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Unix Operating Systems Software Linux

Groklaw Starts Unix/Linux History Project 71

Posted by simoniker from the back-in-the-day dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over on GrokLaw, PJ and others have decided to create a 'timeline' for Unix and Linux development. The plan is to recreate, as completely as possible, the history of these two operating systems '...from the perspective of tracing the code by copyright, patents, trade secret, and trademark. The idea is that the final timeline will be a publicly-available resource, released under a Creative Commons license, that will assist the community in defending against - or better yet in deterring - future lawsuits against GNU/Linux code.'"
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Groklaw Starts Unix/Linux History Project More

Groklaw Starts Unix/Linux History Project

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  • Don't do it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Quasar1999 ( 520073 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @11:20PM (#8186888) Journal
    Sco will find a way to use this history to further 'prove' that source code was acquired from commercial software at specific times from specific companies, using nothing more than the fact that some feature was added to linux on a specific date. This aids insane companies like SCO who want to find relationships and infringement where there really was none... go back far enough, and no one from the time/company/developer will be able to defend their IP...

    • No... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by debilo ( 612116 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @11:25PM (#8186916)
      Fearing SCO is not really a reason not to do this.

      go back far enough, and no one from the time/company/developer will be able to defend their IP...

      I don't really understand this conclusion. Are you trying to say that documenting and publishing events of the past somehow aids criminals? If so, how?
    • Exactly, Don't f--k with Pandora's box. Don't want to give Sco ammunition.

    • Re:Don't do it. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Kalak ( 260968 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @10:43AM (#8189751) Homepage Journal
      While PJ is on the side that is generally against SCO and Linux, that is because she is on the side of finding the truth of the issues relating to SCO. The truth is against SCO because they are not looking at things with more than an eye for profit. If she (and the others at groklaw) were to find that there was a place for infringement in Linux, you can bet that she would be the first to e-mail a copy of it to LKML so that those that are interested in protecting Linux are able to insure it is clean, or becomes clean, and remains clean.

      Linux will not come through this because it's better at hiding things than SCO, but because it is better at opening things up to be revealed to all than SCO. Such a history only reveals more truth to Linux and its development, and can only help Linux.

      Image if they did find something. How long it would remain in the kernel? Everyone would switch to non-tainted kernels, and SCO would have no one left to sue.

      Revealing the truth can only help Linux
    • Sco will find a way to use this history to further 'prove' that source code was acquired from commercial software at specific times from specific companies...

      You may be assuming too much, namely that SCO will be around to take advantage of it when it's released. I'm sure I'm not alone in expecting the release date to coincide with SCO's final dissolution.

  • The slashdot community seems to be at a loss for words, if I'm among the first to post... But maybe that's because we're tired of talking about SCO :P
  • I've often thought that something like this should be done so parasites (i.e. SCO) can't just go out and say a bunch of stuff with no opposition or facts to compare their statements to. Props to Groklaw for their continued good efforts on helping out the linux community!

    I hope it has lots of details, references, and footnotes, so the less technically inclined can follow it if they so desire to (though it may take a lot of reading!) That always helps the integrity and validity of a piece of work. I'll lov

    • I hope it has lots of details, references, and footnotes, so the less technically inclined can follow it if they so desire to...

      Personally, I hope they can get some of the original authors to provide notarized statements detailing their contributions. Something like the "provenance" documents that accompany high-dollar works of art, showing the chain of ownership back to the original artist. In the case of Unix/Linux, such docs could trace the origins and updates to things like errno.h, libc, the C com

  • the past might haunt us (Score:4, Funny)

    by thexdane ( 148152 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @11:22PM (#8186905)
    they will have to watch out because it will finally be revealed that SCO invented unix while a person called Al Gore worked for them and then everything will be lost

  • The press (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Message Board ( 695681 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @11:23PM (#8186909) Journal
    I'm curious to whether the Linux derivitive work(s) that SCO released and distributed in its own products will come out more in the press. Considering that this will be backed up with creditable resources, it could provide valuable insight for the press into "our side" of things. Big corporations have lots of nice looking graphs and reports to make things look rosy, but Linux really does not.

  • Hrm... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Niacin ( 700561 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @11:25PM (#8186919)
    They better have valid sources for the timeline, or SCO will say something along the lines of "this is crap, we did it all!" and the courts would care less.

    And whats up with the lack of responses? People must be getting fed up with SCO crap.

    • Re:Hrm... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dukael_Mikakis ( 686324 ) <andrewfoersterNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday February 05, 2004 @03:23AM (#8186984)
      I agree. It seems like it's going to be a damn hard project. But I guess it depends on how they want to approach it. If they want to document the major events (i.e. Linus had an idea) then it might not be so daunting, but then it might not be so interesting either. If they want to go into any depth, it seems like it'd be impossible because so many people have had their hands on Linux, and there are so many different versions and branches and everything.

      Sounds something like documenting the history of the English language. The "big picture" stuff might not be very interesting, but then it'd be impossible to document when every word was first used, and by whom.

      I guess, obviously, the logical plan is sketch out major events then flush out the details.

  • UNIX Timeline (Score:3, Informative)

    by mmca ( 180858 ) on Wednesday February 04, 2004 @11:27PM (#8186923) Homepage
    Isnt this pretty complete:

    http://www.levenez.com/unix/
    http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline. html

    Now just follow the the copyrights and patents.

  • Do you want to:

    Let people distribute copies of your whole work for noncommercial purposes (for example, on a file-sharing network, or among friends)?

    http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling [creativecommons.org]

    Sorry to say but this whole licensing scheme is getting out of hand. Not to troll about this but how many licenses are there? GPL, BSD, etc? Now another scheme? Now supposing I decided as an admin on one of the machines I -obviously ADMIN - I decide to go with the "non commercial" license. Say I run my own machin

    • http://creativecommons.org/license/sampling ..... Sorry to say but this whole licensing scheme is getting out of hand. Not to troll about this but how many licenses are there? GPL, BSD, etc? Now another scheme?

      There are different types of licenses for different type of work and needs. As an example, the GPL is a license for software, and thus not appropiate for, say, a novel or a song. As for needs, you have Trolltech's QT library that are dual licensed : A GPL variant, and a commercial one.

    • This whole licensing scheme has gotten out of hand? Please note that propreitary software has more licensing schemes than does any open-source software. Hell, each proprietary app has its own cockamamey convoluted license, while most of the open-source apps you run are covered by a few common licenses (GPL, BSD, Apache, etc.).

      So, if you don't like open-source because there are 'too many licensing schemes', you had better stay away from propreitary software! Who knows what kind of violations you can wander

    • Re:Licensing of mass disruption/destruction (Score:4, Informative)

      by n3k5 ( 606163 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @05:00AM (#8187507) Journal
      You're missing a most essential point here. In the proprietary software world, every comapnay makes its own, proprietary licences. If you want to know the contents of one, you have to fight your way through the legalese, full length. On the open source side, however, most projects use one of only a couple of licences, all of which have very simple rights and restrictions attached to them. The legalese is just for the lawyer types, most users can get away just reading the very easily understandable summaries. Creative Commons is not a waste of time, it adresses issues that haven't been adressed before, in other licences. In fact, they do insanely useful things, for example they adress one issue you brought up: making the same license compatible with the legal system of many countries.

      Now supposing I decided as an admin on one of the machines I -obviously ADMIN - I decide to go with the "non commercial" license.
      Huh? WTF? You have to choose a licence when you release a work. Your administrative tasks are not something you release, they're not a work your users are copying ... I don't get it.
    • Sorry to say but this whole licensing scheme is getting out of hand. Not to troll about this but how many licenses are there? GPL, BSD, etc? Now another scheme?

      Compared with proprietary licencing there arn't a large number. Nor do these kind of licences tend to do nasty things like changing terms and conditions behind your back or requiring a relicence for an "update" or even a bug fix. Then compare with the variety of licencing which exists on copyright materials other than software.

      I decide to go with

  • History of UNIX (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05, 2004 @03:14AM (#8186949)
    Unix was a program gone bad. Born into poverty, its parents, the phone company, couldn't afford more than a roll of teletype paper a year, so Unix never had decent documentation and its source files had to go without any comments whatsoever. Year after year, Papa Bell would humiliate itself asking for rate increases so that it could feed its child. Still, unix had to go to school with only two and three letter command names because the phone company just couldn't afford any better. At school, the other operating systems with real command names, and even command completion, would taunt poor little Unix for not having any job or terminal management facilities or for having to use its file system for interprocess communication and locking.

    Then, bitter and emasculated by its poverty, the phone company began to drink. During lost weekends of drunken excess, it would brutally beat poor little Unix about the face and neck. Eventually, Unix ran away from home. Soon it was living on the streets of Berkeley. There, Unix got involved with a bad crowd. Its life became a degrading journey of drugs and debauchery. To keep itself alive, it sold cheap source licenses for itself to universities which used it for medical experiments. Being wantonly hacked by an endless stream of nameless, faceless undergraduates, both men and women, often by more than one at the same time, Unix fell into a hell-hole of depravity.

    And so it was that poor little Unix began to go insane. It retreated steadily into a dreamworld, the only place where it felt safe. It took heroin and dreamed of being a real operating system. It took LSD and dreamed of being a raspberry flavored three-toed yak. It liked that better. As Unix became increasingly attracted to LSD, it would spend weekends reading Hunter Thompson and taking cocktails of acid and speed while writing crazed poetry in which it found deep meaning but which no one else could understand.

    Eventually, Unix began walking down Telegraph Avenue talking to itself, saying "Panic: freeing free inode," over and over again. Sometimes it would accost perfect strangers and yell "Bus error (core dumped)!" or "UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN FSCK MANUALLY!" at them in a high pitched squeal like a chihuaua with amphetamine psychosis. Upstanding citizens pretended it was invisible. Mothers with children crossed to the other side of the street.

    Then one evening Unix watched television, an event which would change its life. There it discovered professional wrestling and knew that it had found its true calling. It began to take huge doses of corticosteroids to build itself up even bigger than the biggest of the programs which had beaten it up as a child. It ate three dozen pancakes and four dozen new features for breakfast each day. As the complications of the steroids grew worse, its internal organs grew to the point where Unix could no longer contain them. First the kernel grew, then the C library, then the number of daemons. Soon one of its window systems was requiring two megabytes of swap space for each open window. Unix began to bulge in strange, unflattering places. But Unix continued to take the drugs and its internal organs continued to grow. They grew out its ears and nostrils. They placed incredible stresses on Unix's brain until it finally liquefied under pressure. Soon Unix had the mass of Andre the Giant, the body of the Elephant Man, and the mind of a forgotten Jack Nicholson character.

    The worst strain was on Unix's mind. Unable to assimilate all the conflicting patchworks of features it had ingested, its personality began to fragment into millions of distinct, incompatible operating systems. People would cautiously say "good morning Unix. And who are we today?" and it would reply "Beastie" (BSD), or "Domain", or "I'm System III, but I'll be System V tomorrow." Psychiatrists labored for years to weld together the two major poles of Unix's personality, "Beasty Boy", an inner-city youth from Berkeley, and "Belle", a southern transvestite who wanted to be a woman. With each

  • Unix History Tree (Score:2, Redundant)

    by noselasd ( 594905 )
    I suppose they want to track it down on the almost individual source file level.
    The Unix History [levenez.com] still makes a good wall poster though.
  • My hope is that the Groklaw project will pay sufficient attention to the GNU/Debian Linux distribution due to its historically important position as a Linux distribution truly dedicated to remaining 'free', and operating within the bounds of a clearly spelled out social contract. These features, as well as the fact that GNU/Debian is maintained not by a corporate entity, but by volunteers, make it worthy of a special mention in the history of Linux. In addition, I would like to see a line-by-line historic
  • Please don't re-do work already done. Consider the following.

    Here's a useful history in PDF format (current as of early 2004):
    http://www.levenez.com/unix/unix_letter.pdf [levenez.com]

    Several other formats of the document are available at the same site.

  • A Quarter Century of UNIX (Score:3, Interesting)

    by hey ( 83763 ) on Thursday February 05, 2004 @07:40AM (#8188126) Journal
    This book might help:
    A Quarter Century of UNIX [amazon.com]
    • - i knew someone would have a clue! - "A Quarter Century of UNIX" is an *excellent* book! - highly recommended, and a keeper... (i still have the rectangular promo button/badge distributed by the publisher with the book) - now if i could only get my hands on the barf bag included with the UNIX haters book... :-)

  • Awesome Idea (Score:1, Insightful)

    by pants1973 ( 688690 )
    I think this is an awesome idea. I have to give kudos to Pamela for doing a kick-ass job. She really deserves some kind of award or recognition for what she and the other folks over there do on a daily basis. Groklaw is truly a wonderful asset to the Linux and open source community.
  • ... why do they need a license? Once they use it in an open court as evidence (and there is no reason to present it to a closed court), then it is in the Public Domain.

    Or is it just to cover that "inbetween time"?
    • This is NOT true! Once it is introduced in court it becomes public but it still retains its copyright and, if it contains trademarked images, then it is protected by trademark. Further, if it has a patented invention (leaving aside the probability that the US patent office failed to properly research the application) you cannot build that invention without licensing the patent. Once something is introduced in court you have the right to see it provided that the judge has not ordered it sealed (to protect
      • I real interesting case concerning copyright and the courts is Coca-Cola v Bob Kolody [guerrillanews.com]. This is a long article and delves into some of the problems that individuals face in going up against large corporations. It is a very interesting story that contains many aspects of the way the law works (or fails to) in reality. Not the way some of us idealistic slashdotters who have read the Constitution think that the law works.

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