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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Not just a legal convenience for linux supporters, but something that could someday be useful as a historical document.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...
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).
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).
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."
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?
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.
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?