After the 1974 paper (claiming 600 installations, up from 10 in 1972, research labs and universities all over the world clamored for the chance to try out Unix themselves.
Was open source born because of an odd legal quirk?
Under a 1958 consent decree in settlement of an antitrust case, AT&T (the parent organization of Bell Labs) had been forbidden from entering the computer business.
Unix could not, therefore, be turned into a product; under the terms of the consent decree, Bell Labs was required to license its nontelephone technology to anyone who asked!
Ken Thompson quietly began answering requests by shipping out tapes and disk packs — each, according to legend, with a note signed “love, ken”.
source: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html
Unix machines were only available to big organizations with big budgets: corporations, universities, government agencies.
But use of minicomputers was less regulated than the even-bigger mainframes, and Unix development rapidly took on a countercultural air. It was the early 1970s; the pioneering Unix programmers were shaggy hippies and hippie-wannabes.
They delighted in playing with an operating system that not only offered them fascinating challenges at the leading edge of computer science, but also subverted all the technical assumptions and business practices that went with Big Computing.
www.faqs.org/docs/artu/hackers.html
ARPANET hackers learned C and began to speak the jargon of pipes, filters, and shells;
Unix programmers learned TCP/IP and started to call each other “hackers”.
The process of fusion was accelerated after the Project Jupiter cancellation in 1983 killed the PDP-10's future. The Jargon File, born on the ARPANET but revised on Usenet, aptly symbolized the merger.)
It did not help RMS's case that, although his Free Software Foundation had produced most of the rest of a full software toolkit, it failed to deliver the central piece. Ten years after the founding of the GNU project, there was still no GNU kernel. While individual tools like Emacs and GCC proved tremendously useful, GNU without a kernel neither threatened the hegemony of proprietary Unixes nor offered an effective counter to the rising problem of the Microsoft monopoly.
The galvanizing effect of the Netscape announcement, and of the new prominence of Linux, reached well beyond the Unix community and the hacker culture. Beginning in 1995, developers from various platforms in the path of Microsoft's Windows juggernaut (MacOS; Amiga; OS/2; DOS; CP/M; the weaker proprietary Unixes; various mainframe, minicomputer, and obsolete microcomputer operating systems) had banded together around Sun Microsystems's Java language.
There was one exception: Richard Stallman and the Free Software Movement. “Open source” was explicitly intended to replace Stallman's preferred “free software” with a public label that was ideologically neutral, acceptable both to historically opposed groups like the BSD hackers and those who did not wish to take a position in the GPL/anti-GPL debate. Stallman flirted with adopting the term, then rejected it on the grounds that it failed to represent the moral position that was central to his thinking. The Free Software Movement has since insisted on its separateness from “open source”, creating perhaps the most significant political fissure in the hacker culture of 2003.
when and where Unix has adhered most closely to open-source practices, it has prospered.
Attempts to proprietarize it have invariably resulted in stagnation and decline.
In retrospect, this should be obvious.
We lost ten years after 1984 learning our lesson, and it would probably serve [UNIX] very ill to ever again forget it.
Another lesson:
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.
IOW, low-end/high-volume hardware technology almost always ends up climbing the power curve and winning.
Clay Christensen calls this disruptive technology and showed in The Innovator's Dilemma how this happened with disk drives, steam shovels, and motorcycles.
To prosper, Unix needs to maintain the knack of co-opting the cheap plastic solution rather than trying to fight it.
The largest-scale pattern in the history of Unix is this: when and where Unix has adhered most closely to open-source practices, it has prospered. Attempts to proprietarize it have invariably resulted in stagnation and decline.
UNIX had it's own lost decade because it was too stubborn to adapt. Both business model and technical dogma held it back.
Cost, culture and ego shape operating system (OS) design.
UNIX success can be attributed to two specific design choices:
- 'everything is a file'
- pipes
OS design impacts the programs that get run on them. The unifying ideas will "percolate upwards".
Systems that cannot support multiple processes quickly became obsolete (DOS and CP/M).
Cooperative multitasking systems can support multiple processes, but must voluntarily give up its hold on the processor before the next process can run (thus, simple programming errors can readily freeze the machine). This too was flawed and tailored to the hardware available at the time, now also obsolete.
Unix has preemptive multitasking, in which timeslices are allocated by a scheduler which routinely interrupts or pre-empts the running process in order to hand control to the next one. Almost all modern operating systems support preemption.