5 ms·

I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open sour

by msla 2y ago

I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Compatibility and not being dependent on a single company are good things!

gryn 2y ago
It's not about objectivity it about teams/tribes if another team is winning then you're losing. Simple as that, you can see it in a lot of places. MMOs,console wars, phones, sports, politics, ...
DannyBee 2y ago
They weren't angry their systems got killed by open systems. They were angry that the replacements sucked.
- msla 2y ago
  They were better in some ways and worse in others. ITS had PCLSRing and no concept of subdirectories, not to mention SIXLTR NAMING; Lisp machines were great as long as they didn't have to be fast or run continuously without GC; VMS was freaking VMS are you serious? The snide derision doesn't help, especially coming from people who were being snide on the behalf of for-profit companies that never gave a shit about them.
  - eschaton 2y ago
    And what, pray tell, was wrong with VMS? In my experience it works quite well.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
tivert 2y ago
> I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Could the reason that idea is so hard to get over be because it's just wrong? I don't think these people "hated" UNIX because it was "open," I think they hated it because they thought it was bad.
- msla 2y ago
  They didn't hate Unix because it was open, but their hatred of a more open system does make them look a bit ridiculous: Any system tied to a single company is doomed anyway, either to the company dying or the company discontinuing it and/or turning it into something you can't stomach. (Microsoft lives, but how happy are MS-DOS partisans these days?) It kinda taints their technical points with a whiff of fanboyism, a naïve partisanship and attachment to entities that didn't give a shit about them.
  - anthk 2y ago
    LOL. Man, most Unixen in the 90's where as corporate as Microsoft, Linux was still a Usenet hobbyist project and 386BSD was sunk into lawsuits. Proper hacker projects died a few years ago with the end of the PDP10/ITS/Emacs and the GNU project was still working on a replacement for that platform but cloning Unix with Emacs/Info and so on top of that because of convenience with 'modern' times.
    - ahefner 2y ago
      "were as"
    - msla 2y ago
      Open as in open standards, not open source.
spc476 2y ago
It was printed in 1994. Linux and BSD (either FreeBSD or 386BSD, I can't recall which) where around, but Open Source (TM) as we now know it wasn't. Other, proprietary Unix systems were still viable and in use (AIX, IRIX, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX and SCO just to name a few). Running Unix was not cheap [1]. Most X servers were proprietary and cost money (I had some friends that sold X servers for a variety of OSes and video cards at the time). The criticisms at the time were, in my opinion, decent enough but not enough to stop to duopoly we have now with POSIX and Windows. [1] In college, early 90s---I got to use IRIX on a machine that cost $30,000 in 1991. PCs caught up and past it pretty much by the mid-late 90s. Also, I did some consulting work at a bank which used SCO. They paid God knows how much for every conceivable package available for SCO. The base system? Pretty much just a shell and some commands in `/bin`. Compiler? Pay. Network? Pay. TCP/IP for said network? Pay.
- anthk 2y ago
  You could use GNU alternatives for that, most people installed GNU coreutils/*utils, Emacs and GCC and I think Irix supported networking and TCP/IP in base without additions. But, yes, the rest of the Unixen were like that if not worse.
  - rusk 2y ago
    That’s why we have GNU pretty much. There was a big law suit over twenty years ago about this. SCO were suing anyone that made significant contributions to OSS Unix (eg IBM) and I seem to remember it just kind of petering out. But yeah, Santa Cruz Operation, one of the bigger name back in the day. Not sure why nobody really talks about this any more, it seems like a hugely decisive period in OSS history
  - keybored 2y ago
    But GNU is not Unix.
- WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
  > The base system? Pretty much just a shell and some commands in `/bin`. Compiler? Pay. Network? Pay. TCP/IP for said network? Pay. Vladimir Barmin had a very hilarious writeup about getting SCO to work at all (http://lib.ru/UNIXOID/scomastdie.txt http://lib.ru/UNIXOID/scomastdie.txt, in Russian).
gattilorenz 2y ago
In my mental image, most Unices used in industry and research in 1994 are not open. What am I missing?
- smackeyacky 2y ago
  Your recollection matches mine. I think I might have had Yggdrasil installed on my home PC for doing after hours support on Solaris machines, but back then if I could have afforded a sparc workstation I would have bought one in a heartbeat. Company owned Unices still dominated the landscape in 1994
- Bene592 2y ago
  Nothing, the book is mostly about proprietary Unices
- msla 2y ago
  Open standards, not open source.
lelanthran 2y ago
> I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. I think that they were angry that the inferior product was winning/had won. The "worse is better" essay didn't come out until a decade later, IIRC. To be clear, the Unix systems were worse in all the ways they point out, but better in the way that mattered - multiple companies provided Unix, and the skills from one Unix to another were easily transferable. The "winning" system won not because it was superior, but because it was easier to hire for. Need an operator for your SCO Unix? Someone experienced with Sun boxes could onboard faster than someone experienced with VMS.
- panick21_ 2y ago
  Its not as simple really. X Server being work on so much and being partially open was because DEC and co were in a panic that Sun would turn NeWS into a second NFS. NeWS also could and did run on some other Unixes. So really a lot of the history has to do with complex pissing context between different vendors that eventually escalated into full blown Unix wars.

by msla 2y ago

gryn 2y ago

It's not about objectivity it about teams/tribes if another team is winning then you're losing. Simple as that, you can see it in a lot of places. MMOs,console wars, phones, sports, politics, ...

DannyBee 2y ago

They weren't angry their systems got killed by open systems. They were angry that the replacements sucked.

msla 2y ago
They were better in some ways and worse in others. ITS had PCLSRing and no concept of subdirectories, not to mention SIXLTR NAMING; Lisp machines were great as long as they didn't have to be fast or run continuously without GC; VMS was freaking VMS are you serious? The snide derision doesn't help, especially coming from people who were being snide on the behalf of for-profit companies that never gave a shit about them.
- eschaton 2y ago
  And what, pray tell, was wrong with VMS? In my experience it works quite well.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

tivert 2y ago

> I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. Could the reason that idea is so hard to get over be because it's just wrong? I don't think these people "hated" UNIX because it was "open," I think they hated it because they thought it was bad.

msla 2y ago
They didn't hate Unix because it was open, but their hatred of a more open system does make them look a bit ridiculous: Any system tied to a single company is doomed anyway, either to the company dying or the company discontinuing it and/or turning it into something you can't stomach. (Microsoft lives, but how happy are MS-DOS partisans these days?) It kinda taints their technical points with a whiff of fanboyism, a naïve partisanship and attachment to entities that didn't give a shit about them.
- anthk 2y ago
  LOL. Man, most Unixen in the 90's where as corporate as Microsoft, Linux was still a Usenet hobbyist project and 386BSD was sunk into lawsuits. Proper hacker projects died a few years ago with the end of the PDP10/ITS/Emacs and the GNU project was still working on a replacement for that platform but cloning Unix with Emacs/Info and so on top of that because of convenience with 'modern' times.
  - ahefner 2y ago
    "were as"
  - msla 2y ago
    Open as in open standards, not open source.

spc476 2y ago

It was printed in 1994. Linux and BSD (either FreeBSD or 386BSD, I can't recall which) where around, but Open Source (TM) as we now know it wasn't. Other, proprietary Unix systems were still viable and in use (AIX, IRIX, SunOS/Solaris, HP-UX and SCO just to name a few). Running Unix was not cheap [1]. Most X servers were proprietary and cost money (I had some friends that sold X servers for a variety of OSes and video cards at the time). The criticisms at the time were, in my opinion, decent enough but not enough to stop to duopoly we have now with POSIX and Windows. [1] In college, early 90s---I got to use IRIX on a machine that cost $30,000 in 1991. PCs caught up and past it pretty much by the mid-late 90s. Also, I did some consulting work at a bank which used SCO. They paid God knows how much for every conceivable package available for SCO. The base system? Pretty much just a shell and some commands in `/bin`. Compiler? Pay. Network? Pay. TCP/IP for said network? Pay.

anthk 2y ago
You could use GNU alternatives for that, most people installed GNU coreutils/*utils, Emacs and GCC and I think Irix supported networking and TCP/IP in base without additions. But, yes, the rest of the Unixen were like that if not worse.
- rusk 2y ago
  That’s why we have GNU pretty much. There was a big law suit over twenty years ago about this. SCO were suing anyone that made significant contributions to OSS Unix (eg IBM) and I seem to remember it just kind of petering out. But yeah, Santa Cruz Operation, one of the bigger name back in the day. Not sure why nobody really talks about this any more, it seems like a hugely decisive period in OSS history
- keybored 2y ago
  But GNU is not Unix.
WesolyKubeczek 2y ago
> The base system? Pretty much just a shell and some commands in `/bin`. Compiler? Pay. Network? Pay. TCP/IP for said network? Pay. Vladimir Barmin had a very hilarious writeup about getting SCO to work at all (http://lib.ru/UNIXOID/scomastdie.txt http://lib.ru/UNIXOID/scomastdie.txt, in Russian).

gattilorenz 2y ago

In my mental image, most Unices used in industry and research in 1994 are not open. What am I missing?

smackeyacky 2y ago
Your recollection matches mine. I think I might have had Yggdrasil installed on my home PC for doing after hours support on Solaris machines, but back then if I could have afforded a sparc workstation I would have bought one in a heartbeat. Company owned Unices still dominated the landscape in 1994
Bene592 2y ago
Nothing, the book is mostly about proprietary Unices
msla 2y ago
Open standards, not open source.

lelanthran 2y ago

> I can't get over the idea that this is a bunch of people who were angry their favorite proprietary systems got killed by open systems and, ultimately, open source. I think that they were angry that the inferior product was winning/had won. The "worse is better" essay didn't come out until a decade later, IIRC. To be clear, the Unix systems were worse in all the ways they point out, but better in the way that mattered - multiple companies provided Unix, and the skills from one Unix to another were easily transferable. The "winning" system won not because it was superior, but because it was easier to hire for. Need an operator for your SCO Unix? Someone experienced with Sun boxes could onboard faster than someone experienced with VMS.

panick21_ 2y ago
Its not as simple really. X Server being work on so much and being partially open was because DEC and co were in a panic that Sun would turn NeWS into a second NFS. NeWS also could and did run on some other Unixes. So really a lot of the history has to do with complex pissing context between different vendors that eventually escalated into full blown Unix wars.