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Groklaw's 'Grokline' To Document *nix History
trick-knee writes "Grokline hopes to fill in the ownership aspect of the history of UNIX. According to the announcement on Groklaw.net, Pamela Jones intends to flesh out Eric Levenez's UNIX timeline with ownership information. The idea is that this is an application of the open source model in the area of law: if enough eyes see this, someone might be able to anticipate a legal attack and the community may be able to forestall it somehow. We don't really want another SCO foodfight, I don't think."
Here's the true History of Unix.
Don't you have to actually have something to throw in a food fight? Besides insults, I mean.
What's to document? Darl McBride wrote UNIX (The UNIplexed Information and Computing Service) while working for SCO (The Santa Cruz Operation Group, based in Tarantella, Utah) which was then stolen with the help of IBM by Linus Benedict Torvalds (who called it GNU/Freax and then renamed to GNU/Linux because William R. Della Croce, Jr had trademark on Freax) in his plot to undermine MINIX and the entire concept of microkernel design to slow down the HURD development, or otherwise Bitkeeper would never be able to take over RCS, CVS and Subversion. Even Andrew S. Tanenbaum says it would be impossible for Torvalds to write the entire operating system in 1991. Furthermore, the UNIX family tree and the bastardization thereof is clearly explained on the slides by Larry Wall. So, what's to document? I thought it is all clear now, is it not?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
You seem to have left out some details. It turns out there isn't just one Unix, but several. It sort of like Unix and brother Unix and its other brother Unix. Some of them decided they didn't like their name and wanted to be called things like sunos but their birth certificates all claim their name is just Unix and its mother is Bell Lab or its alias AT&T. Few of the birht certs ever mention a father and even when one is mentioned a blood test will shed a different light on the parentage. No one has done a DNA test yet but I expect the result to look like a embryo fertilization gone horribly wrong.
And that was just the 1st generation. Take a look at some of the offsping? You have the lucky ones like OsX which had Unix (the lsd junky from Berkeley) as a father and its mother was hatched and grew up at CMU. While thats messed up, its nothing compared to the offspring with the worst identity crisis which now wants to be known as Solaris but when pressed on the issue takes its fathers name "sunos". It even gets confused if its sunos jr or sunos XI. Its cousin (like anyone could figure out that DNA mess) was spliced together at an evil lab at IBM where they took several stillborn unix offspring with a bit of stem cells from something that might have been a real unix and mixed it all together. The result of that isn't going to win any cutest baby awards.
Where does Linux fit into this nice neat family tree? It doesn't. It turns out it was born over the road from the unix family castle and always looked up to them. You could hear them say "when I grow up, I want to be just like them!" Like too many people who grow up on the wrong side of the tracks, linux went off and had several children with several mothers. There was the lady who worked on the corrner who always wore a red hat, you had some German backpacker who seemed to get knocked up and carry her baby suse to full term. Many of the 1st gen breed like rabbits too. Mandrake seemed to be left at an orphanage but the lady in red and sometimes looks like it may head back there or the poor house.
Recently Linux has some problems that there is a growing battle over the babys name. While both parties claim GNU had nothing to do with the birth, we all know that it takes two to make a baby and Linux is covered hints that GNU was arround at the time of conception. So will Linux ever take on another sirname or is it just that hyphanted last names just aren't cool where it hangs out?