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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."
Not just a legal convenience for linux supporters, but something that could someday be useful as a historical document.
I think it'd be interesting to see the customized vendor kernels like the RedHat ones and the RT ones like lynuxworks, tymesys, montevista as well.
I think that although this sounds like a great idea simply for the historical and leagal precident, the issue becomes what will it really protect, or prevent? SCO has filed enough hair-brained and far fetched lawsuits, that if anything even resembling this happens in the future, the courts will (hopefully!!!) nip it in the bud of their own accord. If another Million dollar lawsuit about hot coffee hits the docket, the judge will (likely) toss it and hand a summary jugement for physical damage. The legal system is trying to fix itself, finally. But all in all, a good idea - where can I buy the Poster?
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
No, not a dupe. In the previous story, Grokline had not yet gone on-line.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Here's the true History of Unix.
Not to mention that some GPL advocates I know are going to go ballistic at the idea of the UNIX community calmly and objectively discussing who owns what. I'm not sure that this is going to really help.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
I presume you mean this should be done to somehow defend Linux. However, Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds, and the code is owned by the people that wrote it. Having a UNIX timeline contain annotations on who owned what when has nothing to do with Linux -- really.
You can't prevent some crazy FUD company like SCO suing using baseless claims with such a timeline.
Basically, I am not sure how the existance of this timeline does anything to prevent SCO II: The Wrath of McBride, or SCO III: The Search for a Clue...
Don't you have to actually have something to throw in a food fight? Besides insults, I mean.
That first story was to rally the troops to start gathering information and see who would be interested in contributing.
This story is to point out that Grokline has now gone live.
If you had actually clicked the link instead of trying to search through Slashdot's painful search feature, you would have seen the project launched until May 23rd, 2004 (yesterday).
Would this project scare away SCO-monsters, or possibly create one by calling them and asking if they realized that their forefather company contributed code to Linux years ago....
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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The Bell System Technical Journal, July-August 1978, Vol. 57, No. 6, Part 2, for articles on the "UNIX TIME-SHARING SYSTEM". I find the article on page 2087 particularly interesting ;-). Also look at CP/IX ("Carrier Products Interactive Executive"). It was developed at Case Western Reserve University for IBM's Series/1. IIRC Rice University researchers did a port of BSD to the 80286 (not the 80386, the 286) in the late eighties, too. Also check ISBN 0-13-939845-7, THE UNIX(R) SYSTEM, for accurate history.
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
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.
The most important lesson they teach in what used to be the War College is, "Don't fight the last war". The next attack will be over something else entirely, because IBM has already shown that attacking the Linux kernel via copyright is too hard. The smart money is on patent attacks, most likely on some key non-kernel component (e.g. GNOME).
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
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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.
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Levenez is very cool. He's the only person online with a substantial history of NeXT and NeXTSTEP, for example.
http://www.levenez.com/NeXTSTEP/
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."
...and you run and you run and you can't stop what's been done...
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.
See this link, named Timeline of GNU/Linux and Unix, as it has several info about the issue.
Mind Booster Noori