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Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the s

Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the software game

cogman10 5y ago
I think it's more the case that the linux ecosystem has gotten too complex for a university student or professor to wrangle on their own.
bityard 5y ago
My guess is that university culture changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as well as the mainstream perception of computing technology and the Internet shifting from a neat science fiction type thing that some of us dreamed about to being completely ubiquitous. Most of the technology that powered the Internet in some form or another came out of the Universities prior to the dot-com boom. If you wanted to do something interesting with computers and networks on a scale that mattered, academia was really your only option. (Yes there were BBSes and AOL, and dial-up Internet in most areas. But in terms of what you could do, those were like driving a golf cart on the autobahn.) Now that the Internet is everywhere and programming as a career path is seemingly as popular as nursing or construction, the direction if the Internet is largely being determined by large companies and governments, not the people (or even the type of people) who built it. I suspect university CS departments probably lost that "wacky misfit club" atmosphere a long time ago. I'm sure the insane-and-rising cost of higher education isn't helping things out either. All that said, lots of Universities do still provide material support for open source software in the form of hosting and mirrors. For example, around half of all Ubuntu and Debian mirrors are universities. The OSU open source lab hosts infrastructure for a variety of projects. I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.)
- amyjess 5y ago
  > I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.) Honestly, SourceForge did it first. GitHub just picked off where SF left off.
VLM 5y ago
It was an era of 80s software (msdos, etc) being run on 90s hardware, and the 90s hardware provided capabilities generations beyond what the software typically used. So you'd boot single task single user non-networked msdos to run a text mode eprom programmer, but that was done on early 90s hardware that could easily run multitasking, multiuser, networked GUI linux if you'd bother to install it. Meanwhile the uni got huge donations of hardware and software licenses from now legacy unix providers. The senior EE students would do VLSI design on sunos workstations (sunos was from the oldest versions of solaris pizza box era back when Sun made hardware). Well, if my 386 desktop is 50 times faster and four times the memory of the sunos workstation, why do they have all this fabulous OS and application software and I'm stuck on singletasking msdos or sometimes windows3.11 works and sometimes it doesn't? Why not do TCP/IP and fancy GUIs on linux using the same hardware?

Crazy how much old software had ties to universities ( tamu Linux, BSD, wuftpd ). Are there any modern examples of this or have universities gotten out of the software game

cogman10 5y ago

I think it's more the case that the linux ecosystem has gotten too complex for a university student or professor to wrangle on their own.

bityard 5y ago

My guess is that university culture changed a lot over the last couple of decades, as well as the mainstream perception of computing technology and the Internet shifting from a neat science fiction type thing that some of us dreamed about to being completely ubiquitous. Most of the technology that powered the Internet in some form or another came out of the Universities prior to the dot-com boom. If you wanted to do something interesting with computers and networks on a scale that mattered, academia was really your only option. (Yes there were BBSes and AOL, and dial-up Internet in most areas. But in terms of what you could do, those were like driving a golf cart on the autobahn.) Now that the Internet is everywhere and programming as a career path is seemingly as popular as nursing or construction, the direction if the Internet is largely being determined by large companies and governments, not the people (or even the type of people) who built it. I suspect university CS departments probably lost that "wacky misfit club" atmosphere a long time ago. I'm sure the insane-and-rising cost of higher education isn't helping things out either. All that said, lots of Universities do still provide material support for open source software in the form of hosting and mirrors. For example, around half of all Ubuntu and Debian mirrors are universities. The OSU open source lab hosts infrastructure for a variety of projects. I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.)

amyjess 5y ago
> I also feel like we can "blame" Github here, since it (and a few other sites/projects like it) have become the de facto place to host source code and collaboration tools. (Whereas in the past it would have been an FTP/HTTP site and a mailing list.) Honestly, SourceForge did it first. GitHub just picked off where SF left off.

VLM 5y ago

It was an era of 80s software (msdos, etc) being run on 90s hardware, and the 90s hardware provided capabilities generations beyond what the software typically used. So you'd boot single task single user non-networked msdos to run a text mode eprom programmer, but that was done on early 90s hardware that could easily run multitasking, multiuser, networked GUI linux if you'd bother to install it. Meanwhile the uni got huge donations of hardware and software licenses from now legacy unix providers. The senior EE students would do VLSI design on sunos workstations (sunos was from the oldest versions of solaris pizza box era back when Sun made hardware). Well, if my 386 desktop is 50 times faster and four times the memory of the sunos workstation, why do they have all this fabulous OS and application software and I'm stuck on singletasking msdos or sometimes windows3.11 works and sometimes it doesn't? Why not do TCP/IP and fancy GUIs on linux using the same hardware?