Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:20 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
In reply to: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement by landley
Parent article: Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Oh, and Bruce Fscking Perens got the idea of a swiss-army-knife executable from gzip, it was not original with him:

You've repeated this one for years, and it's wrong, wrong, wrong. I did not get the idea of linking all of the names to one executable from gzip, and I never claimed that particular element of busybox as an invention.

I first worked on Unix at the NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory, the predecessor of Pixar, in 1981. At the time we had Version 6 Unix on PDP-11 and we were just getting the first VAX to be released from DEC. The device of linking multiple names to one executable was present in the command line tool set of Version 6 Unix, and you can probably go to a V6 source archive and find it there today. It was not invented as part of gzip.

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Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:25 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (2 responses)

I didn't say it was invented as part of busybox, I was pointing out an instance of it predating busybox in one of the components of the original busybox. I.E. here's proof it WASN'T an original invention in busybox.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:41 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

This is the straw man fallacy. I never claimed to invent it, you argue that I didn't invent it.

What I did was make a tiny replacement of the entire Unix command line toolkit necessary for a limited purpose that ran like the command line programs it replaced, not like the "stand-alone shell" programs that people were making around then. I made the first, what follows are destined to be clones and copies.

Garrett: The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

Posted Jan 31, 2012 20:45 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link]

For the record, the pnmtools set also used the method of swiss-army-knife linking by the early 90s.