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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.'"
Sco will find a way to use this history to further 'prove' that source code was acquired from commercial software at specific times from specific companies, using nothing more than the fact that some feature was added to linux on a specific date. This aids insane companies like SCO who want to find relationships and infringement where there really was none... go back far enough, and no one from the time/company/developer will be able to defend their IP...
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
they will have to watch out because it will finally be revealed that SCO invented unix while a person called Al Gore worked for them and then everything will be lost
I'm curious to whether the Linux derivitive work(s) that SCO released and distributed in its own products will come out more in the press. Considering that this will be backed up with creditable resources, it could provide valuable insight for the press into "our side" of things. Big corporations have lots of nice looking graphs and reports to make things look rosy, but Linux really does not.
Fearing SCO is not really a reason not to do this.
go back far enough, and no one from the time/company/developer will be able to defend their IP...
I don't really understand this conclusion. Are you trying to say that documenting and publishing events of the past somehow aids criminals? If so, how?
They better have valid sources for the timeline, or SCO will say something along the lines of "this is crap, we did it all!" and the courts would care less.
And whats up with the lack of responses? People must be getting fed up with SCO crap.
Isnt this pretty complete:
. html
http://www.levenez.com/unix/
http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline
Now just follow the the copyrights and patents.
Do you want to:
Let people distribute copies of your whole work for noncommercial purposes (for example, on a file-sharing network, or among friends)?
http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling
Sorry to say but this whole licensing scheme is getting out of hand. Not to troll about this but how many licenses are there? GPL, BSD, etc? Now another scheme? Now supposing I decided as an admin on one of the machines I -obviously ADMIN - I decide to go with the "non commercial" license. Say I run my own machine with 60 users. Friends, friends of friends, etc. Now I decide to host a domain for one of these friends, and he decides he's going to run something commercial then what? Am I breaking license standards here. Aside from that, what the hell difference would it honestly make these so called Licenses being they would have to be a worldwide universal license.
Just because you say it's law here, why should someone follow the laws of land A when they live in land B. Don't you think there is a huge window for abuse here. Not only by cheapskate corporations who can circumvent these laws, but by lawmakers who for one wouldn't understand computing as a whole, but would be quick to indict Average John for a quick hit in the paper on "How I cracked down on international program crackers who acted with disregard those terrorists."
Seriously, why is the community (Open Source) even waisting their time on another licensing scheme.
MoFscker
Unix was a program gone bad. Born into poverty, its parents, the phone company, couldn't afford more than a roll of teletype paper a year, so Unix never had decent documentation and its source files had to go without any comments whatsoever. Year after year, Papa Bell would humiliate itself asking for rate increases so that it could feed its child. Still, unix had to go to school with only two and three letter command names because the phone company just couldn't afford any better. At school, the other operating systems with real command names, and even command completion, would taunt poor little Unix for not having any job or terminal management facilities or for having to use its file system for interprocess communication and locking.
Then, bitter and emasculated by its poverty, the phone company began to drink. During lost weekends of drunken excess, it would brutally beat poor little Unix about the face and neck. Eventually, Unix ran away from home. Soon it was living on the streets of Berkeley. There, Unix got involved with a bad crowd. Its life became a degrading journey of drugs and debauchery. To keep itself alive, it sold cheap source licenses for itself to universities which used it for medical experiments. Being wantonly hacked by an endless stream of nameless, faceless undergraduates, both men and women, often by more than one at the same time, Unix fell into a hell-hole of depravity.
And so it was that poor little Unix began to go insane. It retreated steadily into a dreamworld, the only place where it felt safe. It took heroin and dreamed of being a real operating system. It took LSD and dreamed of being a raspberry flavored three-toed yak. It liked that better. As Unix became increasingly attracted to LSD, it would spend weekends reading Hunter Thompson and taking cocktails of acid and speed while writing crazed poetry in which it found deep meaning but which no one else could understand.
Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to itself, saying "Panic: freeing free inode," over and over again. Sometimes it would accost perfect strangers and yell "Bus error (core dumped)!" or "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN FSCK MANUALLY!" at them in a high pitched squeal like a chihuaua with amphetamine psychosis. Upstanding citizens pretended it was invisible. Mothers with children crossed to the other side of the street.
Then one evening Unix watched television, an event which would change its life. There it discovered professional wrestling and knew that it had found its true calling. It began to take huge doses of corticosteroids to build itself up even bigger than the biggest of the programs which had beaten it up as a child. It ate three dozen pancakes and four dozen new features for breakfast each day. As the complications of the steroids grew worse, its internal organs grew to the point where Unix could no longer contain them. First the kernel grew, then the C library, then the number of daemons. Soon one of its window systems was requiring two megabytes of swap space for each open window. Unix began to bulge in strange, unflattering places. But Unix continued to take the drugs and its internal organs continued to grow. They grew out its ears and nostrils. They placed incredible stresses on Unix's brain until it finally liquefied under pressure. Soon Unix had the mass of Andre the Giant, the body of the Elephant Man, and the mind of a forgotten Jack Nicholson character.
The worst strain was on Unix's mind. Unable to assimilate all the conflicting patchworks of features it had ingested, its personality began to fragment into millions of distinct, incompatible operating systems. People would cautiously say "good morning Unix. And who are we today?" and it would reply "Beastie" (BSD), or "Domain", or "I'm System III, but I'll be System V tomorrow." Psychiatrists labored for years to weld together the two major poles of Unix's personality, "Beasty Boy", an inner-city youth from Berkeley, and "Belle", a southern transvestite who wanted to be a woman. With each
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.
This book might help:
A Quarter Century of UNIX
For example: Let's say that I write a short story about Mickey Mouse and attempt to sell it. Mr. Eisner, through his lawyers, will attempt to stop my distributing/selling it. In reality, being a broke programmer that lacks the funds to take on a multinational corporation in a court of law, I would be forced to concede before I ever entered a court room. But lets assume that I did have the funds and the tenacity to attempt to take on such a battle. First, the complainant, Disney, would file their complaint, or lawsuit, and attach exibits, namely my story, and submit it to the court. At that point they have not violated copyright law by reprinting my story for their complaint as it is needed for them to make their case. Second, although my story will now become part of the court record -- and therefore open to public review -- I would still own the copyright on that story; that means that even if Disney prevailed in court and loved the story that I wrote they still would not have the right to publish it without making a deal with me; and for that matter no one else can publish it without making a deal with me and Disney (since it is a work derivied from their character).
Where it will really become interesting is if it is considered a database that could be protected under the proposed HR 3261. A timeline is a collection of facts that could conceivably be protected by the proposed law; that is the reason for releasing it under the Creative Commons license. Fortunately, collections of fact are only protected if they are organized by some unique means. Courts have ruled that phone books, because that are sorted alphabetically, are not protected at the moment; that is why corporations that collect data are trying to change the law. I would guess that numeric and chronologic ordering of data would not be considered a unique method of organizing the data and thus would not be protectable under the current law.
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