"John S. Gage" wrote: > Torvald took an existing Unix implementation called Minix and adapted it. > John Gage > > Joseph Dal Molin wrote: > > Sorry for what may be a dumb question to many... but how was the kernel for > > Linux built in the first place.....? Did Mr. T do it by himself. > > > > If that was a critical step to moving forward then that's the nut we have to > > crack. Gentlemen (aren't there any females BTW?), please think about loosening up your tight association between "open source" and "Linux". I have nothing against Linux, but it opens up the mind if we do not over-constrain our associations. Linux has helped open source to become popular (= mentioned in the press), but that doesn't mean Torvald has invented open source. If anyone has "invented" open source, it is Richard Stallman with his GNU project and the FSF. But even Stallman only pointed something that already existed before him, the spirit of the Unix community, the sharing of source code, that was both necessary and possible in the Unix world. Sharing of source code was necessary because the different Unices weren't binary compatible. Sharing was possible because the APIs of these different Unix systems was largely compatible. So, forget about the hero-legends (history is not run by singular people), if you want to understand the open source paradigm, stop staring at Linux, and understand the origin and spread of Unix at large. It starts with Kernighan, the invention of C, the conversion of MULTIX to UNIX at Bell Laboratories (today Lucent Technology, Kernighan is still there.) Bell Labs (then owned by ATT I think) has issued a source code license for the UNIX kernel ... yes, source code license: open source!!! That was back in 1970 or so. So, it's not wrong to say that Bell Laboratories "invented" open source! Yes, the license was expensive, but was discounted for universities. UC Berkeley bought in and they ran operating systems classes and workshops using this code base. Berkeley added all the rich tools to UNIX, and most importantly developed the reference IP implementation in 4.2 BSD. Open source once again made history: most of the worlds IP stacks (commercial or free) originate in the 4.2 BSD kernel code. Now ask yourselves: if Berkeley had not develop IP in BSD and give it away as open source, how important would the IP be today? May be, we would still have to live with DEC NET, XEROX XNS, and probably OSI/ISO would have taken over by now and we were all bogged down by it. Would there be e-commerce over the Internet ... who knows, I doubt it. But does this make Berkeley the one heroe of open source? No! It's the (academic) spirit of giving and taking that open source is all about, not singular heroes, not ATT, not UCB, not Torvald. Berkeley UNIX has served as a pooling of all kinds of cool software. Every Berkeley UNIX had a C compiler, LISP (Franz Lisp) compiler and interpreter, and of course Fortran. Lex, yacc, and make were all in the box, awk, sed, grep, find, and of course the bourne shell. Where would the world be without these little helpers? You know how it feels without 'sed' once you had to live with Microsoft DOS and Windows: poor, powerless. How could you have a software project without make, SCCI (later RCS used in CVS) and all those things that make up the UNIX development environment? All this was possible not because of single heroes or companies or organizations, but only through the spirit of sharing. So it could all be pooled on the Unix platform. The BSD platform spanned well-known systems such as the PDP-11 and the VAX, I don't know why anyone would settle with VMS on the VAX when BSD was available, but people did. IS managers did not trust the UNIX world without commercial support. They mostly bet on the wrong horse, however, as most of the commerial systems they bet on had to be replaced in the last 10 years, where Unix still lives on. Anyway, back into the 1980s. Then came Stallman with Emacs, his problems at MIT, his building Emacs again as GNU Emacs, and the GCC project. None of the free Unices nor Linux would exist without GCC. Linux is in fact extremely dependent (historically) on the GNU project: GCC, GNU make, GNU binutils, bash, GNU shellutils, GNU textutils, GNU libc, flex, bison, GNU tar, gzip, etc. BSD had all this stuff already before GNU, but Linux had to take from GNU to keep it's stand-alone identity. But all of them, BSD and Linux had to use the GCC, since the original Kernighan CC was still ATTs and not shareable. Stallman is surely a unique character and workhorse, but what would the GNU project be without its many supporters, maintaining and writing all the code? In 1989/1990 4.3 BSD was put up on the net, as 4.3 BSD/Net2, open source hits again. Then the commercial paradigm hit back: the lawsuit of USL (ATT) against Berkeley about copyright infringement with the 4.3 BSD/Net2 release. Bill and Lynne Jolitz (two more names to be remembered) had already delivered the first 4.3 BSD port to the Intel 80386 PC architecture, called 386BSD (it's about 1990/91 now.) It was then 1990 that free Unices became a real alternative to DOS on the PC. Yes, Tannenbaum's MINIX was about first, it costed $100 :-), but it was still somewhat a toy and could not accumulate all the existing UNIX tools and applications. Linux started out at the same time, and built based on Tannenbaum's work. If you look at it from the perspective of 10 years ago (1990), where BSD already was alive and well for over 10 years and 4.3 BSD/Net2 available for download, Linux was really a superflous one-man-tinker-project. Linux stayed superflous in its first 5 years, since it had nothing to add that wasn't already available in the Unix open source world. What Linux magically did, was drawing attention of new users. So, recently you see crowds of ex-DOSsers and Winsozers who are excited of Linux (but still a little afraid of Unix.) So, Linux and 386BSD became quite popular in about 1993, 1994, but of course far from the mainstream. The lawsuit USL vs. UCB pulled 386BSD back, for fear of the entire BSD being suffocated in the lawsuit. Then Linux' popularity surged, it entered the commercial sector, and the rest is a positive feed-back effect that selects a weak but distinct enough signal and amplifies it to a big buzz. Open source is the spirit of sharing, not a designed business paradigm. There is not one inventor of open source, it is a community phenomenon. As always, there are some highlight figures in history, but they live in a matrix of tradition and fellows. And there is usually more than one highlight figure, so in all of history, so in the history of open source. Why did open source become attractive for the commercial world? Because of Linux? Yes and no. Linux has surged the movement to a level of attention that was unseen before. But looking behind the PC magazines, the open source paradigm was already established in the industry. Again, if with anyone specific it started with Richard Stallman and GCC. Stallman's MANIFESTO said: "free software is about freedom not price" (that's why "free software" is now called "open source", the shareholders don't like their company to make just freebies.) Apart from consultant firms, who may have operated on the open source driven business model for years before, Cygnus was one of the first larger companies adopting this model. Cygnus was soon in charge of the GNU C++ and then all of the GCC compiler. Cygnus packed and sold the GNU utilities polished nicely and with service. Cygnus finally, finally, made most of GNU available for Windows 32 under the name "CygWin". That was the raising sun for the poor fellows locked in the DOS/Windows world with its mostly proprietory system of vendor and shareware software. Cygnus has been traded at the stockmarket for quite a while, did fine, was acquired, and continues to operate, and share. Yes, RedHat is a hit today with its Linux distribution, but its not the first successful open source company. There is one cornerstone of open source one must not forget: X11. The X Window system was maintained in a consortium of all major UNIX vendors. It was a commercial undertaking, but the source code was free with its release X11R5. That allowed people in Germany and Australia (David Wexelblat was the guy from Australia) to port X11R5 to i386 Unices. Among them was SCO, DELL, and of course 386BSD and Linux. The Xfree86 project was born (with nostalgy I can say that I took part in the vote for the name "Xfree86", althoug my preferred name did not make it :-) That was back in 1992. Xfree86 was, since then, maintained by a group in Australia (and the world). The control model was, similar as the FreeBSD, a "core group" model: a few people, around 10 or so, taking care for the entire system, its integrity, and its releases. Xfree86 was back integrated into the X11R6 release a few years later. Without Xfree86, none of the free UNIX systems would have created any commercial attention, especially not Linux, since Linux was mostly popular in the end-user world. One can tell more stories about the X11 project, especially the painful period under the "Open Software Foundation" (OSF) that tried to do the impossible: develop open software under a closed source model. Motif was quite successful and bogged down the open source world, because back then, most of the more polished GUIs were based on Motif and thus could not really participate in the open source world. OSF did two more notable projects: the OSF/1 Unix clone (adopted only by DEC, now called Tru64 under Compaq) and of course the Distributed Computing Environment DCE. DCE was a close forefather of CORBA, one should know. But DCE and OSF/1 was not open source, which may be the reason why DCE really didn't fly all too well. Conversely the DCE competitor, Sun's ONC RPC with NFS did fly a whole better, because it was open source! That leads us, finally, to conclude by looking at Sun Microsystems Inc. Sun is well known in both hardware and operating systems market. Sun running the Motorola 68000 processor under a 4.2 BSD clone named SunOS. But Sun, like every other commercial Unix, developed SunOS under a closed software model. That was the reason why upgrading to 4.3 BSD standards was quite difficult and never really happened. Finally Sun gave up on their BSD clone and launched Solaris. But Sun was not a bad guy in terms of open source. They did contribute their RPC protocol along with XDR and NFS (and NIS, and YP, etc.) to the IETF and gave its source code for free. All RPC and NFS implementations on free Unices (and probably everywhere else) are based on the Sun sources. So, it is only consequential that something like the Java business model happened. Java is open source with some restrictions on what you can do with the sources. Kind of like the first ATT UNIX source code license, but cheaper. Java and Sun really have a tradition of good friendship to the open source community. So, this was my essay on a broader picture of what open source is. It is the spirit of sharing, the pooling of neat stuff on the Unix environment, but also the spreading of the idea of sharing accross the boudaries of Unix, even including Microsoft Platforms (not because of Microsoft but because people who are lucky to live outside the MS-only world would share with those poor fellows who were locked inside.) Open source is a community phenomenon, and its about the fun of writing programs. So, please don't get too focused on Linux, the Linux operational model, Torvald as the hero, the Copyrignt issue, etc. Also don't make open source something owned by organizations. Open source is a spirit, a spirit that can be organized to death, a spirit that can be commercialized to death. Let's just have fun writing and sharing programs in source code form. To finally answer to Joseph: yes, existing source is the critical step. A critical mass of software (not necessarily people) is needed. And of course users and user demand is also needed (a problem in hospital health care.) So, may be, VistA can become such a thing once it gets free of the commercial MUMPs. It seems to me that much of what MUMPS tried to do is all available on UNIX. The multiprocessing, the files, data bases, etc. So, a few people's weightlifting act of dissecting VistA out of the grip of the MUMPS-and-only-MUMPS environment could make a big difference. regards -Gunther -- Gunther_Schadow-------------------------------http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu Regenstrief Institute for Health Care 1050 Wishard Blvd., Indianapolis IN 46202, Phone: (317) 630 7960 [EMAIL PROTECTED]#include <usual/disclaimer>
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