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Historical Unix, Open Source Legal Battles, and John Lions
Invicta{HOG} was the ffirst to write us about today's new Salon piece. It covers the first legal battle open source faced, quite some time ago, John Lions and a look into the history of Unix. It's a pleasant read.
IMHO this is why FSF needs to start coming out of their proverbial well and start a legal defense fund for Free Software, in particular, the GPL. So far it seems to me (correct me if I'm wrong) that FSF only cares about defending the GPL when the software involved is owned by the FSF, like GCC, Emacs, etc.. We need a legal defense fund for free software in general, not just for FSF products! Otherwise all it takes is one piece of obscure GPL'd software (that FSF doesn't care about) being abused by some company/person, and the court overturning the GPL -- and everything will collapse.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Remember that if the courts decide that the GPL is so much toilet paper, the consequence is that distributors have no right to distribute code at all, since it's only the GPL would grant them that right. It's pretty much a fail-safe license: there's simply no legal route by which someone could distribute GPL'd code as if it placed no obligations on them unless the court returns a seriously perverse verdict.
You're mistaken about Common Law. It's possible you're thinking of trademark law; this isn't trademark law.
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I must disagree that "open source" is nothing more than a marketing term for "free software." It may be that to you, but it's more than that to many people.
Neither open source nor free software have much to do with either money or law, IMO. Free software maintains it is a moral imperative to open sources because information shouldn't be property, while open source just says software works better and develops faster if you do. You can honestly believe in the efficacy of sharing sources without believing it has anything to do with morality. To provide an umbrella that includes such people is more than mere marketing.
Yes, the GPL has never been tested in court. So what? That argues against there being much reason to write cute articles to prepare legal positions that probably will never be necessary.
You really can't throw out things like "widespread abuse" and call for the overturn of the GPL and open source before it's too late without backing up your argument. I am not aware of any abuses.
If you don't like the GPL and Open Source, why do you think you have a right to the labors of those who do, and wish to voluntarily pool their own efforts together? Do you believe in nationalization of all intellectual property or just that of groups you disagree with? In actual fact, if the GPL fails, it should fail safe, that is, all GPL software will become undistributable without permission from all copyright holders. Is that what you want?
It was an interesting historical article that barely mentioned either free software or open source.
ISBN: 1573980137
Price: $29.95
Ships: usually 2-3 days
ISBN: 1573980137
I think I'll make a suggestion to the Christmas elf :-)
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neophase
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neophase
I attended a Usenix LISA conference about a year ago. The Lions book had just been released, and there was a table in the vendor area with copies for sale. I picked up a copy and started looking through it ... trying to decide whether to buy it then or wait until later, when I happened to notice that the person standing next to me was having a pretty interesting conversation with the booksellers. Checked his badge ... Dennis Richie! I'd no idea beforehand that he was on the program. Of course, I couldn't think of a thing to say. I settled on asking him nicely to autograph my copy (he did, nicely.)
:-)
Feel free to moderate this tripe down
I'm not sure why the reponses to this article have devolved into a flamewar over the GPL, since this article was about John Lions, not the GPL.
I had never heard of John Lions before this article, but he sounds like he was an intelligent and wise man, and I wish I had had the chance to have him as a teacher. It's good to learn the history of the movement to open the source to the people, and fascinating to hear source code discussed and dissected like literature. These are the types of intelligent conversation that I wish I saw more of here, instead of petty bickering.
Thanks, John, and I hope to read your book soon.
is the total LACK of comments about this article. Its like the Linux camp could give a damn about Unix history.
*walks away stroking greying beard, mumbling about kids, and how people who don't understand Unix are doomed to repeat it*
At the time, Western Electric was the manufacturing arm of the Bell System (i.e. AT&T). So when Bell Labs wanted to distribute Unix, they did it through Western Electric. That's just how things worked in those pre-divestiture days.
Take a look at the recent slashdot thread about a Java PDP emulator running Spacewar
Apparently the emulator can also boot V7 UNIX. Also see comment #73 for a link to DEC's non-java emulator.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
- Historical Unix, Open Source Legal Battles, and John Lions: 28 comments
- Interview with The Mind Behind Aibo: 50 comments
- Napster Attacks Open Source Clone: 112 comments
So we find that a story that was rushed and (repeadedly) flamed for being incorrect ends up having more commentary than two stories which seem fairly interesting, but non-controversial. I really would hope that Slashdot isn't starting to pander to the lowest common denominator like television does. I try to have more faith in the people here.-Denor
Should be fun.
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This is not my sandwich.
I was fortunate - no, privileged - to have been taught by John Lions, and to have learnt about operating system theory using these notes in 1977. He probably has as much to do with the success of Unix, and establishing the intellectual freedom that inspired those who followed (Torvalds, Raymond, Stallman) as the other Unix pioneers. We owe him a great deal.
My only regret - I sold my copies of his notes in 1978.
Everything that I've gotten seems to say there's no problem, so here it is:
http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/~epaulson/lionc.ps
When I attended the University of New South Wales I had John Lions for a couple of subjects including that where we learn't from the UNIX source code using the version 6 books talked about. Of the subjects I took, that subject was by far probably the most interesting. I am not sure if I still have the books and will be most disgusted with myself now if I did indeed throw them out in my last big cleanup earlier this year. One of the aspects of John Lions class which I found to be most unique was his manner of doing assesments. We were encouraged to write our own notes against the source code and the commentary and then we had a number of tests during the session where we could take the books including our extra notes we had scribbled onto the books into the exams. At the end of the test you could actually choose not to submit your answers if you felt you hadn't done well. Instead you could choose to sit a second different test the following week covering roughly the same material. You could also sit the second test even if you submitted the first in which case the results from both tests were averaged. This way if you didn't end up going well in the first you could sit the second and thus had a chance to improve your mark. For myself I was always happy with my first try and didn't sit the second test, but the whole concept I feel did encourage people to study the source code even harder when they realised they hadn't gone well in the first test. I was dismayed a year or so later when I heard that he had abandonded this assesment style and instead relied mostly on end of session exams and programming assignments. Anyway, when I get home now I will have search out my copies of the source code and the commentary. I dearly hope I still have them as I didn't realise what had gone on in regards to them. Two volumes that will be treasured if I do but still have them.
I think we're reaching an interesting point here. Language of course was invented to communicate, and computer languages are called languages for a good reason - they are how we communicate in a deep way both with our computers and with other programmers who help maintain and develop our code. Before C (which came along with UNIX and made things like Lions' book possible) there were machine or assembly languages, which were too close to the machine to be very useable by humans. Or there were abominations like Fortran and Cobol, which generally insulted the intelligence of both the machines and the humans. C and later derivatives like Perl and Java somehow elegantly capture the essence of both machine and human ways of "thinking", and allow deep communication of meaning in relatively concise fashion. Just like a real language.
And this goes to the crux of the definition of open source itself. Binary executables are pure machine language, essentially unusable by humans, but since they contain the full "content" of a program (at least for a particular piece of hardware/configuration etc) why can't we just write good decompilers to convert machine code to source code? Maybe if our artificial intelligence efforts succeed eventually that will be possible, but until then the results of such machine translations are many times worse than the snarls babelfish and its ilk get into translating human languages... Things like variable names, the choice of loop or switch constructs, object-oriented constructs, even regular expression syntax are generally carefully chosen by the programmer for human readability and verifiability of the correctness of the instructions that the machine will carry out. What we're doing is really a new, and very interesting, form of literature... food for thought I hope!
Energy: time to change the picture.