hi, just my random thoughts....
actually, AT&T never intended to make profit from UNIX in the beginning. i think the early development of UNIX was similar to linux. ken thompson wanted to play games (as a hobby) so he created an OS. AT&T did not tell ken to create UNIX so that they can sell it. it was an individual effort out of self-motivation... hobby. even during the early phase, nobody thought that UNIX could be a multimillion dollar business. they gave it away.... not because of whatever law prohibiting them but they didn't think OS was a good business.... whoever would have thought that UNIX would become important in the development of internet? ever wonder why IBM ask bill for the DOS instead of creating one? during that time, IBM could afford to hire developers for the OS but nobody saw it as an important business case for personal computing. during that time, OS was an added value to the hardware. ken and company developed UNIX as a hobby and many contributed to it (more like a project... extended it in universities and research labs)... until AT&T saw a business opportunity and owned it literally. the same thing happened to linux. it was a hobby.... then shared to the world... until IBM and other big companies join and made business out of it.... these two are examples of innovation not really driven by *PROFIT*. linus created LINUX because he wants to install UNIX-os in his computer for free. it was never intended for profit in similar way that ken created UNIX. dennis ritchie even mentioned that UNIX is just one of hundreds of mini projects/utilities they developed to get things done or satisfy their hobbies. fortunately, some of these miniprojects like UNIX were shared to the world... but he said that many got lost... maybe, if these other projects found their way to the world, their impacts would have been more significant than UNIX... but AT&T were not interested of marketing those other miniprojects because they were just tools or products which were not in line with the business of AT&T. UNIX just got lucky.... or the world just got lucky. i would say that the early development of these technologies were not driven by business agenda... so in this case, innovation was not driven or directed by *a corporation*... look what happened to *multics*. it was *a corporation* project and somehow it failed... compare it with UNIX and linux which started with a very simple target and shared to the world. one main reason why many significant inventions came from Bell labs was their policy of attracting the best graduates of MIT and other top US universities... gave them huge amount of money... and told them to create whatever they want from that money within a period of time.... Bell Labs gave total freedom to these researchers to create things... things the interest them... like a hobby. this policy is different policy from a typical company where products are created based on what the market dictates. AT&T just capitalized the creativity of individuals to create new things in the same way that STALLMAN advocates every person to have the power to create things that interest them by giving them full access to the environment they work... in this case the source code. do you think this is a bad philosophy? _________________________________________________ Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List http://lists.linux.org.ph/mailman/listinfo/plug Searchable Archives: http://archives.free.net.ph
