Florian La Roche <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Are there some "history" pages about these discussions?
The entire history of VM, including Melinda Varian's "VM and the Community" paper (an excellantly researched history, based on years of interviews with key players) is online. The VM community literally started the computer bulletin board craze with "VMSHARE" way back in 1976. VMSHARE is no longer active, having been superceeded by the VMESA-L list and assorted web sites, but the entire 22 years of discussion has been archived and is available on the web at http://pucc.princeton.edu/~vmshare. Melinda's history is available at http://pucc.princeton.edu/~melinda in a variety of formats. Lynn Wheeler, one of the early VM folks inside IBM, has been posting regularly to the comp.arch and alt.folklore.computers newsgroups for years, and maintains a huge archive of interesting S/3x0 and VM historical info at http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html. > Are parts of > the current VM code available from IBM? It's hard to say how much of the current VM code is available, but VM sites have always had some source and many of us believe that today we have the lion's share of it. We are prevented by license terms from sharing it with others, but that's not an OCO issue, just a licensing one. > How much of that code > has changed > from being available then to closed source? By current terminology, it's all "closed source", because none of it is licensed under any generally accepted Open Source license. I think you're asking how much source that was once available under license is no loger available. The answer for the current codebase is, I believe, "none". Yes, there are parts that are not available in source, but to my knowledge those sources have never been available except under non-disclosure terms. One might rather ask the opposite - how much has changed from no-source to source-available? That answer is much more revealing. The 1990s saw a great "re-sourcing" of VM, resulting in the largest components of VM being mostly source-available. > Seems like "good-old" VM customers understand how important > source code is > for a better operating system... Yup. Paradoxically, when those of us old enough to remember POSIX being new asked IBM to include POSIX facilities in VM, that request created a huge pool of code that IBM delivered only in object code. It seems some of the licenses IBM had to accept prevented them from sharing the source with their customers. The "open systems" support in VM wasn't even closed source, it was OCO! Ross Patterson Computer Associates
