RE: gnu and linux

[Oommen Thomas <oommen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Dr. P. Sriram wrote:

<sriram>
<sriram>
<sriram>On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, Oommen Thomas wrote:
<sriram>> 2. One correction to Hansolo's mail: Unix was originally developed by/at 
<sriram>> Bell Labs and not AT&T, although the latter took over the former later
<sriram>> to become AT&T Bell Labs... Rest is history.
<sriram>
<sriram>not quite; if my memory serves me right, at&t and bell were a single
<sriram>company till about 1980 or so; in a landmark anti-trust judgement, the us

AFAIK, in 1969, when the PDP-7 or PDP-11 machine was used to develop
Unix/C, it was in Bell Labs, which was a purely non-profit research
organisation. Later that was taken over by AT&T who got the rights too and
Unix was commercialised. The monopoly and breaking up are after the
merger.

The fact that Bell Labs was a research orgn and that the initial
contributors of Unix were mostly university students is often used
to draw a parallel with the history of Linux, under the fear that Linux
too must not be commercialised and not split up into different flavours
with lot of differences. In fact this is one point which pro-M$ people
make of Unix/Linux.

Well, if what we hear is true the US DOJ is trying to do a similar split
with M$ too, for its so-called monopoly activities. That will surely
create history and is expected to make a lot of impact.

-
Oommen

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