Open Definition 2.0

A) don't you think it's long enough already?

B) I covered some of that in the Ohio Linuxfest talk.

I can talk about how Sun's marketing guy Ed Zander's decision to unbundle sun's compiler and sell it as an optional ad-on that cost extra was responsible for gcc reaching a critical mass of developers. How the real killer app the FSF had was its FTP site back before the NSF AUP changed to allow for-profit use of the internet (giving us "the september that never ended" in 1993 and geocities in 1995), which is why Larry Wall signed the copyright on his "patch" program over to the FSF back in the 80's, but happily supported perl on windows in the 90's. He never cared about idealism, he didn't have any other easy way to get distribution. (sunsite/ibiblio eroded it a bit, but it was really the home isp, geocities, and sourceforge that made the FSF's copyright assignment requirement too much of a hurdle for most developers to ever bother with).
So the decline in influence of the FSF in the 90's was a natural result of the spread of the internet (remember, their primary fundraising was printed manuals and the sale of software on magnetic tape well into the 90's). They declined due to changes Linux took advantage of. They blamed Linux, and tried to _claim_ Linux, but neither was so...

But the thing is: you're not citing _any_ of the points you're making. You're not even referring to specific historic events. You're repeating assertions that some guy told you, and what that guy is telling you is that he's a really important guy who was inexplicably cut out of history and that he must regain his rightful place by telling everybody in the world about his greatness.

While this does tend to happen to people like Rosalind Franklin? It doesn't happen _that_ much to white male college graduates from boston. His big contributions are what, emacs? Even granting the importance of his version of eclipse (posix standardizes vi, but not emacs), even there he was not the first, was part of a very large team, and was working on one of a zillion forks: http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html

The start of this thread was "why didn't you mention X"? The answer is "because most things that happen do not involve this specific guy, even though he tries to take credit for magnetism and sunlight because of his raging ego and ".

Honestly, I've hung out with Peter Salus in three different states (and at his apartment when he lived here in Austin), he was executive director of usenix and vice president of the FSF, you probably don't know him as the author of "A quarter century of unix": he said richard was nuts. I spent a summer staying with Eric Raymond (they had a falling out but he and Richard were friends in the 80's hanging out at science fiction conventions, and Eric maintained the EMACS Lisp library once upon a time: _he_ said richard was nuts. (Maybe there's a "takes one to know one" there, but at least it's a different kind of nuts.) My friend Stu Green (founded the Austin Linux User Group) was the only guy to work for _both_ of the Lisp startups that spun out of MIT (the ones RMS was so pissed about), he says he was on _suicide_watch_ with the guy after a bad breakup with a girlfriend, long ago. In 2001 I drove to Boston to interview Stallman himself in _his_ office. (He borrowed my car to run an errand, and left it unlocked.) He told me the BSD guys fighting back against AT&T legally was his idea. (Because obviously, they wouldn't have thought of that.)

I've made some minimal attempt to figure out what did actually go on. I talked to more than one person, often traveling to other states to interview them. I tracked down primary sources where possible.

The basic story is that the gnu project failed. It was 8 years old when linux happened, and had not produced a usable system. Coherent took three, minix took three, BSD rewrote and replaced all of AT&T's old code in less than three, and even more have come and gone that nobody pays attention to.

I grew up in an open source community that had never heard of unix. We didn't even have the patch program.

http://landley.net/history/wwiv/

> As for the FSF's emphasis on philosophy, I find it impressive how often
> the FSF has successfully predicted future problems with technology and
> policy. (Whether they've been the best positioned to deal with them in
> all cases is another matter.)

Stallman didn't invent open source. It was ubiquitous before the apple vs franklin decision. The FSF was not visionary, it was a conservative reactionary movement to changes in the industry, and its goal was to recapture the glorious past of the 1970's. (Keep in mind the year before announcing GNU he was cloning the output of the two Lisp companies in boston because he was sure that was going to be big.)

Unix was so obviously big that Paul Allen (the techie co-founder of microsoft, Gates was the lawyer/marketer, it's like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak) licensed Unix when he found out that IBM was doing a PC, and hired a two man garage operation called the Santa Cruz Operation to port it to the 8086 and 68000 (because he didn't know which IBM would use) and called it "Xenix" to indicate they would port it anywhere IBM needed.

Then when IBM did come to them (to license basic) and the hardware specs said "16-64k ram" he saw they were doing a CP/M clone (marvelous page about that mirrored here: http://landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/history.html ), and so they bought the 16 bit CP/M clone Tim Paterson had done (they knew him because he'd previously made Microsoft's first hardware product for them, an Apple II expansion board that let you stick an 8080 processor into an Apple so it could run Microsoft basic instead of woz's version).

But Allen didn't give up on Unix, he shoehorned unix features into their CP/M clone (which is why Dos 2.0 went from file control blocks to filehandles, and grew subdirectory support) with the goal of gradually converging with unix until he could just ship Xenix as DOS 4 or 5. (The DOS 2 manual has an appendix about this.)

And then Paul came down with Hodgkins Lymphoma in 1983, initially wrote it off as overwork getting DOS 3.0 out (a driver upgrade for the IBM AT, now with hard drives), heard Gates and Ballmer in the next room scheming about how to get his stock back if he died, left for medical treatment and never returned to the company. His technical agenda left with him.

Microsoft continued to use xenix to run its internal email system until 1990, but when Gates found out that Unix System III had sucked in Xenix code with attribution stripped (the same practice that came back to bite them in the BSD lawsuit, they did it to everybody), he _flipped_out_. Rather than fight much bigger AT&T, he unloaded xenix on the porting house SCO and washed his hands of it. But that's how close we came to having Unix from microsoft in the 80's: one cancer cell away.

So thinking the gnu project was visionary? Cloning a 15 year old widely deployed operating system that had already _been_ cloned (coherent shipped its first version in 1980)? No, it really wasn't. That was the same year Sun Microsystems was founded. Go read "where wizards stay up late" (it's a history of the arpanet/internet), Bolt Beraneck and Newmann replaced all the original honeywell IMPs with VAXes running BSD Unix in 1980. It was in every university with an internet connection, running the show.

Oh here, I mirrored the start of a good book about it (and Bill Joy's role in it, back before he went crazy):

http://landley.net/history/mirror/books/andrewlenard/part...

(That's the sort of thing I find fascinating. I am weird.)

Stallman talks about reacting to Xerox closing its driver software in response to Apple vs Franklin. AT&T similarly closing its code led Andrew Tanenbaum (who was using unix as a teaching tool) to write a new clone version from scratch so he could _continue_ teaching OS design based around Linux. (No, he wasn't the only professor doing that, google for the Lyons book. But Tanenbaum responded by writing code. Unlike Stallman, he actually finished and shipped something, because he had a class to teach. Linus learned "ship early, ship often" from the comp.os.minix community.)

Linux is a clone of Minix, with input from printed Sun workstation manuals in the university library (because posix cost too much). It is not a product of the FSF, they were working on GNU, with the hurd (after alix), which failed. The FSF trying to take credit for Linux (as they try to take credit for BSD standing up to AT&T) is factually untrue.

And yes, I asked Kirk McKusick about that one when I saw him at Ohio LinuxFest in 2013. I also asked Doug McIlroy some questions when I had dinner with him at a previous LinuxFest (2010?) but as far as I remember he hadn't ever met Stallman.

We live in a time when primary sources for this stuff are still alive (some of them, anyway). before he died, I got to email Dennis Ritchie to ask what "inode" stood for. Turns out, even he didn't know, but he could at least definitively guess:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2002/7/20/86

(And I spoke to him on the phone briefly once, he answered the "office" phone number on his web page so I invited him to Penguicon as a GoH. He declined politely, wasn't traveling much. I've received email from Ken Thompson but it was about the 8 chapters he reviewed of The Art of Unix Programming, I didn't get to ask any of my own questions...)

But if you really want to ask Linus Torvalds a question, and are willing to drive to his hometown at a time of his choosing and buy him an expensive beer, you can probably get an answer. (Or arrange to meet up with him at a conference he's attending, through the conference organizers.) Same for any computer science luminary you care to name, they're generally not movie star level famous...

> Apart from that, even if they did nothing else, huge credit to GNU and
> the FSF for the GPL and LGPL, and the concept of copyleft, which they
> rather clearly originated. Without that, it seems highly likely that
> Linux would be a predominantly all-permissive and far more proprietary
> ecosystem.

I covered that in the talk too. Copyleft only works as a category killer. There's no such thing as "The GPL" anymore. Samba and the Linux kernel can't share code even though they implement two ends of the same protocol and are both GPL. By introducing GPLv3, the FSF fragmented the GPL the way AT&T fragmented proprietary unix back in the 80's.

(No, "just ship GPLv2 or later" doesn't help, then you can't accept code from either one. The GPL was a terminal node in a directed graph of license convertibility providing a universal receiver. Developers only faced a single binary decision, "is this GPL or not", with no care for how licenses _interacted_ beyond that one question.

In the absence of a universal receiver, people like unlicense.org are switching up to universal donor. That's the public domain, but since the public domain has been so hugely FUDded for years (here's a lawyer comparing placing code into the public domain with abandoning trash by the side of the highway, and for some reason Linux Journal saw fit to publish him in 2002: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6225 ) people are afriad of it so the either have long elaborate legalese that equals public domain (creative commons zero for example) or they go with one of the BSDs. But the various number of clause BSDs and MIT and LSC and Apache and so on are equivalent to public domain EXCEPT they require you to copy specific license boilerplate into derived works, so if you combine a bunch of them together in one product... guess why the kindle paperwhite's about->license page is over 300 pages long. Ok, kindle pages, but still. You think that's verbosity is ever going to be _useful_?)

Sigh. I care deeply about this topic, but lwn.net comments is not an ideal venue to discuss it.

Rob

Sorry, I don't mean to impugn your lawyer friends, but I'm very interested in medicine. I've done secondary research (ie read primary papers and drawn my own conclusions) both into modern medicine, and historic medicine. And it's left me EXTREMELY cynical about the public view of medicine, including a lot of what is apparently peddled by doctors themselves.

Just because someone's a lawyer doesn't mean they know jack about law ... :-) and especially doesn't mean they know anything about particular "historical" events. If they've got first-hand knowledge I will bow to their knowledge. But I get the impression Rob makes a point of trying to get to primary sources, to hear or read first-hand accounts. You've made no attempt to claim your lawyer friends are in the same league ... Sorry.

Cheers,
Wol