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Unix Operating Systems Software

Caldera releases original unices under BSD license 236

Posted by Nik from the born-free dept.
q[alex] writes "Caldera International has done a very good thing. They have released the "Ancient" Unices they inherited when they purchased SCO under a "BSD-style" license. The license is available here, instructions on finding the source are here. Caldera (and before that SCO) had required people to obtain a free (as in beer) but somewhat restrictive license in order to get these old sources. The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool."
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Caldera releases original unices under BSD license More

Caldera releases original unices under BSD license

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  • Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by tanuki_x ( 450933 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @09:56PM (#2891831) Homepage
    Now we can see how these "unix" thingies work and write one that works on PCs!
    • ...depends if you actually think one of those "unix thingies" belongs on a desktop computer. *Places can of worms on table for someone else to open*

    • Re:Yes! (Score:3, Funny)

      by alexburke ( 119254 )
      Now we can see how these "unix" thingies work

      The whole point is that eunuchs' thingies don't work.

      *whispering*

      Oh, uhh, I mean... never mind.

  • Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by twilight30 ( 84644 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @09:56PM (#2891832) Homepage
    Never would have thought Caldera would have done something as community-oriented as this, given their history of late.

    However, a big thank-you from this Slashdot reader for their act. I appreciate it, and I know I'm not alone...

  • Why is this cool? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SpookComix ( 113948 ) <spookcomix@g[ ]l.com ['mai' in gap]> on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @09:57PM (#2891836) Homepage Journal
    The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool.

    I don't mean to sound like a stick in the mud here, but why exactly is this cool? This source code was obviously available before, for people who actually needed it. Why, then, is the simple fact that anyone can get to it now a "cool" thing?

    Will this spawn development of breakthrough products? Will this help administrators of these old system finally take control of their network?

    Or is this just another geek trophy to have, print, wave around over coffee, and ultimately collect dust on shelves full of other useless time-wasting trinkets?

    --SC

    • Re:Why is this cool? (Score:3, Informative)

      by twilight30 ( 84644 )
      Historical purposes. Developmental and teaching purposes, more importantly.

      • I agree ... the historical value is great. I personally have in my possession PDP-11 V7 sources (with my marked-up changes to the terminal driver to change from Multics-style line editing to DEC-style editing) but have no legal right to distribute them.

        People will probably bitch that the sources have no *future value* and they'll be right. But ... who cares? History is, well, history.

    • Re:Why is this cool? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stan Chesnutt ( 2253 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:00PM (#2891855) Homepage
      It is great to have this available for study. And, this might inspire a whole new generation of PDP-11 emulators so you can sit down and actually run the original bits (emulation of an ASR-33 not considered mandatory).

      Computer Science would also be served well if the original Multics sources/binaries were released. Although it would be much harder to write a Honeywell emulator!

      • Re:Why is this cool? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @11:26PM (#2892225)
        Of course, in order to partially emulate an ASR-33, you could perhaps connect an IBM selectric up to your computer while running a looped recording of gunfight and an idling 58 chevy with one blown piston. For the final touch, you could replace the room's light switch with a dimmer switch and wiggle it back and forth whenever you are printing something out.
      • This is a tiny fragment of Multics Source [multicians.org]

        It's only 20 years old, surely we can find more of it?

      • I was going to ask the same questions.

        Particularly, is there anything in these ancient sources that the GNU tools [gnu.org] have overlooked? Or have they succeeded in their earlier goal of superseding the original UNIX utilities?

        Second, if the focus was on 16 bit computers, then is there anything in these sources that could be helpful on smaller processors of the current age, namely embedded applications where power requirements take us back a few generations.

        Busybox [busybox.net] is popular among the embedded crowd - does this old code have anything in it for BusyBox to learn from?

    • "Will this spawn development of breakthrough products? Will this help administrators of these old system finally take control of their network?"

      Yes and yes. Now developers can do just about anything with the code, and the being able to do so will allow for bettered versions of the original code to replace some of the still antiquated code out there with newer, better versions, as well as improving interoperability with those ancient programs and newer stuff.
    • Or is this just another geek trophy to have, print, wave around over coffee, and ultimately collect dust on shelves full of other useless time-wasting trinkets?


      Yes. Sometimes isn't that what makes life worth living? Not the huge major successes, but just something that temporarily brings a smile to your lips and exclamation to your voice? The things that may not shake the world, but are still cool in their own way?

    • Re:Why is this cool? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dr. Tom ( 23206 ) <tomh@nih.gov> on Thursday January 24, 2002 @12:51AM (#2892634) Homepage
      This is why it's cool:

      [~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
      (syntax errors like =|, =&, and the rand() API changed)
      [~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
      [~/new/usr/src/games]% wump
      Instructions? (y-n) n
      You are in room 8
      I smell a wumpus
      There are tunnels to 10 6 18
      Move or shoot (m-s) m
      which room? 10
      You are in room 10
      I smell a wumpus
      There are tunnels to 19 8 1
      Move or shoot (m-s) s
      Give list of rooms terminated by 0
      8 6 0
      You slew the wumpus
      Another game? (y-n)

  • ewww...SCO/UNIXWARE (Score:1, Insightful)

    by levl289 ( 72277 )
    As a sysadmin at a company who uses these Unices, I would recommend that the hobbyist stay away from them. They're cludgy at best. I figure that this'll fare well mainly for those that are stuck with them, and need the source (we are slowly migrating to Linux/Solaris).
    • SCO Open Server is 10x worse then Unixware. Don't even get me started :).

      A few notes:

      * No ELF shared libraries (COFF)
      * No loadable kernel modules (manually re-link the kernel for every new driver).
      * No kmalloc function for many kernel buffers; if you over-run a buffer you have to change the kernel header files, re-link and pray you don't over-run them again.
      * Many functions that should be in shared libraries are hacked to hell; for instance some NFS functions for "ls" are in ls itself rather then libc. GNU ls does not work with NFS directories on Open Server because of this.
      * They just implemented a dhcp client in Open Server about a year ago.

      [Necessary MS jibe] But hey, what can you expect from somthing that used to be a Microsoft product [Xenix].

      From what I could tell most of the SCO messiness came from a hacked merger of System V and System III into Open Server 5. What kills me about OpenServer is that it is STILL heavily used by the telco industry. A former company that I worked with looked at Linux but stuck with SCO Open Server because of "support" concerns.

      To the point:

      I'm just waiting for Caldera to Open-Source Open Server so that the whole computing industry can get a good laugh and Computer Science departments can gain a valuable teching tool as to what *NOT* to do in your OS :).

      I hate to say it, but I would prefer to be an MSCE then to ever touch Open Server again. Open Server is a complete shame to the name UNIX.

      I invite any Open Server fans out there to put in thier arguments for it -- I would love to hear anything that anyone has positive to say about it. Moreover, if anyone has a UNIX derivative that is *worse* then Open Server and is still sold today I would also love to hear about it. Frankly I don't think that's possible.

      • Re:Double ewww...SCO/Open Server (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Ethanol ( 176321 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @02:52AM (#2893033)
        First off--you're dissing an operating system released by one company in 1993, because a different company has released the source to a different OS, which was written by still a third company, decades before the one you're complaining about. How, exactly, is this even remotely on-topic?

        That said, even though it isn't on-topic, I'd like to respond, for personal reasons: I'm one of the half-dozen engineers responsible for maintaining SCO OpenServer. (In point of fact, I'm the one responsible for that DHCP client you mentioned. BTW, if you think it's easy to maintain an entire OS distribution with a team that small, try it sometime.)

        I could post voluminous defenses of why OSr5 is the way it is, but won't bother. I'll just say this: Some of your complaints are quite valid. (Others aren't--where in the world did you get the idea we don't have ELF libraries?) But it can essentially all be chalked up to the fact that we're talking about a legacy OS from 1993 which is neither intended to be, nor sold as, a state-of-the-art kernel in 2002. (For that, you want OpenUNIX 8.)

        OSr5 is successful in the marketplace because it does what a lot of people need, does it well, does it extremely reliably, and does it in essentially the same way that it's done it for a decade (modulo those changes necessary to ensure that it runs well and takes advantage of the most current hardware)--which means no surprises for resellers and vertical-app vendors. There are fancier kernels nowadays, but nothing else on the market is as stable a platform, and for all its admitted outness-of-date, I'm very proud of it.

        To bring this back within hailing distance of the topic: I fervently hope that one day OSr5 will be open source too. I don't really expect it, unfortunately; not all of the code belongs to Caldera. Bits of the XENIX-compatibility code, as you noted, are licensed from Microsoft, and what are they odds they'd ever agree to open-source anything? But it would be very satisfying.
        • SCO OpenServer has a huge userbase where I am; the PATH trains that run from New Jersey to Manhattan have in on their fare vending machines. At least I THINK it's OpenServer; I saw one where the graphical menu system had failed, and I'm fairly sure there was a little SCO OpenServer message. This is totally off-topic, I know, I just get a little thrill from seeing UNIX used in weird places...
          • I saw one where the graphical menu system had failed, and I'm fairly sure there was a little SCO OpenServer message. This is totally off-topic, I know, I just get a little thrill from seeing UNIX used in weird places...

            :-) Some weeks ago, when the German Mark to Euro current conversion took place, I had a simliar experience - nearly every 2nd ticket vending automaton was not working properly. It was very enlighting to finally see one of them to display a Windows message box on its touch screen. :)

            Regards,
            Marc

        • At the risk of sounding like an AOL'er ... ME TOO.

          At my previous job, we used SCO ranging from Xenix SysV/286 (2.3.2) through ODT2 and ODT3 through OSR 5.0.2.

          OSR5 had ELF and Shared Library support. And, I know it's popular to bash SCO here (almost as popular as MS bashing), but for us, it Just Worked(tm).

          It was incredibly stable on a 286 (uptimes of about 6 months, and then only shut down for plant holidays). Uptimes of over a year on a 486/33 and P5-90.
        • "How, exactly, is this even remotely on-topic?"

          Your right, I was off-topic. . .I couldn't help the urge after the Unixware off-topic thread. I'll just round-up here.

          "BTW, if you think it's easy to maintain an entire OS distribution with a team that small, try it sometime"

          I can only imagine. I didn't realize that the team was that small. Ironically I've probably been in contact with you in the past. Trying to support 150 of these SCO boxen alone and trying to get them to play nice with Solaris, Linux, and Tru64 was no small feat either.

          I'm sorry for my SCO flame. I've tried to discuss OS on ./ before and no one ws interested so I went on the verge of flaming just to see if anyone else here actually ever used OS5. It is cool to see that one of the engineers answered.

          I think my fustration with the OS has more to do with trying to get it to work properly for people who expect the usability of Solaris 7 on OS5 as well as seamless integration which is not possible from an OS that old (automount/NFS/NIS caused SO many problems between all these hosts) and was just plain living hell. Like any admin the person gets blamed for OS problems and incompatibilities and SCO being the weakest link I came to detest it. I hadn't realized that active development on OS5 stopped in 1993 however in light of that I'm amazed that it is still sold [at a hefty price nonetheless] and that support has not EOLed -- supporting somthing that old must be living hell for you guys. SCO had tried to convince my company to move over to Unixware a long time ago but they would not budge. Fear of the unknown.

          The ELF thing was my mistake. I remebered compiling emacs for somthing and I had to do COFF shared libraries. . .I thought it was OS.

          I admit, as ugly as it was to work on OS5 it was rock solid after it was tuned properly, however it is like buying a Plymoth Valari today -- the slant 6 was rock solid but the caberator needs tuing once in a while. The people I supported expected electronic fuel injection, per say, perfect running at the turn of the key and have it perform as well as a 2000 Nissan Maxima. Thus the fustration.
          • Oh, active development hasn't stopped, it's still ongoing in areas like hardware compatibility and occasional new features. We're putting out a new release in a few months. But major kernel revisions stopped when we acquired UnixWare from Novell in 1994, so dynamically loadable drivers, lightweight processes, the linux kernel personality, etc, went into the UnixWare 7 line, and the OSr5 kernel has remained relatively static, along with a lot of the user environment (still X11r5, for instance).

            And it's really not a "living hell"; I like the company, like the people I work with, like the location (living and working in Santa Cruz is hard to beat), and swelpme I like the kernel. And the positive side of being on a tiny team maintaining a large distro is you never get bored; when I was one engineer among a hundred, I worked on my own code and that was that, but now it's kernel today, compiler tomorrow, network protocols the day after that. I dig it.

            Thanks for your reply (and apologies to those who may be bored by a personal conversation in a public locale...)

  • Plaintext license (Score:4, Informative)

    by jensend ( 71114 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @09:59PM (#2891851)
    Here's the text of the license before it gets slashdotted or for those who don't want to bother with PDF:

    January 23, 2002
    Dear UNIX enthusiasts,
    Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, including creating derived binary products created from the source code. The source code for which Caldera
    International, Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems: 32-bit 32V UNIX
    16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

    Caldera International, Inc. makes no guarantees or commitments that any source code is available from Caldera International, Inc.
    The following copyright notice applies to the source code files for which this license is granted.
    Copyright(C) Caldera International Inc. 2001-2002. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the
    following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
    following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
    All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.
    Neither the name of Caldera International, Inc. nor the names of other contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
    USE OF THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED FOR UNDER THIS LICENSE BY CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. BE LIABLE FOR
    ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
    OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

    Very truly yours,
    /signed/ Bill Broderick
    Bill Broderick
    Director, Licensing Services

    * UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries.
  • Especially the code commentary as I am no expert in programming. Anyone else going to scan through this like the pre .9 linux kernel for a feeling of what the people were thinking when they wrote it? Didn't someone bind up the linux kernel with commentary bolded it would be cool to see the same thing here.

  • I've been using this same software for a year now (Score:3, Insightful)

    by buckrogers ( 136562 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:02PM (#2891865) Homepage
    to play around with the old Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition with source code by John Lions.

    It is amazing how much you can learn from this old stuff. And now we can discuss, modify, and share the code with each other.

    This is really great! Thanks Caldera!
    • Hey, that's great!

      It's refreshing to see somebody who appreciates Caldera's move, instead of poo-pooing it and using it to jab at the company that actually bothered to change the license.

      There will be others who appreciate Caldera's decision in due time.

    • Re:I've been using this same software for a year n (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:41PM (#2892047) Homepage Journal
      Absolutely. Someone's already put a link to Amazon for the book, so go check it out. It's amazing how damned interesting it is to read it, to see how things like task switching and process creation are actually done. (Keep in mind I came into Unix as a hobby, so I haven't taken any of this in CS courses.)

      Someone was asking up above what the point was. Aside from learning from reading yet more code, this is as close as we can get to original Unix. If I was given the chance to check out the original manuscript for, say, the Revelation of St. John (I'm atheist, but religion fascinates me), I'd jump at the chance to see what changes have been made between the original and what we've got now. You'd learn an awful lot about how things have changed -- not just the book itself but everything else. I think that would apply with Unix just as much.

      Couple things: buckrogers, I downloaded the source for the PDP-11 version a year or so ago. The original tarball has been lost in the mists of hd upgrades, but I do remember not being able to correlate Lions' code sections with the source I downloaded. Has your experience been any different?

      And another thing: I'm sure I went picked up the code -- just the code -- for the PDP-11 version, way back when. Now, though, I can't seem to find it on their site. I thought I checked through the directories pretty thoroughly -- can anyone tell me where it is, or provide a link to their own copy?

      Now, of course, I've got to check out the PDP-11 simulator [freshports.org]. (I'm sure I heard about one that was written in Java, but when I did a search on Google [google.com] it seemed like every damn CS student in the world has built one as a class project...someone else'll have to provide the link.)

      • Re:I've been using this same software for a year n (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @11:49PM (#2892298)
        Try compiling:

        ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/pub/PDP-11/Sims/Supnik_2.3 /s ources/sim_2.3d

        build the pdp11 emulator.

        download an image of the v5 root partition and save the contents below to a file named v5init:

        set cpu 18b
        att rk0 v5root
        boot rk

        from the shell, type "pdp11 v5init". at the boot prompt, type "unix".

        Voila. Remember that "cd" doesn't work, but "chdir" does. The only thing coming close to a backspace key is the # key.
      • When you consider that their problem space was a lot narrower than what, say, the developers of NetBSD have to cover (many many more arches, two decades of incremental features, etc. etc.), it's no wonder that their code will be more easily digestible to a newbie. Think about it via an analogy: when you're in undergrad differential equations, probably every thing you touch was a solved problem in early 19th century Europe. This simplicity is what makes it manageable so you can study more recent and more complex things (I remember the first time I was in a chem course and we started talking about things that had happened in the last five years. It was electrifying, but that had nothing on the awesome knowledge in later courses that what we were working on was _on the frontier as it was right then_. That's heady stuff...)

  • Thanks -- and not just to Caldera. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:03PM (#2891867)

    I think it's wonderful that Caldera decided, pretty much without even being directly asked, to free the sources to historical Unix.

    It's noteworthy that they decided to do this just a few days after, finally, the successful end of Perry Metzger's long campaign to free the historical Unix *documentation* (perhaps more useful, these days). It sure seems to me that once they seriously considered Perry's request they must have realized the PR benefits they could reap by freeing the source code, too.

    Thanks, Caldera -- and if you too are grateful to Caldera, you should probably be grateful to Perry as well.
    • Actually, the enthusiasts have been asking the owners of the copyright for a LONG time. It used to be you could get PDP emulators, be allowed to run some OS's, but not Unix. Lots of effort was done in the attempt to show SCO that it was a good thing to let people use them, and now Caldera have finally done the right thing - these sources have no commercial value, so why hoard them.
  • I guess this is for; as they say, "enthusiests". I think pretty much all modern UNIX archetecutes have surpassed any code in what has been released.

    And to my dismay it doesn't include Xenix. Would have been nice to finally have an open source Microsoft product =P
    • And to my dismay it doesn't include Xenix. Would have been nice to finally have an open source Microsoft product

      That's almost certainly why Xenix isn't in there. In the last days of SCO, they wanted to release the Xenix source code, but were held up in negotiations with Microsoft in trying to get the rights released.

      This is very cool indeed. These early UNIXes weren't at all feature-rich, compared to what we have now, but they were compact. Tight. Elegant. Worthy of inspection and study. And more accessible for that purpose because 5000 lines of code is more browsable than 500000. (Pulled both of those numbers out of goatse-guy's orifice.)

      • Edition 6: aprox. 9,000 lines of code (From my Lion's book)


        FreeBSD-Stable: aprox. 77,000 lines of code (wc -l /usr/src/sys/kern/*.c /usr/src/sys/kern/*.h)


        Both these numbers are smaller than they are in real-life as not all device drivers are included and the asm code was not counted in the FreeBSD code.


        Just wanted to get your hand out of you-know-who's oriface.

  • Ancient Code (Score:4, Funny)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:04PM (#2891873)
    The good news is you can't have a VM flamewar running on a machine that lacks virtual memory.

    The bad news is: 'TECO' r00ls; 'ed' suX0rs.

    • The bad news is: 'TECO' r00ls; 'ed' suX0rs.

      Foreshadowing Emacs vs. vi? The first version of Emacs was a set of TECO macros [geek-girl.com]. Vi was originally just a visual interface to ex, which was an extended version of ed.

    • Pardon me, but as an old PDP-11 hacker (one who played with Unix in 1974) that dear old machine was perfectly capable of supporting virtual memory.

      As was the PDP-8 (with custom hardware, as built by a local company based on a design suggested by Richie Lary and fleshed-out by me).

      Virtual memory was actually old-hat by then in the mainframe world. I don't argue for chops on those grounds, but these early VM efforts on *minicomputers* were significant.

      Mostly because we were poor, of course :)
      • Pardon me, but as an old PDP-11 hacker (one who played with Unix in 1974) that dear old machine was perfectly capable of supporting virtual memory.

        As was the PDP-8 (with custom hardware, as built by a local company based on a design suggested by Richie Lary and fleshed-out by me).

        It seems you were pioneering the "embrace and extend" strategy. :-)

        Anyway, I was just looking at some history websites on the PDP-8 last week My high school had one, and it was the first computer I got my hands on. I only used high-level languages back in the day, but I finally looked at the machine architecture on the websites. The instruction set is very cool; basically just 8 opcodes that can be put into various interesting permutations.

        I'm guessing that since memory addressing was largely paged, you hacked in extra registers somewhere to add more pages and mix them up. A bit more interesting than today's overclocking.

  • Original UNIX Source (Score:3, Informative)

    by rusti999 ( 167057 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:05PM (#2891877)
    Wanna see the original UNIX source? Check this book [amazon.com].
  • The source code is actually engraved in stone and the kernel is a small rock.

  • Yuck - Old style BSD license (Score:5, Informative)

    by elbuddha ( 148737 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:25PM (#2891970)


    Their "BSD-style" license is actually the old-style BSD license, which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause:
    All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.

    What most people think of now as the BSD license does not contain such a clause, and has not for quite some time.
    • And giving credit where credit's due is a bad thing why, exactly? One of the key motivations for doing Open Source/Free software is the kudos you get, so I really have no problem with authors requiring that licensees not pass the work off as their own.
      • > And giving credit where credit's due is a bad
        > thing why, exactly?

        The problem is the "all advertizing material". Imagine everybody had such clauses in their license. A TV spot for Redhat Linux would be pretty long.

        Disclaimer: IANAL. Simply my understanding of the matter.
        • Technically, RH isn't selling any software derived from any other software, they're distributing other people's software.

          Back in that day, there wasn't exactly the huge heap of free software that there is now, so a simple 'This product contains software derived from Berzerkley Systems Distribution UNIX' would have sufficed.

          That's also one reason the advertising clause is taken out of teh BSD license. Also, because a lot of people don't advertise their software (I know I don't).

          /me pictures an animated gif banner add advertising a new distro... 18 meg banner ad...

          --Dan
    • Their "BSD-style" license is actually the old-style BSD license, which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause

      ... and many other open source programs contain extensions to the license that require the author's name to be connected. I like credit for my work. I put things like this in the software that I write.

      • Re:Yuck - Old style BSD license (Score:4, Informative)

        by bugg ( 65930 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @10:48PM (#2892087) Homepage
        Both you and the other poster in response to the parent are quite mistaken about what the advertising clause means.

        Copyright reproduction clauses exist in *every* version of the BSD license. The license & copyright must be reproduced with the product regardless of the advertising clause. What the advertising clause does is require that in any advertisement for the product, that credit is given. This can be interpreted to apply to things like newspaper ads, where at the bottom they'd have to say "contains code copyright regents of the university of california" or in a radio ad, where they'd have to have one of the voices giving credit... this makes per-word advertising impossible.

        Copyright reproduction clauses are good, advertising clauses are bad. There are webpages out there that can cover the issue in more detail than what I just described.

    • which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause:

      Why, exactly, is this onerous? You should expect to get code that you can basically do anything you want with it and being required to acknowledge the people who gave it to you is too much? I bet you never wrote thank-you notes to your grandparents for your presents, either.

      The current BSD license may not contain this, and there's nothing wrong with that either -- but I don't understand how this is unreasonable.

      I wish M$ was required to print an acknowledgement on every Windows box that mentions that their TCP stack is derived from BSD instead of putting on like they're the only company that's every produced useful software.
      • The Windows TCP stack isn't derived from BSD. A very long time ago they licensed a TCP stack from a company that based their product on the BSD TCP stack. But that was close to a decade ago, the licensing agreement is over, Microsoft implemented their own stack from scratch, and the TCP stack in Windows has no code in common with the BSD TCP stack.

      • Why, exactly, is [the old BSD ad clause] onerous?

        It effectively prohibits you from advertising your product in limited-space media such as a small print ad or the radio, as the acknowledgements required by each author's ad clause would fill up the allotted space or time for the ad.

        You should expect to get code that you can basically do anything you want with it and being required to acknowledge the people who gave it to you is too much?

        The copyright notice does this just fine, thank you very much. "Redistributions ... must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer."

      • I wish M$ was required to print an acknowledgement on every Windows box that mentions that their TCP stack is derived from BSD instead of putting on like they're the only company that's every produced useful software.
        Microsoft are required to print an acknowledgement to Berkeley, and they do actually. The copyright section of the release notes for Windows XP [microsoft.com] contains a list of copyright holders and acknowledgements.

        This list not only contains acknowledgements to Berkeley, but also to a number of other companies, universities, and individuals who apparently published their code under a BSD-style license.

  • Now if they had only done this as recently as 10 years ago, then they and us might actually have gotten some real economic value out of this. Now it is merely destined to be a curiosity in the history of UNIX as Linux spreads all over the planet.

    I'd like to say "I told you so", but now it's just a symbolic victory.

    • Now if they had only done this as recently as 10 years ago, then they and us might actually have gotten some real economic value out of this.

      Oh yes, tons of economic benefits, like not being able to sell squat because they give their product away for free! Sheesh, you people are so dense. Just because the isolated community of GNU/hippies/pirates applauds a company when they give away their hard work for free doesn't mean that it makes good business sense.

  • I applaud the good folks at Caldera for taking this course of action. This will benefit many people:

    • Folks who continue to use these unices will now have more control over their system.
    • Free operating systems may benefit from the knowledge and experience present in the original unices.
    • Just about anybody who wishes to study and expand the system will now have the ability to do so.

    This is also a good marketing move by Caldera. Hey, what have they got to lose by this? I think they have only to gain.

    xxxxxx O xxxxxx H xxxxxx xxxxxx W xxxxxx E xxxxxx L xxxxxx L xxxxxx

  • But not the good stuff (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    excluding System III and System V

    so in other words.. useless..

    seriously, in this day and age, how can the System V source NOT be released!

    oh well, might be interesting to look at the really old stuff, to get some insight into Dennis Ritche.. ;)

    • so in other words.. useless..


      Not necessarily. The license on 32V also covers the encumbered 4.x BSD releases, for instance. aka the dawn of modern UNIX. And this is mainly for educational purposes, as the source has (as noted) already been available under a restrictive but free (cost) license for some time.

      seriously, in this day and age, how can the System V source NOT be released!


      Caldera still sells a product (UnixWare) based on System V. "How, in this day and age, can the Windows 95 source not be released?" Caldera makes money selling proprietary software. Its that simple.

  • Excellent, ....good code, some of it.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CDWert ( 450988 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @11:05PM (#2892151) Homepage
    People are scoffing, but oh what a kludge, caldera only did it for the publicity, who cares.

    There is some GOOD code in there, some is crap just like all projects.

    There are/were some code segments that were optimized VERY well, and hy dont laugh I remerber USING a pdp-11.

    Point is the horsepower ot these machines sucked by modern standards, things we take for granted were MAJOR tasks, some of those routines were refined over a lifecycle longer than BSD and Linux combined.

    My dad, a coder starting in the 60 tought me in about 1979, when he handed over his collection of computer mags, Byte and the lot, you can NEVER , EVER have too much source code, good or bad.

    Im could care less what Caldera's motives are theyre a dead fish. When was the last time YOU installed that distro ? BUT they should be congratulated, I agree they should open up the other sources as well, but who am I to ask, hey while youre at it all people reading this post should give me all their old ????, see dosent fly. Its theirs , they bought it, and paid for it, sorta.

    Im gonna grab it asap, there about 4 things I hate in the 2.4.18/2.5 series kernel, BSD IMHO dosent have the solution in theirs either, I keep looking , Im at a mental roadblock so to say(nothing new there) if these sources even point me in the right direction to solve one of those problems I will be etternally greatful

    • Re:Excellent, ....good code, some of it.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Animats ( 122034 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @02:43AM (#2893015) Homepage
      There is some GOOD code in there, some is crap just like all projects.

      Very true. Two real howlers in PDP-11 UNIX:

      • Dumb scheduler. Three compute-bound processes near the head of the process table would starve out all other processes.
      • Really dumb malloc. O(N^2) speed. It's Knuth's fault. When he discusses memory allocation in the original edition of Fundamental Algorithms, he gives a bad algorithm, says it's bad, and leaves the good one as an exercise for the student. UNIX used the dumb one, right out of the book down to the variable names.
      • Yeah, there was a lot of blunt force trauma in those kernels -- even ken and dmr admitted that.

        Still, it's good to see it out there -- just once I'd like to plop a copy of V7 onto a floppy disk or a CDR and see how it runs on a reasonably modern Mac or PC...

        /Brian
      • I looked for (and found) the infamous comment in V6...

        "You are not expected to understand this".

        It's there!
      • The dumb "malloc" algorithm copied into early UNIX is the "first-fit method" on page 437 of Knuth's "Fundamental Algorithms". Knuth wrote: "This algorithm is certainly straightforward enough. However, a significant improvement in its running speed can be made with only a slight change in strategy. This improvement is quite important, and the reader will find it a pleasure to discover it for himself (see exercise 6)". That sort of thing was unusual for Knuth; usually, he gave the good algorithm. The one printed slows down linearly with the number of blocks allocated; the better version (which links together the empty spaces, not the allocated blocks) satisfies new allocations in near-constant time unless memory is very fragmented.

        I discovered this many years ago because some UNIX utility was incredibly slow on large data sets.

        It's scary to realize that I've owned that book for 35 years now.

  • BSD code (Score:2, Informative)

    by MavEtJu ( 241979 )
    If you want to have access to the Ancient BSD source codes, have a look at CSRG Archive CD-ROMs [mckusick.com].

    I wonder if there are archives of mailing-lists also, since you can't use code without comments :-)
  • # fgrep Vote *.c
    // Vote Adams in '96!

  • Reading the install notes..... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Jester99 ( 23135 ) on Wednesday January 23, 2002 @11:33PM (#2892253) Homepage
    is really amazing.

    If you ignore the instructions for copying the system from magtape to disk (!), everything else looks very similar to the install notes for most modern unices today....

    They tell you to 'cat' files to the printer, 'tar' together items for backup storage, 'sync' before you turn the machine off, and remember to check 'df' regularly to make sure your users don't fill up the disk, and clean out the /tmp directory periodically.

    Reading documentation written 30 years ago which almost hasn't changed at all is really a beautiful thing. (Well, some things have changed. During bootup, the 'mem' line reports user-available memory in bytes. :)

    Hats off to the developers of a system which is so flexible that hasn't really needed interface changing at all to adapt to 30 years of great changes in computer design and usage!
    • everything else looks very similar to the install notes for most modern unices today...

      You say this like its a good thing? As a technical person I'm ok with it, but I (along with a lot of others) definatley see room for improvement in the areas you mentioned. If the interface has changed as little as you say then I think we've got a lot of work ahead of us if we ever want to be a suitable OS for grandma (say what you will, but I believe there are many people who do want this to happen).

      • The chief aspect of Unix is its malleability and extensibility. As new, important things get discovered, it gets folded into the kernel, or some user level program. I don't think the years old kernsl had encrytion for example. But modern unices have that. Journalling FS? Didn't have it, but as soon as someone had the idea, it made it into kernels, free and nonfree. Need a windowing system? X.


        There's got to be somethings that can be improved. The only question is - can it be improved to the point where the changes get closed off, so that other implementors of Unix cannot study and learn from your product? If you do that, when however brilliant your new improvements will be lost, in the long term.

      • You say this like its a good thing?

        It's a very good thing, most of our society used technology hundreds even thousands of years old. Where the engineering principles are well understood.

        As a technical person I'm ok with it, but I (along with a lot of others) definatley see room for improvement in the areas you mentioned. If the interface has changed as little as you say then I think we've got a lot of work ahead of us if we ever want to be a suitable OS for grandma

        Does this "grandma" do her own plumbing, wiring, service her own domestic appliences and car? Indeed a great many of these warn "No user servicable parts". Yet suddenly with computers it's expected that end users should be servicing them...
    • >During bootup, the 'mem'
      >line reports user-available memory in bytes. :)


      yeah, but they still had more bytes than I'll have megs in my new workstation, by an order of magnitude! (but not 2 orders :)


      hawk

  • SCO charged $100 for this shit. And they had some bullshit license and all of that.

    Now if Caldera open sources UnixWare, I'd be more surprised. That could be really useful. Although I'm not holding my breath.

    Anyway, it's cool of Caldera to do this, albeit I doubt it will mean much in the long run...
  • Maybe you thought this was going to be a funny post. It is not. My claim: it is *wonderful* fun to play with early unices on their original machines. If this news story interests you, you should get yourself a PDP-11 or a VAX.

    You can still find PDP-11s and VAXen if you look hard enough -- sometimes with little or no impact on your wallet. After one year of searching, I possess five 11s and three VAXen, and I've even had to pass on some acquisition opportunities. Plus, while some 11s are serious big iron, some are almost as small as an average PC. More recent VAXen actually do come in average-PC form factors.

    There are also several large and very competent Internet communities centered around these machines. They're not that hard to locate. Join one of these, and you've got nearly instant help with getting yourself set up and running. Need tapes? Need that paper tape controller board? No problem. The only catch, of course, is that you'll have to do the same one day for all the future vintage hardware fans that are just now being born (as in babies, children, offspring).

    So go grab yourself a PDP-11/73 and a VT220 and throw 2.11BSD on it. You'll enjoy every minute of it.

  • Coolness factor (Score:2, Interesting)

    by dreamsinter ( 451159 )
    Hey, for all the "worthless code" grumbles I've read, I think Caldera deserves a lot of credit for this. I think it'll be useful to read and reread this code until I get some idea of how to handle multi-usered, multitasking memory in 64K or less.

    That's one thing you won't get from reading code written for systems with >64M.

  • #define NINODE 50 /* number of in core inodes */
    #define NPROC 30 /* max number of processes */"
    -- Version 7 UNIX fuer PDP 11, /usr/include/sys/param.h
    • Please disregard the .signature under the previous post. Unfortunately there is no way for me to selectively post without a .sig on Slashdot.
    • Use of my text outside of Slashdot, for example in a book
      published by Andover, or on a Best Of Slashdot CD-ROM, or in
      other places or for purposes other than discussion here on
      Slashdot requires a license. That is, I have to explicitly grant
      you the right to use my words.


      Wrong. I can use your words as long as I properly attribute them. Example:


      Some Slashdot posters assert that "I have to explicitly grant
      you the right to use my words" (Kris, 2002).


      Works Cited

      Kris. http://www.koehntopp.de/kris/copyright.txt Accessed Jan. 23, 2002.

  • Wow! (Score:2)

    by rew ( 6140 )
    Does anybody know if I will be able to run this on my PDT-11?

    (Which as far as I know has a whopping 56k words of RAM).

    Roger.

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