[nycbug-talk] Article on Unix and open source

[G.Rosamond]

On Aug 2, 2004, at 12:45 AM, Jesse Callaway wrote:

>
> On Aug 2, 2004, at 12:04 AM, G.Rosamond wrote:
>
>> http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/07/28/2057223
>>
>> The article is titled "can gnu ever be unix?", but the author 
>> repeatedly refers to gnu and bsds.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> g
>>
>
> "In researching this article I met with hurdles that almost made me 
> give up on writing it." - newsforge.com article 4/7/28/2057223
>
> I guess that money from the Open Group made you think twice, huh.
>
> This is pretty crazy. I like that he hints that Windows could be 
> certified with some code revamping. It's an amusing thought. The whole 
> article is rather uninformed and not newsworthy. It's an ad with bad 
> information.

It's actually a funny article, IMO.

GNU's not Unix could be Unix-certified?  I think there's a tendency to 
put the Unix certification process on an altar. . .either as a 
throwback to the past or as a self-defense to the SCO run-around.

Fundamentally, the clearest thing to me is the spirit of the Unix 
tradition, which is not about costly processes and hollow labels, but 
rather about dynamic, open development, in addition to allegiance to 
the standard Unix development models and principles.  The perception of 
traditional Unix being over-priced but amazingly stable and secure is a 
more recent phenomena than the public-at-large thinks. . .

Everyone should take the opportunity to speak to Brian, Bubette and 
others from the Lower East Side Mac Unix Users Group (lesmuug.org).  
While some people in NYCBUG have attended their meetings and are even 
long-time members of it, those of you who have not heard about the old 
Bell Labs days might learn a bit.  LESMUUG is not a group of people 
looking for Quark shortcuts.  There are some technical heavy-hitters 
there who always cause my mind to race when they speak.

For instance, I heard about Brian's opinion of "open source" via a 
third party (Big I): there's nothing new about it, it's always been the 
way Unix development happened.  It was just labelled 'open source' in 
the 1990's.  This was also mentioned by Peter Salus several times at 
USENIX. . .

g
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 2230 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20040802/e4f0105b/attachment.bin