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."

Comments

The Problem

[DaveAtFraud]

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.

Re:The Problem

[IntlHarvester]

Yeah, I imagine the history will look something like this:

1983 -- BSD UNIX 3
1984-2003 -- AT&T, Novell, and Sun spend 15 years adding tens of millions of lines of proprietary sourcecode
2004 -- Solaris 9 !

If you back to when the code was open enough to track, you are really talking about ancient, obsolete crap that's not relevant anymore. Levenez's chart is interesting as an overview, but trying to nail down exactly which code went where seems to be overkill.

Instead of the History of Unix on a byte level, it would be a lot more interesting to have a place where oldtimers could reminisce and submit their stories. But that would be a lot like alt.folklore.computer.

Re:Unix Ownership in general...

[k98sven]

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.

Busy busy busy

[k4_pacific]

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?

UNIX time line already exists?

[Jailbrekr]

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:Don't do it.....

[DugzDC]

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?

Nah

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Biggest Problem with Grokline

[Anonymous Coward]

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.