On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Richard Hoffbeck wrote: > There's an extensive history online as part of the whole SCO debacle(see > http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html or > http://salon.com/tech/feature/1999/11/30/lions/index.html), but the > basic reason Unix is so popular in academics is that AT&T made the > source code available for a fairly low licensing fee which made it very > popular for teaching and research. In the early years most networks were > using proprietary networking protocols so DEC stuff used DECNet and > pretty much only talked to DEC stuff, same with IBM, etc. Having source > code made it easier to play with stuff like tcp/ip, uucp, etc. I can > still remember when the U dumped BSD for VMS on the public VAX back in > the early 80's - it wasn't a real popular move in some quarters. > > And stuff was always expensive back then, so if you already had access > to Printer Brand A and didn't want to buy DEC Printer XYZ it was a lot > easier if you already had source code to a print driver that you could > hack until it worked with A. That made unix a lot more flexible. > > 'Open Source' has always been there. In the early days of Unix, CP/M and > Apple a lot of people wrote software that they simply dumped into the > public domain. It wasn't until the advent of the IBM PC that we started > to see the whole shareware approach. There were a number of usenet > newsgroups devoted to distributing source code for applications, > utilities, etc. With regard to UNIX v. VMS, it looks like the issue now is the same as it ever was: the expensive, closed-source, corporate OS may be profitable but it is designed by a corporation for a corporation and not by the users and not for the benefit of the users. Jeff Nelson suggested dramatically that VMS is superior to Linux in terms of "Stability. Security. Reliability. Availability." But Linux, properly managed, seems to do quite well on these dimensions. The Mizzou LUG's Linux machine had many users and it ran for a full year without a reboot during which time it was continually accessible and never cracked ('hacked') -- and they were giving shell accounts to anyone who requested one by e-mail. It seems to me that "stability, reliability and availability" are three ways of saying the same thing and Linux is adequate on all three. VMS may be better, but I can't see why it should matter to me. Any improvement on Linux's level of availability would be so minor that it would be unnoticable for our users. That said, I can understand why the NY Stock Exchange might prefer VMS to Linux. Mike _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list