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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."
Now we can see how these "unix" thingies work and write one that works on PCs!
However, a big thank-you from this Slashdot reader for their act. I appreciate it, and I know I'm not alone...
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
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!
Their "BSD-style" license is actually the old-style BSD license, which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause:
What most people think of now as the BSD license does not contain such a clause, and has not for quite some time.
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.)
Carousel is a lie!
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)
Very true. Two real howlers in PDP-11 UNIX:
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.