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Historic "Free Unix" white paper by Larry McVoy
greg writes "This is a white paper written by Larry McVoy at Sun Microsystems discussing free Unix software, *.BSD, Linux, GNU and FSF and competition with Microsoft. In the paper Larry proposes the opensourcing and standardizing of Unix in gerneral and Solaris in particular. Whats truly impressive is that it was written in 1993 and is still quite relevant and its predictions regarding Linux were very accurate. Here is the link:
" Currently only available in Postscript... HTML is coming.
It's been six years since this document was written and other than the Linux/FreeBSD movement, what has changed between all the Unix vendors to try and thwart Microsoft's onslaught? It doesn't seem like a hole lot in terms of how much domination Microsoft has managed to achieve. And Linux is no closer to hitting everyone's desktop than Microsoft is to releasing NT's source code.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98519347&mode=n ested
not quite. Solaris 1.1.1 was SunOS 4.1.3+OpenWindows, Solaris 1.1.2 was SunOS 4.1.4+OpenWindows, etc.
Solaris 1.x was, as I remember it, a name tacked on _after_ Solaris 2.x came out.
They're moving towards this with the NT box; I think there was an announcement to this effect recently, that Linux would be available.
They're currently hemorrhaging OS engineers, so IRIX will end up dead one way or another.
But the traditional reason inside SGI was reluctant to go to an Open Source (or other published source model) is that much of the performance that they get is done in traditional systems fashion - by exploiting a combination of hardware and software. (Also many of the bugs in the hardware are masked/fixed by changes in the OS software.) That's the core of their competitive edge, and they're reluctant to give it away.
It appears that this was paper was converted by the author, but if you ever come across a PS file that you want to convert to HTML (and you aren't too particular how the finished product looks) you can do it in a just a few minutes if you have the Adobe Acrobat distiller. Use the Distiller to convert the PS file to PDF, then use Adobe's free PDF to HTML converter at http://access.adobe.com/ to change it to HTML.
(Please don't flame me on how Acrobat is a proprietary product, 1) So is PS and I wasn't the one that put the document in PS format to start with; 2) I'm anonymous, so you don't know who I am anyway.)
He is wondering "what do you know about running a business?"
Hehehehe... And he is considering wearing a nametag so the dummy from O'Reilly knows how to attribute the question.
Hi Larry, you sneaky A/C d00d you :-)
YouKnowWho!
"Microsoft is back pedaling from the source access commitment. They said they would do it but have not yet delivered." -- in 1993!!!
I don't know if there was back then, but they are currently developing parts of the kernal out here. I bought a couch at a garage sale from a guy who was working on the I/O portion. He was also selling 7-1/2 inch floppies and copy of Solaris 2.5.
I'm not Larry. Hehehe... Guess again!
Yes, let's all switch to an OS that barely supports 2 architectures, without any concept of security or multi-users, and a windowing system with no network transparency!!!
Obviously this guy is a visionary, I wonder what his views are today? Has he published any
other documents?
Larry is Da Man!! He was the engineer at Sun largely responsible for SunOS 4 being the quality OS it was, and he added a lot of the cool / fast features of it which were new at the time. He left for SGI when they dumped his work and switched to Solaris. At SGI, he did more kewl fast shit, before leaving for full-time Linux stuff. He was involved with Cobalt Micro (yeah, *those* guys) when they were getting off the ground, and now he's at BitMover ( http://www.bitmover.com/) writing the source control software to end all source control software (he hopes). I don't think I've ever heard him suggest something stupid. Truly a great, if not well-known, hacker.
> Okay, that makes sense. Which is odd considering you have no knowledge of the history.
It sounds like the previous poster has much knowledge of the history. Mind pointing out where he is wrong, or did you just flame that guy for no good reason?
Sun felt threatened by other Unix vendors, and fought for dominance in the Unix workstation market when it should have gone for the desktop.
A unified Unix standard would have gone a long way toward this effort. Instead, Sun made a deal with the devil, er... AT&T, and dumped the BSD-based SunOS for the SysV-based Solaris. The other Unix vendors, cut off from Sun, banded together to form the Open Software Foundation. The infighting kept Unix from becoming dominant, and Microsoft seized the day. Serves Sun right to have MS eating into their low end products and forcing them to move up-market.
To this day, I have a hard time feeling anything nice towards Sun at all. I hope when Intel gets their 64 bit chips out the other vendors eat Sun's lunch.
It took me a while to figure it out, but I'm guessing
he's talking about BeOS, since that's what the first guy said we might want to switch to
before Linux becomes closed source.
*Rolls eyes*
surak_at_my-deja_dot_com
At the time Berkeley had sold all commercial rights to BSD Unix to BSDI and thereby gotten embroiled in a lawsuit with USL (Unix System Laboratories), the semi-autonomous AT&T division (sold to Novell sometime in that time period) which owned the rights to Unix. In addition, a Republican administration in California was busily dismantling their educational system with yearly budget cuts for all public universities, to the point where UCB barely had the money to engage in normal instructional and research activities, much less stuff like PostGres or BSD. And finally Sun had dumped BSD-inspired SunOS in favor of the "merged BSD/SysV" that they had spent much money working on with USL, which was released as System V.4 for mere mortals and as Solaris for Sun customers and which looked suspiciously like System V.3 with a BSD compatibility bag slapped on the side (I know, I know, there were considerable kernel improvements between V.3 and V.4, but from an API standpoint V.4 was much closer to V.3 than to BSD). Given the politics, BSD obviously would not have been a good place for Sun to dump source code upon at that time, despite Sun's close connections to UCB (hey, Bill Joy wrote 'vi' while he was a grad student there, for cryin out loud!).
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
BeOS is nice, but it's not a server platform. It seems to me more like the Amiga done right. For the children out there who know of the Amiga only as some dusty box in their father's closet, it was the first mass-produced consumer microcomputer sold in the United States with a message-passing microkernel and multi-tasking operating system, ten years before Be... except Commodore didn't know they had a graphics workstation rather than a game machine on their hands, couldn't figure out how to market it, never got the OS completed, and went belly up eventually.
The "In the US" part is important, because the Sinclair ?QL? was being sold in Europe with much the same feature set, except it had some kind of weird tape-ish type drives instead of "real" drives and had chicklet keys (Sir Clive did not believe in having a real keyboard!). Linus attributes much of his interest in computers to hacking on his uncle's QL while a child.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I'm not exactly sure how things played out after that document. I know that Novell sold the Unix stuff to SCO sometime around then - maybe SCO offered more than Sun? I do know that a few years back Sun spent something like $80M to buy permanent (or 20 years I or something) licenses for some Unix/System-V stuff. Kinda funny how things turn out.
There have been noises from Sun (mostly late last year, early this year) about opening up the source to Solaris. (in that, everyone can get it, not just developers with money, or people in education). They said the biggest problem is licensing issues - Sun don't own everything in Solaris. Looks like things haven't changed much... BTW Java, Jini, designs for the SPARC and Java chips, are not that only thing Sun have put under their "community source license" recently. Actually, it seems for quite a few products/tools, when they announced new versions they also annouced that it would be out under their "community source license" too. If/when Solaris does go this way, it'll probably be first with Solaris 8 (which is expected early 2000), and might not be back-ported.
I don't really know what happened after this, but I guess Novell couldn't be pursuaded to go along - they sold their IP rights to SCO...
To my knowledge, Sun have not (yet) announced or commited to releasing the source to Solaris. Last I heard was just thinking, strongly, about it. Do you have any references?
"The following references, which were not part of the November '93 version of this paper, show support for this point of view....."
So exactly which version are we looking at and how much has changed since the original?
Suddenly, the paper doesn't seem quite so remarkably "visionary" any more.
"If it's not source, It's not software". .sig
I think I'll make that my
--
An esoteric scratched itch:
Homeworld Map Maker Tool
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
But it's still a very interesting read, especially these days. Good to see how a good idea grew, even if this isn't quite what started it all.
The Sourceware Operating System Proposal
Revision 1.8
Larry McVoy
and a cast of thousands, see acknowledgments
lm@sun.com
+14153367627
Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation 1
ABSTRACT
This document describes a proposal to provide a source form, royalty free Unix as an evolution of the COSE ffort, as a means of unifying the Unix desktop market, and as an application deployment platform, with a focus on running all applications, including those from other operating systems, such as DOS and Windows 3.1. This effort is intended to provide substance to the many Unix unification and standard agreements that exist today.Significant effort has been made to address the concerns of the major Unix vendors, the Unix customer base, the DOS customer base, the Windows 3.1 customer base, the educational and research community,and the development community.
This document is an assessment of the condition of Unix, and a proposal to improve the condition of Unix on the desktop. To get a quick reading, the reader may scan for the highlighted bars; they are a summary of the key points of each section.
The organization of the document is background on the state of Unix, background on the efforts to fix Unix, a digression on why bother with fixing Unix, a suggestion for how to start Unix on the path to healthiness, more details on the health plan, details on managing the resulting system, alternatives to this plan, questions and answers, and finally,acknowledgments.
Neither Larry McVoy nor the views in this document are necessarily representing the views of Sun Microsystems or Sun'saffiliates. Sun's tolerance in this matter is gratefully acknowledged.
Unix in trouble
Unix needs our help because Unix is dieing. Unix is no longer even close to competitive.
©1993 Larry McVoy 9 November 1993
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Okay guys, goofed earlier and posted a half-butchered version of the PS document. Didn't notice the damn thing until AFTER I'd gone back to read a couple more articles.
This version has been formatted in the attempt at readability. Any errors in readability are a combination of my fault, goofs with Ghostscript's conversion, and original grammatical mistakes in the document.
P.S.: NO. I did NOT have anything better to do tonight! I'm a geek remember?
The Sourceware Operating System Proposal
Revision 1.8
Larry McVoy
and a cast of thousands, see acknowledgments
lm@sun.com
+14153367627
Sun Microsystems Computer Corporation 1
ABSTRACT
This document describes a proposal to provide a source form, royalty free Unix as an evolution of the COSE ffort, as a means of unifying the Unix desktop market, and as an application deployment platform, with a focus on running all applications, including those from other operating systems, such as DOS and Windows 3.1. This effort is intended to provide substance to the many Unix unification and standard agreements that exist today.Significant effort has been made to address the concerns of the major Unix vendors, the Unix customer base, the DOS customer base, the Windows 3.1 customer base, the educational and research community,and the development community.
This document is an assessment of the condition of Unix, and a proposal to improve the condition of Unix on the desktop. To get a quick reading, the reader may scan for the highlighted bars; they are a summary of the key points of each section.
The organization of the document is background on the state of Unix, background on the efforts to fix Unix, a digression on why bother with fixing Unix, a suggestion for how to start Unix on the path to healthiness, more details on the health plan, details on managing the resulting system, alternatives to this plan, questions and answers, and finally,acknowledgments.
Neither Larry McVoy nor the views in this document are necessarily representing the views of Sun Microsystems or Sun'saffiliates. Sun's tolerance in this matter is gratefully acknowledged.
©1993 Larry McVoy 9 November 1993
Unix needs our help because Unix is dieing. Unix is no longer even close to competitive.
Licensing ranges from $20 to $100 per seat, with vendor mark up for their costly "value add" resulting in customer seat costs of $600 $3000. Microsoft sells Windows/NT for about $150.
Unix has ceased to be the platform of choice for the development and deployment of innovative technology. A great deal of the early development of Unix was done by researchers because of Unix's ready accessibility. As time has gone on, it has become more and more difficult for research organizations to acquire source. Microsoft is planning on releasing Windows/NT to universities in an attempt to leverage from the same sources of innovation.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Red Hat's had this in their Knowledge Base on their web site for at least a year now.
---------------------
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John 3:16 - God's Public License
Didn't this all get somewhere recently when Sun announced they would be distributing Solaris under the Community License by the end of the year?
I was curious about this too. What was McVoy's reasoning for this site?
Why not Berkeley who could have offered both it and the BSD source at that point?
Okay, that makes sense. Which is odd considering you have no knowledge of the history.
Be is compatable with Unix/Linux... the big difference with Be is the Added a diffrent Windowing system and multimedia servers... (Be is a server based OS ontop of a micro kernel.... if you don't understand that don't bother flaiming...)
"There is no spoon" - Neo, The Matrix
"SPOOOOOOOOON!" - The Tick, The Tick
Wanna Read it in PDF form (for those Post Script Impaired) its here
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
Nice document. I would really like to see some archived comments from whoever read it at the time.
Can anyone go diving into the Sun archive pile and find comments supporting or denegrating the document? Also where are the people who made the comments are today.
It is always neat to find a prediction like this and examine it in light of what has happened.
Spring was a research project, never meant to go into full production. Some ideas from Spring almost certainly infected other products, and the doors API (basically a fast local RPC) came out of Spring into Solaris. There's also an implementation of doors for Linux, no word on how fast/stable/featured it actually is. I know from watching truss output that doors are used extensively in Solaris.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
How close we are! I just like the NASA phrase.
Okay, back to work....
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
The html version of this paper can be viewed at Larry's site here.
It was Yet Another Research Operating System that didn't go anywhere. Very OO design, meant to be "distributed". All system interfaces were written in a specialized interface definition language.
:)
Sun's pages on it seem to have disappeared, although they still turn up in search engines and links from other sites.
BTW--- I think "royalty-free" in this context meant just from Sun's perspective, in that it was written from scratch internally. Shouldn't be taken as a suggestion that it was free software.
If McVoy was correctly predicting 1999 in 1993, does that mean that he is currently correctly predicting 2005 in 1999? Because, if so, Open Source is in trouble. Isn't he the creator of BitKeeper, the non-free source management software?
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I can only guess you are talking about NT. What does that have to do with my topic, which was "Larry McVoy apparently doesn't think Open Source will last."?
---
Put Hemos through English 101!
Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
"Unix has become stagnant. Unix has ceased to be the platform of choice for the development and deployment of innovative technology."
"Unix has become large and complex. Obsession with the wrong sorts of compatibility (i.e., unused features) has lead to a bloated, hard to maintain, Unix source base."
Face it folks, both Unix, Linix and NT are bloated. Maybe a new OS like Be would do better.
Obviously this guy is a visionary, I wonder what his views are today? Has he published any other documents?
If Sun and Novell actually listened, I think times would have been different. At the end he mentions "Linux is a win on the political front and a lose on the maturity front". I know linux was very immature back in 1993, and still needs to grow in some areas today. But it is improving with each release. It would have been nice to see Solaris under GNU. But now Sun missed out and we have Linux to work with. I've always said that "software is a service, not a product". This means that you pay to have something done (written). And you get to do what you want with it later. It seems that Larry McVoy could predict the future. This paper was better than ESR's Cathedral and the Bizarre.
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
He mentions a royalty free OS named Spring, wonder what ever happened to it?
George
I found it quite interesting, and amusing, that he considered the Unversity of Colorado, Boulder as one of the places to donate the source to. CU's CS department only became a full department in the College of Engineering just this last year! I remember two years ago they told me that I couldn't take CS classes to fill my engineering electives because CS wasn't technically in the College of Engineering, nor was it in the College of Arts and Sciences, they were in limbo.
And frankly the CS department at CU isn't exactly well known, decent program but not a powerhouse in CS. Probably thought that it was mostly harmless to give to CU.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person