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Not just a legal convenience for linux supporters, but something that could someday be useful as a historical document.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