Re: Re: Viability of Linux companies

[Arun Sharma <arun@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Apr 22, 2001 at 01:08:56PM +0530, Dwivedi Ajay kumar wrote:
> On Sat, 21 Apr 2001, Arun Sharma wrote:
> 
> > It was open source software right from the beginning. Any university could
> > easily get the source code, which is what made UNIX popular. If UNIX wasn't
> 
> 	Well, I don't think so. IMHO the source code was available only
> for a price. Maybe free for some universities but not for all.
> 

And where did you learn that from ? Some linux tabloid ? :) (g, d & r)

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html

The licensing terms were liberal. A licensee could release the code
modified or unmodified in source or binary form with no accounting or
royalties to Berkeley. The only requirements were that the copyright
notices in the source file be left intact and that products that
incorporated the code indicate in their documentation that the
product contained code from the University of California and its
contributors. Although Berkeley charged a $1,000 fee to get a tape, anyone
was free to get a copy from anyone who already had received it. Indeed,
several large sites put it up for anonymous ftp shortly after it was
released. Given that it was so easily available, the CSRG was pleased
that several hundred organizations purchased copies, since their fees
helped fund further development.

> 	If it were so, GNU would never have been formed

Why was GNU formed ? You'd have to find out about Gosling Emacs (yeah,
the same guy who invented java).

> and Linus would
> not have thought of writing Linux. IIRC Linux once said he wouldn't have
> written linux if he knew about Hurd.

Given Linus's published statements about Mach, I'd take that with a bucket 
of salt.

	-Arun