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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."
The problem Grokline sets out to address is that Eric Levenez's original Unix timeline didn't quantify or qualify exactly what sort of "contribution" an existing product made to a newer product. As an example, it might show that Linux was somehow descended from Minix in spite of Andy Tanenbaum's recent disclaimer. Another way of looking at the problem is that the original timeline didn't really differentiate between an actual inclusion of code vs. inspiration and a platform to work on.
Hopefully, Grokline will help sort this out for at least the open source world and the people like Ken Brown at AdTI will have to find a different dumpster to go diving in to find dirt on FOSS and FOSS contributors. Alternatively, he could seek employment at the National Enquirer since his idea of research seems to be more at home in a supermarket tabloid.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
True. Stuff like this will never stop guys like SCO.
However, as we all know, SCO has managed to spread FUD and raise questions among people. Most people, including journalists are just too lazy to go check facts, like reading one of the books on Unix history.
Being able to point out 'Here, look at this website. It has detailed info on who did what and when.' makes it easier to dispell the FUD. The more detail we have, the harder it is to 'spin'.
The original Levenez diagram is a good example of this. SCO actually used this to show how Linux 'derived' from Unix. Not that there's anything wrong with the chart, but without the details, most people don't realize which lines are actually shared code, and which are just inspiration; i.e. what parts actually have any legal relevance.
PJ never to ceases to amaze. There are usually 2-3 new articles everyday on Groklaw, posted around the clock. The are filled with tons of in-depth information. now she is doing this too. Does PJ ever sleep? Is "PJ" actually several people?
Unknown host pong.
Be careful what you wish for. This study isn't going to change current copyright law. What would happen if a truly objective study resulted in evidence that would mean that SCO or one of the other parties claiming ownership could win their cases? Grokvolt?
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.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
crud. we're truthful and honest. so there will be no problems there. remember that obfuscation doesn't work, so there's no point in trying to hide things. a scientist doesn't fear what he'll find at the end, only the ramblings of the fools that don't understand once he's done.
And just suppose there were problems, would you not want to know about them now? Say, for example, we find that we need to get rid of some piece of code. surely better that we find out now, and do it ourselves?
I don't believe that's the case however. Speaking of cases, where's my next beer?
Problem is, your second paragraph is undone by your first - lazy people won't bother reading the details on a Grokline-like site anymore than they read one of those Unix history books. Too much work either way, and the soundbite prevails.
Open Source can only be strengthened by maximizing the propigation of information. In a worse case scenario there's something in Linux that shouldn't be in there and needs to be removed and rewritten. But that stuff shouldn't be in there anyway and the linux community is better off with it gone.
Anyway it's at least marginally better if the linux community uncovers evidence of infringement and deals with it themselves than if SCO or some other unfriendly third party uncovers evidence of infringement and runs about yelling to the press about this.
Open Source is all about sharing and you can't share something that you don't own. Who owns what is an important foundational detail of OSS.
If you read the GPL, the GPL is actually based entirely on copyright law... it works within the existing system, not against it.
It approaches the timeline as if UNIX were one single product with different brands (AIX, HP-UX, Tru-64, etc).
But UNIX has never been just a single "thing". Important to the development of UNIX are the development of the utilities - grep, vi, emacs, awk, cc, csh, etc.
I don't see any way to fit that information into the timeline as it is currently organized.
Look, this is well-intensioned but misguided, in my view. It will play directly into the hands of the corporate "intellectual property" bean-counters.
It will quickly degenerate into a series of arguments along the lines of "who invented the for-loop". I wouldn't be surprised to see flame-wars errupt which won't end until someone finally compares the opposition to Nazis.
It would probably be more productive in the long run to dedicate a new web site to the debunking of all the "intellectual property" in *nix, by showing how every bit of it is actually based on everything that went before.
My life is an open book ... up to a point.