ESR Shares A Forgotten 'Roots Of Open Source' Moment From 1984 (ibiblio.org)

Eric S. Raymond recently documented one of the first public calls for free software, which happened immediately after AT&T's fateful decision commercialize Unix: [I]n October 1984 I was in a crowd of people watching a presentation by a woman from Bell Labs describing the then-new getopt(3) library, written by AT&T as a way to regularize the processing of command-line arguments in C programs... Everybody thought this was a fine idea, and several people asked questions probing whether AT&T was going to let anyone else use the getopt code they had written. These questions related to the general anxiety about Unix source code distributions drying up. Frustration mounted as the woman gave evasive answers which seemed to add up to "No, we refuse to commit to allowing general access to this code." Which seemed to confirm everyone's worst fears about what was going to happen to Unix source code access in general. At which point Henry Spencer stands up and says (not in these exact words) "I will write and share a conforming implementation." -- and got a cheer from the assembled.

If you're thinking "That's not a big deal, we do this sort of thing all the time," my actual point is that in October 1984 this was indeed a big deal. It took an actual imaginative leap for Henry Spencer to, in effect, say "Screw AT&T and its legalisms and evasions, if they're going to cut off source access we hackers are gonna do it for ourselves"... [H]e got an actual cheer exactly because he was pushing forward, exposing the possibility of doing not just small projects and demos and quirky little tools but at competing with the likes of AT&T itself at software production.
Raymond also remembers this as an important moment for him. "I was a young, unknown programmer then -- just 27, still figuring out what I wanted. I watched Henry make that promise. I heard the cheer, and felt the change in the air as culturally, we realized what the solution to AT&T fscking us over had to be. And I thought 'I want to be like that guy.'"

Comments

Henry is right

[MichaelSmith]

Its quicker to code something simple like getopt than to argue about it.

Re:Henry is right

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'll just leave this here and be on my merry way. Thanks.

Re:Henry is right

[Z00L00K]

Unfortunately the decision to no longer be open was also the decision that caused Unix to be overrun by Microsoft.

Re:Henry is right

[MichaelSmith]

Microsoft isn't open. I think it was more a question of accessibility. More people understood windows than unix, so server side windows had a head start.

Re:Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Well memed sir, and prompt.

Re:Henry is right

[Z00L00K]

I never stated that Microsoft was open, but at the time they only provided the cheap and simple MS-DOS, nothing more. Windows came later and wasn't something to care about until late 80's, before that it was just a toy.

The problem for Unix was that by going closed they also charged a lot for the use of it without realizing that they then gave Microsoft basically an open goal to play towards.

Re:Henry is right

[Zero__Kelvin]

In the business world more people understood Unix than Microsoft by far at the time. The problem was that Unix was much, much more expensive than Windows Server, and people hadn't yet learned the lesson that you get even less than what you pay for, and keep paying for it decades after you realize you got in bed with the devil.

Re:Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

[..] people hadn't yet learned the lesson that you get even less than what you pay for, and keep paying for it decades after you realize you got in bed with the devil.

They still don't, as I witness on a daily basis.

Re:Henry is right

[Zero__Kelvin]

Well Linux is far more popular than Windows in big business these days, so while it is true that many haven't, most of the big names have.

Re:Henry is right

[cyt0plas]

Reimplementation also gives people the option to choose their own license. As developers, it's all too easy to succumb to "not invented here" syndrome, but there are sometimes very legitimate reasons to re-write things, even if they do exactly the same thing as existing solutions.

Re:Henry is right

[dbIII]

and keep paying for it decades after you realize you got in bed with the devil.

I had some loser who claimed to be subcontracting to Microsoft threaten a software audit on me a couple of years ago on the basis of an NT4 server licence and something like five CALS not being renewed since 1998 or 1999. The place went to Samba some time around then.

Re:Henry is right

[Stormwatch]

at the time they only provided the cheap and simple MS-DOS, nothing more.

Microsoft also produced Xenix, the most popular Unix variant of the 80s.

Re:Henry is right

[Megol]

Don't confuse people with facts. They (generally) don't want to know anyway.

Re:Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

No, more people understood Unix.

Re:Henry is right

[Zero__Kelvin]

It's funny how you get it bass ackwards, then go on to describe Gates perfectly at the end :-)

Re:Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

> Microsoft isn't open.

Nobody said it was. Learn to read, dumbass.

Re:Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

If you were not at a college though, Unix was already a $40000 item and so inaccessible. Remember the
conferences where you had to show your ATT license to even get into talks about unix?
This led to much more interest in other OSs. For example, if you worked with RSX11M, it was
sysgenned from source, so everyone who had the OS had the source code. Many add-ins and tools
got contributed to public domain by folks who had no access at all to unix.

Some will remember too the legal machinations that tried to decree anyone who ever saw unix was
contaminated, thus BSD could not have been written without copying ATT code, hence BSD could
not be released and hence loads of folks would have been forever unable to give out (or probably sell)
their OWN code. Fortunately UIL (ATT successor) lost that one but Unix was never never free until
the BSD rewrite was done. That Linux and Gnu also got done confirmed this.
Having your OS fall into proprietary hands can become a hideous nightmare.
Keep in mind that outfits like Sun and DEC, which were fairly easy going, got absorbed by
others. Oracle in particular seems much more interested in control than Sun ever was.
So if it isn't public domain or some kind of open source/free license, and if you haven't a copy
of the code so licensed, beware.

Re:Henry is right

[Zero__Kelvin]

Bass ackwards is the correct use of the term as used by The Dixie Flatline. You would know this if you were a true geek and had read Neuromancer.

Re:Henry is right

[Antique Geekmeister]

getopt is a critical function now used by nearly all C or C++ programs that handle command line arguments. The "quicker to code" version you may write to get or care about the few arguments you use in a particular function may, indeed, work well on your limited environment. Unless you're quite good and quite thorough, they are unlikely to perform well on multiple architectures or to be really small and fast for hardware from the 1980's. If you look at the code at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., it is quite good. This is how we were expected to write 35 years ago. It has extremely well defined behavior and uses loops rather than the modern fondness for recursion, because calling subroutines was considered _expensive_ due to the context switching needed for all subroutines.

At that time, I was already working with BSD 4.x releases of UNIX. I'd begun to get fond of being able to see and compile my own versions of critical software.

Re:Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

> Its quicker to code something simple like getopt than to argue about it.

That's perfectly true -- and yet only an aside. The main idea, for which Henry was cheered, is taking the issue himself, have the guts to do it, ignoring AT&T claimed "right to knowledge" and, above all, establishing people as owner of all ideas. If you're human, that immediately puts in high-gear spirit.

Many can feel that, but a few can voice it into words like Spencer then and ESR now.

ESR, know that I too wanted to be like you -- minus the love for guns, which I find low.

Please keep sending things, you're doing it right, pal.

PS: Someone pointed out about Microsoft winning because Unix was closed. Someone else misunderstood that as an assertion that Microsoft is open. Well, it was a different time: back then nobody was open and people would not copy things without a license. It took many years and many lives (OK, exaggerated) for open until came to be. And Microsoft is closed even when it's open -- see the OOXML "standard", a moving target.

Re: Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't do bass to mouth, she is lying.

Re: Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Very clean code. I haven't programmed in C++ since 2003 and I can read it with ease. Same for the C version. I think the C version is actually a little easier to read. But that might be preference on my part.

Found a link to the Yes command. Finally something I could of wrote myself ;).

Does the Yes command need maintainers? Hehe xD

Re:Henry is right

[Anonymous Coward]

"Bass ackwards" has been a somewhat common turn of phrase for many decades. My decidedly non-techie friends would use it way back in the day I'm pretty sure I heard it in the 70s. I doubt it originated with Neuromancer.

Re: Henry is right

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Maybe you shouldn't've made fun of him for that.

Re:Henry is right

[sconeu]

It was 1984, FFS!!! Windows didn't even exist. The AT had barely come out. PC-based servers were Netware.

Re:Henry is right

[SivDotnet]

I think you need to look up the Reverend Spooner!

In the UK we have terms like:

Betty Swollocks (Americans don't understand this one) :)
Cupid Stunt!
Centle Mase
Jut nob

etc etc.

Props to Henry

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice to see ESR giving props to someone else.

B efair

[Anonymous Coward]

Frustration mounted as the woman gave evasive answers

She probably didn't even understand the question.

Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

For any given app, it's just as simple and clean to write custom code to parse the command line; the arg vector is provided for you by the shell. Then you don't have to remember/lookup the complicated protocol of getopt.

Re:Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[gringer]

Except when you need to account for arguments appearing out of order. Or multiple arguments. Or the same argument that can override or revert itself. Or a mixture of short and long arguments, where all long arguments have a short alias, but not necessarily the other way round. Or if you want parsing to stop (or pass-through) at the first unexpected argument. Or if you want environment variables to influence the method of argument parsing. Or if you want to allow long arguments to start with a single '-' rather than the usual '--'.

Re:Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[rgbatduke]

Well, yes, but for most coders older than the dawn the "custom code" starts with a template C application in a build-ready template directory with a pre-built makefile and perhaps a bit of structured shell, so that they are basically cloning fragments to parse this or that kind of data. At one point I had templates for using getopt but, as you say, you end up cloning lines either way and adding one level of indirection doesn't really save you much, even if you don't really have to remember all of the getopt stuff because IT is templated instead of simple CL parsing. Ditto parsing in bash -- I don't even try to remember it, I just copy my superlong bash script template (which also has useful fragments that illustrate loops, conditionals, sed-isms, awkeries, some regex stuff), delete what I don't need, and modify what I do.

This is the way "reusable code" really works a lot of the time. Once you've solved a particular problem, especially the second or third time, the trick goes into your code "library" and from then on you just copy them and hack them to fit, you don't rewrite them from scratch. And thus we spare reliance on memory at the level of detail and instead use our brains efficiently, as lookup engines and problem solving engines.

rgb

Re: Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell. Are you trying to refute the previous post or to give an example?

Re:Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[TheRaven64]

Unfortunately, getopt doesn't really handle those cases well. For simple cases, I much prefer the OpenStep mechanism, where every option is inserted automatically into the user defaults dictionary. For more complex ones, see something like clang's options parser.

Re:Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why bother with a special getopt library, though, when a generic parser should do the same job just fine? It's a stream of tokens like any. Use something like META and you're fine.

Re:Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[Antique Geekmeister]

Because burning even a few hundred bytes of memory with a more general parser would have been an unacceptable burden for single programs on hardware that had only a few megabytes of memory, total.

Re:Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[Anonymous Coward]

watchoo talkin bout nigga? AT&T getopt, just like Henry Spencers's dope getopt and (to this day) BSD/OS X getopt stop processing at the first non argument. permutating arguments and was a GNU getopt extension. And even there it can be disabled based on the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable.

Re:Who needs getopt (or getopt_long etc)

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I meant today, not back then. (On the other hand, META and similar things existed even back then.)

Funny Fact:

[tomxor]

In the business world more people understood Unix than Microsoft by far at the time. The problem was that Unix was much, much more expensive than Windows Server, and people hadn't yet learned the lesson that you get even less than what you pay for, and keep paying for it decades after you realize you got in bed with the devil.

Funny fact: Hotmail ran/runs on both FreeBSD and Solaris.

Hotmail originally ran on a mixture of FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.[21] A project was started to move Hotmail to Windows 2000. In June 2001, Microsoft claimed this had been completed; a few days later they retracted and admitted that the DNS functions of the Hotmail system were still reliant on FreeBSD. In 2002 Hotmail still ran its infrastructure on UNIX servers, with only the front-end converted to Windows 2000

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In Microsoft's most recent EEE plans... they are now trying to get their fingers into both the Linux and FreeBSD foundations.

Re:Funny Fact:

[Hognoxious]

The bastards! At least Lennart's leaving BSD alone (for the moment).

Re:Funny Fact:

[boudie2]

"Speak of the devil and he shall appear" - old saying.

Not quite how I remember Henry Spencer.

[tlambert]

Not quite how I remember Henry Spencer.

On the other hand, he did do the getopt thing. His regex thing was far, far, far more important. Also: Perl, anyone?

Henry was an important, important person around that time. So was UToronto. Too bad UToronto kinda bailed on us all at the time of the BSD lawsuits.

Hi Henry; still alive. Yourself? ;^)

Re:Not quite how I remember Henry Spencer.

[thogard]

Ok, outside of one of the coolest open source gurus...
Henry promoted the concept of a one way trip to mars.

Overrun

[Kunedog]

.

Unfortunately the decision to no longer be open was also the decision that caused Unix to be overrun by systemd.

ftfy

His regex work is still in use in MySQL

[Anonymous Coward]

https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/5.7/regex/

Damn it, that's GNU Henry Spencer

[Outtascope]

Without GNU, Henry Spencer is just a dude. Now, who wants to buy a plushy?

Eh?

[DontBeAMoran]

...fateful decision commercialize Unix.

I think missed a word here.

Re:Eh?

[nomadic]

Back in the good ol' days Bell was just a bunch of long-haired hippies playing folk songs in the woods and writing code. Then all of the sudden they turned into a multibillion dollar multinational corporation and started selling UNIX. It was terrible.

Public Domain came earlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Like 1492.

Re:ESR

[Jay Maynard]

he also has a nasty habit of appropriating bits of Unix culture.

Uhm. If you created it, you aren't appropriating it.

I don't like to see him being given a platform here.

Oh, so you're an SJW who believes in no-platforming. Right. Drop dead. Hacker culture doesn't need you.

I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

I was working for Western Electric when Unix first appeared. I had the opportunity to camp out on a PDP10 based system in the Labs, which is where I taught myself C (along with K&R first edition) and learned Unix. Source was on the machine. Looked at the Bourne shell code, which I described as seagull (G-gol). He bastardized the preprocessor to allow writing C code that looked like Algol. I was really sad when I heard AT&T wanted to close the source and "monetize" Unix. I felt that they didn't know what they had in Unix and C, and what could be done with them had they allowed the community to work and expand what was there. Then came Linux, and the rest is history.

Re:ESR

[OneAhead]

I don't like to see him being given a platform here.

Oh, so you're an SJW who believes in no-platforming. Right. Drop dead. Hacker culture doesn't need you.

With that statement, you're doing the exact same thing that you're deriding in it. I'm agreeing with neither of you on this particular subject, but I do find it interesting to know both of your opinions on it. Wishing for dissenting opinions to be suppressed is often a first sign of a myopic worldview taking hold in your brains. Even if you totally can't stand each other, think "know your enemy".

Re:ESR

[Tenebrousedge]

Uhm. If you created it, you aren't appropriating it.

ESR did not create the Unix culture.

Oh, so you're an SJW who believes in no-platforming.

Ad hominem, and I have no idea what you might mean by that. Probably nothing interesting. I'll assume that by defending ESR you're endorsing his views -- sound fair?

the more things change...

[Anonymous Coward]

good news, ESR! You're no longer a young unknown programmer. Now, you're an old unknown programmer. But at least Open Source won! Just look at your locked down phone that spies on you 24/7 -- all made possible by Open Source.

Re:ESR

[Tenebrousedge]

I really just think that ESR has no value as a commentator. He's never been known for his technical skills, and it's been a long time since he was relevant in the Open Source community. Generally people stopped paying attention to him once he started going full-on wingnut. I'm of course far from alone in my opinion of him, but most people seem to be posting their negativism as ACs.

I don't really get this idea of lumping people into a category and pretending they all share the same vaguely-defined set of bad qualities. It's a poor habit of mind to dehumanize one's opponents. "SJW", "hipster", "millenial", "hippie" -- the purpose of these words is virtue signaling, not dialogue. In an individual it's boring and a little pathetic, but that this mindset is a popular one is a grave risk to our democracy.

Re:ESR

[OneAhead]

Modded down; irony +1 :)

Re:ESR

[OneAhead]

To be clear, yes, ESR does seem to be a bit of a jerk, but so does RMS (in a totally different way). I nevertheless feel that both have things to say about Open Source that are very much worth considering, even if one ends up discarding them. More generally spoken, I think the coexistence of these kind of dissenting opinions is essential to the viability of the Free / Open Source Software community. One may even take that as a metaphor for society (though I must admit I haven't deeply thought about how much merit that metaphor really has).

Back on topic: TFA merely seems to be a short and perfectly innocuous reminisce on an inspiring moment (at least for ESR). I don't see anything remotely wingnutty or offensive in it, and even if you're right about him presently having lost his relevance, the story is set more than 30 years ago... Maybe I'm too naive, but I see it as an edifying story: have the guts to stand up and do what's right, and maybe someone will be citing you as an inspiration some 30-odd years later. I really don't see much wrong with that, other than the fact that it's not exactly earth-shattering news.

Re:Eric Ass Raymond

[slashdice]

I saw him a couple years back (2014?) at ESR's New Year Eve party. I wasn't expecting Anal Cox, but after the third or 4th bottle of Jaeger, he showed up. That was my first experience with Anal Cox and I can't say I cared for it. Everyone else couldn't get enough of the Anal Cox, though. He's one dirty fucker, I'll give him that.

Re:ESR

[Jay Maynard]

No assumption needed. I consider Eric a good friend, and generally do endorse his views.

And if you think that makes me a racist deserving of no-platforming, then that's your problem, not mine.

No, lets confuse people with facts.

[fyngyrz]

Facts like people were writing and widely sharing open source code well before any of this nix-specific event came along in 1984. Go look at early issues of Byte, Kilobaud, Dr. Dobbs and so forth and so on.

I had source code of my own published and shared nationally in November 1977, and I wasn't anywhere near the first.

This kind of hype reminds me of Apple/IBM/Radioshack/Commodore and fans variously claiming they were the "roots" of the PC market. Look into the history of Altair, Imsai and SWTPC, for instance. Not saying who was first, I'm not sure by any means -- but I am sure who wasn't.

Re:No, lets confuse people with facts.

[Stormwatch]

This kind of hype reminds me of Apple/IBM/Radioshack/Commodore and fans variously claiming they were the "roots" of the PC market. Look into the history of Altair, Imsai and SWTPC, for instance. Not saying who was first, I'm not sure by any means -- but I am sure who wasn't.

Maybe the right question is not who was first, but who was first in the mainstream market. In this sense, it is only proper to credit the "1977 trinity".

Self promotion again

[Anonymous Coward]

This all sound so good.
Until you remember., This is Eric Raymond we are talking about.
The king of self promotion.
In other words: This likely never actually happened.

Re:ESR

[Tenebrousedge]

Why don't you explain that term. In particular, explain why there is some default assumption that all viewpoints deserve an audience.

Re:Eric Ass Raymond

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when Anal Cox comes knocking on my backdoor.

Re:ESR

[Anonymous Coward]

I really just think that ESR has no value as a commentator. He's never been known for his technical skills, and it's been a long time since he was relevant in the Open Source community. Generally people stopped paying attention to him once he started going full-on wingnut.

I had read about ESR for years before I saw the Linux documentary where he told this story about meeting Craig Mundie from MS and telling him "I'm your worst nightmare!"

He really seems to perceive himself as being much more impressive than he actually is. :)

Re:ESR

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidentally, "Yonder Racism" is an anagram of his name.

Unfortunately, his work and expertise in computer technology[1][2] has been all but overshadowed by his batshit insane wingnut tendencies in the wake of 9/11, his misogynistic claims,[3] and his increasingly wanky ego-gazing,[4][5] as he acknowledges that people aren't so crazy about him anymore.

It's funny to see an author for a site called "rationalwiki" not even make a half-assed attempt to hide their bias, or restrict their arguments to things that actually matter.

Re:ESR

[Jay Maynard]

Because no-platforming amounts to shutting down speech you disagree with. All that does is make the speech more desirable to those who oppose the orthodox view, and give it currency.

The only answer to speech you disagree with is not shutting it down, but rather more speech opposing it.

Re:ESR

[Tenebrousedge]

Because no-platforming amounts to shutting down speech you disagree with. All that does is make the speech more desirable to those who oppose the orthodox view, and give it currency.

Citation needed. And also explain why any third party commercial service has to give you a platform, because the opposite of that has been a point of jurisprudence for centuries in this country.

Re:ESR

[Anonymous Coward]

Read what he writes sometime. The 'flute god' bit is seriously disturbing even if racism doesn't bother you.

There's a clear undercurrent of Slashdot which is racist and sexist. Fortunately the younger generation will inherit these to a lesser degree.

Re:ESR

[Anonymous Coward]

All that does is make the speech more desirable to those who oppose the orthodox view, and give it currency.

Citation needed.

Gamergate. Alt-right. Tea Party.

Re:ESR

[Anonymous Coward]

Go fuck yourself, Jay, you massively racist sack of shit. I've seen your Google+. I know how you think.