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.

Comments

Re:Open Source is too young for this

[Gurlia]

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.

The GPL will be fine.

[Paul Crowley]

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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What I note is more interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

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*

Re:Running Version 7

[IntlHarvester]

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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Sensationalism

[Denor]

I think this is quite interesting, too. Some statistics:

• 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.

Re:Postscript version of the book...

[epaulson]

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

Literary criticism and programming?

[apsmith]

What I found most interesting about the article was the author's notes about how what Lions did resembles literary criticism. Of course Perl has long been advocating "literate programming" and Larry Wall has a rather interesting piece on Perl as the first postmodern computer language. But it really all started with C and UNIX.

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!

Re:John Lions, remember?

[craw]

I agree with you. It would appear that many ppl that peruse /. don't know how to intelligently comment on an excellent piece of journalism. The article was extremely bittersweet to read as I was unaware that Lions had passed away. However, the last section about how Lions was so pleased by the publishing of the book was very nice to see. That in itself made the article worthwhile.

As for bickering, how can one attack a story about a great OS, a true educator, and a significant series of events, all told superbly. Furthermore, the author actually married a Linux kernel hacker!

BTW, the book is amazing. How many other times do you get to check out code written by the gods of UNIX?