Groklaw Starts Unix/Linux History Project

An anonymous reader writes "Over on GrokLaw, PJ and others have decided to create a 'timeline' for Unix and Linux development. The plan is to recreate, as completely as possible, the history of these two operating systems '...from the perspective of tracing the code by copyright, patents, trade secret, and trademark. The idea is that the final timeline will be a publicly-available resource, released under a Creative Commons license, that will assist the community in defending against - or better yet in deterring - future lawsuits against GNU/Linux code.'"

Comments

UNIX Timeline

[mmca]

Isnt this pretty complete:

http://www.levenez.com/unix/
http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline. html

Now just follow the the copyrights and patents.

Re:Licensing of mass disruption/destruction

[n3k5]

You're missing a most essential point here. In the proprietary software world, every comapnay makes its own, proprietary licences. If you want to know the contents of one, you have to fight your way through the legalese, full length. On the open source side, however, most projects use one of only a couple of licences, all of which have very simple rights and restrictions attached to them. The legalese is just for the lawyer types, most users can get away just reading the very easily understandable summaries. Creative Commons is not a waste of time, it adresses issues that haven't been adressed before, in other licences. In fact, they do insanely useful things, for example they adress one issue you brought up: making the same license compatible with the legal system of many countries.

Now supposing I decided as an admin on one of the machines I -obviously ADMIN - I decide to go with the "non commercial" license.

Huh? WTF? You have to choose a licence when you release a work. Your administrative tasks are not something you release, they're not a work your users are copying ... I don't get it.

Unix timline mostly has it at [levenez.com]

[MMHere]

Please don't re-do work already done. Consider the following.

Here's a useful history in PDF format (current as of early 2004):
http://www.levenez.com/unix/unix_letter.pdf

Several other formats of the document are available at the same site.

Re:Unix timline mostly has it at [levenez.com]

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't re-do work already done.

Please don't repost stuff already posted AND REFUTED above.

From the article,

I want to do a systematic, comprehensive, and carefully documented history timeline relating to Unix and Linux, based, with his kind permission, on Eric Levenez's Unix History timeline chart,

Re:History of UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.wards.net/~bill/humor/geek/unix-history .shtml

credits this text as:
Posted to the unix-haters@ai.mit.edu mailing list by ian@ai.mit.edu (Ian D. Horswill) on 10/12/92