Having seen on Phoronix that minix-R3.4.0-rc6 has been released leaded me to read this interesting paper from MINIX' author Andrew S. Tanenbaum. It dates back 2004 and most of the oldtimers probably know it, but I didn't and found in it an interesting history of UNIX like OS.

Happy reading.

Very interesting article! thanks for posting it. I thought I was pretty well-read on UNIX history, but this article mentioned aspects that I didn't know. And even so, it's endlessly fascinating to read about issues from other perspectives.

Thanks for the link!

I remember reading this back in the day (being an oldtimer myself), and lots of other discussion about the Brown "book", although I had no interest in reading the book itself.

Tanenbaum's comments in the above linked page (and the pages linked at bottom of that page) are well worth the time it takes for a thoughtful reading. I recommend everyone take the time to do so.

Lot's of history, truth and personality, contained in a well written brief.

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Okay, the thing about MINIX being in /testing is a joke, right?

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I have a good book of Andrew S. Tanenbaum, it's about distributed operating systems. Always a pleasure to read.

No but it's actually in /snapshot, and I forgot the link. I just edited the first post to fix that, thanks for noticing.

In case you're wondering what the first part was about, it's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies

Thanks for the nice read.

I still have two of his books (Computer Networks and Modern Operating Systems) at home that I can warmly recommend to everyone.

SCO v IBM is still ongoing by the way. It's been narrowed to a Tenth Circuit appeal over tortious interference and unfair competition claims, and whether their ten copyright claims against AIX were improperly excluded because they were simply too late trying to claim them. To give you a sample of how pathetic those claims are, one of the ten alleged infringements inside AIX is the manpage for lpsched. I am not making this up: https://blog.idlemoor.tk/SCO/Item-203.pdf

If you visit this page every day -- http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/clerk/opinions/daily -- hopefully some time in the next couple of months you will see the damn thing finished.

Brown's book, 'Samizdat', was never published after the preprint was widely ridiculed, but then again, it was probably never intended for genuine publication. Public information about the funding of AdTI showed that Microsoft were paying them. "Many critics have claimed that Microsoft funded the report, but a Microsoft representative denied that charge, saying that while the software giant does fund the institution, it doesn't fund any specific research." [source] The AdTI website today is somewhat amusing: http://www.adti.net/. When the money runs out, the FUD runs out.

Amongst the other people rebutting Samizdat were Ritchie, Stallman, and interestingly, Robert Swartz of Mark Williams Company fame -- they wrote Coherent, the famous non-Unix Unix, from scratch in a year and consequently got AT&T crawling all over their code chasing infringements that didn't exist. Jones at Groklaw failed to join the dots, but it was Bob Swartz who consulted for Doug Michaels' Old SCO when they first tried to find infringement in Linux and came up empty (the "Swartz Memo" and the "Davidson Email"). Let's not overlook that Bob Swartz is the father of Aaron Swartz.

Lastly, since there's always two sides to every story, here is my good friend Esker Melchior writing in support of Ken Brown's boss, Gregory Fossedal:

ATDI FOSEDAL have ALL TRUETH!!! LIE-NUX = COMUNIST HIPPEY SATAN CONSPIRASEY agnest AMERICA!!! SCOX MEGA FIGTAR for teh FREE MARKETES = ALL DOOM of EVIL LIE-NUX!!! DID you now LIE-NUX create in PINKO SOCELIST OLD EROPE??? IT IS TRUE not can hides!!! CRUSH TEH LIE-NUX!!! ALL LIE-NUX USAR too ABU GRAB NOW!!! USA #1!!! ATDI FOSEDAL plus teh OGARA DESTRUCTES all you with MEGA SCOX JESUS POWAR!!!

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It was that and SuSE (which I had been using for three or four years up until the SCO thing) kissing SCO and Microsofts ass that made me leave SuSE like a ball of lava dropped in my lap and how I found Slackware.

And if you want nitty gritty details, and you've got days to spend reading, check the Archives Link at GrokLaw

Scroll down ... the old, juicy SCO-Related stuff is 'way-back'.

-- kjh

Didier Spaier, fascinating. Thank you.

If SCO vs IBM is still going on, who is representing SCO ? They were acquired by third party who distanced themselves from the whole thing.

BTW, my first serious job was in the company which had SCO UNIX and SOLARIS 2.1. I was, sort of shocked to see that SCO has Microsoft C compiler. SOLARIS 2.1 was not very stable and SCO was expensive as hell then. Everything about it was expensive like NASA project. We switched to SOLARIS only as soon as SOLARIS 2.4 was out.

Unxis (now renamed to Xinuos) bought everything *except* the legal claims. All the money went to the bankruptcy lawyers. The only thing of value was a /16 of IPv4 addresses, which were obviously going to be worth far more than Unxis actually paid, but the Bankruptcy Trustee was too dumb to realise that (possibly also Unxis). Clearly Unxis understood that the legal claims were toxic.

But the Bankruptcy Trustee (Cahn) still believes in his lottery ticket, just like the previous fools. The *original* lawyers were paid a fixed fee to take the case all the way to a final appeal, so they still have to keep going as long as the Bankruptcy Trustee tells them. So all the same old faces from BSF (Normand etc) were in the appeal court just a few weeks ago wailing about Project Monterey. Like any abusive relationship, they still believe in their abusers.

If they ever win any money (ha ha) it will go to the bankruptcy lawyers, who did not get paid in full. Nobody else will get anything, because 'TSG Group Inc' was liquidated.

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Actually we can criticize a lot of things about MS, but their compilers (among some other "stuff"), are quite good. We shouldn't generalize the aggressive commercial attitude, and some poor user experience, to the whole MS production. For the developers they have a lot of great and efficient tools.