cool:

[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
(syntax errors like =|, =&, and the rand() API changed)
[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
[~/new/usr/src/games]% wump
Instructions? (y-n) n
You are in room 8
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 10 6 18
Move or shoot (m-s) m
which room? 10
You are in room 10
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 19 8 1
Move or shoot (m-s) s
Give list of rooms terminated by 0
8 6 0
You slew the wumpus
Another game? (y-n)

Plaintext license

[jensend]

Here's the text of the license before it gets slashdotted or for those who don't want to bother with PDF:

January 23, 2002
Dear UNIX enthusiasts,
Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, including creating derived binary products created from the source code. The source code for which Caldera
International, Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems: 32-bit 32V UNIX
16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Caldera International, Inc. makes no guarantees or commitments that any source code is available from Caldera International, Inc.
The following copyright notice applies to the source code files for which this license is granted.
Copyright(C) Caldera International Inc. 2001-2002. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the
following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.
Neither the name of Caldera International, Inc. nor the names of other contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
USE OF THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED FOR UNDER THIS LICENSE BY CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. BE LIABLE FOR
ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Very truly yours,
/signed/ Bill Broderick
Bill Broderick
Director, Licensing Services

* UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries.

I've been using this same software for a year now

[buckrogers]

to play around with the old Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition with source code by John Lions.

It is amazing how much you can learn from this old stuff. And now we can discuss, modify, and share the code with each other.

This is really great! Thanks Caldera!

Thanks -- and not just to Caldera.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's wonderful that Caldera decided, pretty much without even being directly asked, to free the sources to historical Unix.

It's noteworthy that they decided to do this just a few days after, finally, the successful end of Perry Metzger's long campaign to free the historical Unix *documentation* (perhaps more useful, these days). It sure seems to me that once they seriously considered Perry's request they must have realized the PR benefits they could reap by freeing the source code, too.

Thanks, Caldera -- and if you too are grateful to Caldera, you should probably be grateful to Perry as well.

Ancient Code

[Waffle Iron]

The good news is you can't have a VM flamewar running on a machine that lacks virtual memory.

The bad news is: 'TECO' r00ls; 'ed' suX0rs.

Original UNIX Source

[rusti999]

Wanna see the original UNIX source? Check this book.

Yuck - Old style BSD license

[elbuddha]

Their "BSD-style" license is actually the old-style BSD license, which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause:

All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.

What most people think of now as the BSD license does not contain such a clause, and has not for quite some time.

Re:Yuck - Old style BSD license

[cthugha]

And giving credit where credit's due is a bad thing why, exactly? One of the key motivations for doing Open Source/Free software is the kudos you get, so I really have no problem with authors requiring that licensees not pass the work off as their own.

Re:Yuck - Old style BSD license

[bugg]

Both you and the other poster in response to the parent are quite mistaken about what the advertising clause means.

Copyright reproduction clauses exist in *every* version of the BSD license. The license & copyright must be reproduced with the product regardless of the advertising clause. What the advertising clause does is require that in any advertisement for the product, that credit is given. This can be interpreted to apply to things like newspaper ads, where at the bottom they'd have to say "contains code copyright regents of the university of california" or in a radio ad, where they'd have to have one of the voices giving credit... this makes per-word advertising impossible.

Copyright reproduction clauses are good, advertising clauses are bad. There are webpages out there that can cover the issue in more detail than what I just described.

Re:I've been using this same software for a year n

[Saint Aardvark]

Absolutely. Someone's already put a link to Amazon for the book, so go check it out. It's amazing how damned interesting it is to read it, to see how things like task switching and process creation are actually done. (Keep in mind I came into Unix as a hobby, so I haven't taken any of this in CS courses.)

Someone was asking up above what the point was. Aside from learning from reading yet more code, this is as close as we can get to original Unix. If I was given the chance to check out the original manuscript for, say, the Revelation of St. John (I'm atheist, but religion fascinates me), I'd jump at the chance to see what changes have been made between the original and what we've got now. You'd learn an awful lot about how things have changed -- not just the book itself but everything else. I think that would apply with Unix just as much.

Couple things: buckrogers, I downloaded the source for the PDP-11 version a year or so ago. The original tarball has been lost in the mists of hd upgrades, but I do remember not being able to correlate Lions' code sections with the source I downloaded. Has your experience been any different?

And another thing: I'm sure I went picked up the code -- just the code -- for the PDP-11 version, way back when. Now, though, I can't seem to find it on their site. I thought I checked through the directories pretty thoroughly -- can anyone tell me where it is, or provide a link to their own copy?

Now, of course, I've got to check out the PDP-11 simulator. (I'm sure I heard about one that was written in Java, but when I did a search on Google it seemed like every damn CS student in the world has built one as a class project...someone else'll have to provide the link.)

Excellent, ....good code, some of it....

[CDWert]

People are scoffing, but oh what a kludge, caldera only did it for the publicity, who cares.

There is some GOOD code in there, some is crap just like all projects.

There are/were some code segments that were optimized VERY well, and hy dont laugh I remerber USING a pdp-11.

Point is the horsepower ot these machines sucked by modern standards, things we take for granted were MAJOR tasks, some of those routines were refined over a lifecycle longer than BSD and Linux combined.

My dad, a coder starting in the 60 tought me in about 1979, when he handed over his collection of computer mags, Byte and the lot, you can NEVER , EVER have too much source code, good or bad.

Im could care less what Caldera's motives are theyre a dead fish. When was the last time YOU installed that distro ? BUT they should be congratulated, I agree they should open up the other sources as well, but who am I to ask, hey while youre at it all people reading this post should give me all their old ????, see dosent fly. Its theirs , they bought it, and paid for it, sorta.

Im gonna grab it asap, there about 4 things I hate in the 2.4.18/2.5 series kernel, BSD IMHO dosent have the solution in theirs either, I keep looking , Im at a mental roadblock so to say(nothing new there) if these sources even point me in the right direction to solve one of those problems I will be etternally greatful

Re:Excellent, ....good code, some of it....

[Animats]

There is some GOOD code in there, some is crap just like all projects.

Very true. Two real howlers in PDP-11 UNIX:

• Dumb scheduler. Three compute-bound processes near the head of the process table would starve out all other processes.
• Really dumb malloc. O(N^2) speed. It's Knuth's fault. When he discusses memory allocation in the original edition of Fundamental Algorithms, he gives a bad algorithm, says it's bad, and leaves the good one as an exercise for the student. UNIX used the dumb one, right out of the book down to the variable names.

This license has the dreaded advertising clause

[yerricde]

this is incredibly useful especially for GNU developers who have made gnu reimplementations of these software. now they can get rid of some of BSD code in the GNU Tools

Wrong. These tools are licensed under the Old BSD license, which includes an advertising clause: "All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc." According to RMS, an advertising clause makes a license incompatible with GNU GPL.

Reading the install notes.....

[Jester99]

is really amazing.

If you ignore the instructions for copying the system from magtape to disk (!), everything else looks very similar to the install notes for most modern unices today....

They tell you to 'cat' files to the printer, 'tar' together items for backup storage, 'sync' before you turn the machine off, and remember to check 'df' regularly to make sure your users don't fill up the disk, and clean out the /tmp directory periodically.

Reading documentation written 30 years ago which almost hasn't changed at all is really a beautiful thing. (Well, some things have changed. During bootup, the 'mem' line reports user-available memory in bytes. :)

Hats off to the developers of a system which is so flexible that hasn't really needed interface changing at all to adapt to 30 years of great changes in computer design and usage!

Re:I've been using this same software for a year n

[Anonymous Coward]

Try compiling:

ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/pub/PDP-11/Sims/Supnik_2.3 /s ources/sim_2.3d

build the pdp11 emulator.

download an image of the v5 root partition and save the contents below to a file named v5init:

set cpu 18b
att rk0 v5root
boot rk

from the shell, type "pdp11 v5init". at the boot prompt, type "unix".

Voila. Remember that "cd" doesn't work, but "chdir" does. The only thing coming close to a backspace key is the # key.

Re:Double ewww...SCO/Open Server

[Ethanol]

First off--you're dissing an operating system released by one company in 1993, because a different company has released the source to a different OS, which was written by still a third company, decades before the one you're complaining about. How, exactly, is this even remotely on-topic?

That said, even though it isn't on-topic, I'd like to respond, for personal reasons: I'm one of the half-dozen engineers responsible for maintaining SCO OpenServer. (In point of fact, I'm the one responsible for that DHCP client you mentioned. BTW, if you think it's easy to maintain an entire OS distribution with a team that small, try it sometime.)

I could post voluminous defenses of why OSr5 is the way it is, but won't bother. I'll just say this: Some of your complaints are quite valid. (Others aren't--where in the world did you get the idea we don't have ELF libraries?) But it can essentially all be chalked up to the fact that we're talking about a legacy OS from 1993 which is neither intended to be, nor sold as, a state-of-the-art kernel in 2002. (For that, you want OpenUNIX 8.)

OSr5 is successful in the marketplace because it does what a lot of people need, does it well, does it extremely reliably, and does it in essentially the same way that it's done it for a decade (modulo those changes necessary to ensure that it runs well and takes advantage of the most current hardware)--which means no surprises for resellers and vertical-app vendors. There are fancier kernels nowadays, but nothing else on the market is as stable a platform, and for all its admitted outness-of-date, I'm very proud of it.

To bring this back within hailing distance of the topic: I fervently hope that one day OSr5 will be open source too. I don't really expect it, unfortunately; not all of the code belongs to Caldera. Bits of the XENIX-compatibility code, as you noted, are licensed from Microsoft, and what are they odds they'd ever agree to open-source anything? But it would be very satisfying.