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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.'"
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.'"
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.
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
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/blob/5.7/regex/
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.