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| The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin, by Dr. Peter H. Salus - Errata |
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Friday, May 13 2005 @ 01:55 PM EDT
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The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin
By Peter H. Salus
Some Errata
One of the "problems" of writing is that your
readership can be quite notable. I have
received clarifying comments from two of the
major "participants."
With regard to Chapter 2 (UNIX), Dennis Ritchie has
pointed out the following (as well as a few minor points):
- "'AT&T Bell Labs' is correct, I guess, but BL didn't
really start using that name until divestiture, and AT&T
wanted the prominent branding. Of course we were a part of
AT&T (via WECo), so it's not wrong."
- "Doug wasn't heavily involved in Multics at the time, and he
was always pursuing other things as well (including, course,
being Ken's boss)."
- "I don't think 'UNICS' was ever committed to paper...
A couple of years ago I checked again with Brian and Peter N,
and Brian admits to Unix, Peter denies it. Like you I thought
that it must have been Peter because of the punsterish tendencies,
and may have written that, but it seems not to be true.
I suppose leaving the air of mystery has some virtue, though."
- "Bob [Morris] retired several years ago from NCSC."
I also received two pieces of mail from Richard Stallman,
one pointing out that: "It was only in senior year
[in high school] that I was using a computer."
Moreover, I wrote "He [RMS] has frequently said that 'Software
wants to be free'."
Richard writes: "I don't believe I ever said those
particular words. ... What I say is that software should
be free; that is to say, its users should have freedom."
I have received other comments and addenda from several
notables (e.g. Rob Kolstad and Mike O'Dell). All will
be incorporated into the next full version.
I am really gratified that the most eminent workers in
the field have been reading my work and have taken the
time to write to me.
PHS
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 02:17 PM EDT |
There have been less illustrious contributors that have hoped to help you
improve the articles. I hope you likewise consider their suggestions. Enjoyed it
so far. And I appreciate the effort and your openness to accuracy and
(hopefully) excellence.[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Nick_UK on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 02:22 PM EDT |
Sort of strange, I suppose, to get corrections from these
great people that gave us all this - almost surreal, I
bet.
Thank you ALL... because we now know you read here :-)
Nick [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Ed L. on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 02:23 PM EDT |
| I really appreciate this series, Peter. Could you possibly find space to
elaborate further r.e. the software/code contributions of RMS and GNU.org? I
seem to recall an OT thread a while back wherein there was much discussion
whether or not the "GNU" was appropriate in the title "GNU/Linux" and, while I
doubt even you can put that particular controversy to rest, it seemed
to me at the time that many of the participants were relatively clueless about
the breadth&depth of Stallman's contributions, and your (hopefully
preliminary) piece on Emacs and the start of gcc has by no means yet addressed
the matter. Any further plans?
Or is this a matter of "Patience. All things
in their time..."
Thanks!
---
"Microsoft is like having a car where
the bonnet is welded shut" (Mohammad Sephery-Rad, Iran IT Minister)
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 02:28 PM EDT |
This illustrates:<BR>
1. The principals involved have a sense of their place in history.<BR>
2. They have a strong sense for the need of "getting it
right".<BR>
This strive for accuracy is already observable in the other work they have
produced.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: seanlynch on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 03:03 PM EDT |
Please place off-topic posts in this thread, so they don't get scattered
around.
First I'd like to thank Dr. Salus for his work.
Second I'd like
to go off-topic:
Why has SCOX stock shot up over $.50 in less than an hour? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: ssavitzky on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 03:03 PM EDT |
| There's a related, very common quote: "information wants to be free."
No idea where it came from, but I'm pretty sure it predates the WWW; I think I
first read it on Usenet, and it was probably old then. ---
The SCO method:
open mouth, insert foot, pull trigger. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Simon G Best on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 03:56 PM EDT |
Thank you, Dr Salus and PJ, for writing and publishing this serialised book
on Groklaw :-) It's an interesting read.
The mystery of the early
spelling or spellings of 'Unix'/'UNICS' does add a nice air of mystery. Worthy
sagas are worthy of mysterious origins. Having different versions of the story
of the origins of the name only adds further to the mystery -
delicious!
I wondered if, perhaps, it might have been that different
people imagined it to be spelt in different ways, without necessarily writing it
down or reading each others spellings of it? The theory that a punster who
first came up with the name, based on 'MULTICS', does nicely fit with the
'UNICS' spelling, and it's not hard to imagine that this pun was spoken before
ever getting written or read by others. Perhaps some who heard the pun imagined
it to be spelt 'Unix'?
And as for the Stallman nonquote, "Software wants
to be free", it reminds me of something I heard about Michael Caine's
catchphrase, "Not a lot of people know that." From what I heard, he'd never
actually said that. According to the story I heard, it was a line that someone
used in a Michael Caine impersonation, and the line had somehow stuck,
associated with Michael Caine as a result. It grew into a catchphrase, which
was only used by Caine himself when he did his own Michael Caine impersonation.
(Caine's Michael Caine impersonations aren't too bad, though there's room for
improvement.)
(Oh, and I was also wondering about the title (at least in
the earlier articles), "A History of Free and Open Source". Without the "Open
Source", it would just be "A History of Free" - ?)
Anyway, thanks
again!
---
FOSS IS political. It's just that the political
establishment is out of touch and hasn't caught up. [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 06:36 PM EDT |
I heard Richard Stallman talk at Northwestern University, sometime in the mid
1990's. I very clearly remember him saying, "Software wants to be
free."
Stallman also said something substantially to the effect of "...software
should be free; that is to say, its users should have freedom."[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 13 2005 @ 06:51 PM EDT |
He duplicated the work of the Symbolics programmers in order
to prevent the company from gaining a monopoly. He refused to sign
non-disclosure agreements, and he shared his work with others in what he still
regards as the "spirit of scientific collaboration and
openness."
To the uninformed, this reads like Stallman
copied the software, rather than reimplemented it from scratch. I think this is
very ambiguous at best, and probably misleading to many
people.
Stallman and Free Software advocates have come under a lot of
fire for allegedly ignoring copyright, I think it would be best to err on the
side of caution to avoid propogating this misconception.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: soronlin on Saturday, May 14 2005 @ 05:12 AM EDT |
| This is a useful and informative book, and it's nice to see reader's comments
are appreciated. In that spirit would it be possible to revisit chapter 1? I
know the UK didn't have a major impact on FOSS, but ignoring the earliest
British computers propogates a myth.
I would be the first to agree that the
USA and UK were both working on computing at the same time and some firsts are
definitely American. However some of them were also British, including the first
stored program computer (the program is contained in the same memory as the
data) and maybe the first commercial computer.
While the story in the USA
has always been known, the very earliest computers in the UK were an off-shoot
of the Bletchley-Park code-breaking work and were clouded by national security
secrecy for many decades.
Could I just ask the author to read the British
story at
http://www.computer50.org/
and revisit
chapter 1 to give a nod to the British in the appropriate places? [ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 14 2005 @ 08:17 AM EDT |
<for the sarcasm impaired - enable sarcasm mode>
Talk about letting the side down, here we are as an internet community of
communists - attacking everyone left right and center - and you let the side
down by admitting mistakes, publishing corrections... and striving for an honest
accurate representation of the facts..
AND ! you're not even letting your ego get in the way...
Talk about pathetic
</end sarcasm mode>
Really enjoying reading along.... looking forward to the next installment.. but
we need some soft porn sex scenes and a car chase :-)
(that last comment required humour mode enabled - in case you missed it )
We could get Colin Farrell to play RMS
Dame Judy Dench to play PJ
Russell Crowe as Darl
MOG as herself
we just need to fill the roles for
Rob Enderle
Linus
Bob Sims
Dan Lyons
Ms. Didio
[ Reply to This | # ]
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| Authored by: tredman on Saturday, May 14 2005 @ 02:55 PM EDT |
Actually, Peter, I saw somebody make the comment (can't recall where) that RMS
never actually said that. I did some research and found that the only origins
of that phrase I could find were:
- I found an essay on First Monday authored by Eben Moglen called
"Anarchism Triumphant", where he uses that phrase in a section titled
"Software Wants to Be Free; or, How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love
the Bomb". It was based on a paper submitted to the Buchmann International
Conference on Law, Technology and Information at Tel Aviv University, around May
of 1999.
- An article in TechWeb around December of that same year called "McNealy
Says Software Wants To Be Free", but his actual quote is "Software is
going to be free".
- Many references to "Software wants to be free" as, not a quote from
RMS, but rather as a philosophy represented by RMS.
Tim
---
Tim
"I drank what?" - Socrates, 399 BCE[ Reply to This | # ]
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