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The Daemon, the GNU & the Penguin, Ch. 14, by Dr. Peter H. Salus |
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Thursday, June 30 2005 @ 08:30 PM EDT
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Here you are, Chapter 14 of Peter Salus' The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin. This chapter in his ongoing history of Free and Open Sources is on Plan 9 and Inferno. More information on Inferno on Freshmeat and on Plan 9 and Inferno in this interview with Michael Jeffrey, CEO of Vita Nuova, who says this: "In the mid-80s Bell Labs stopped research and development into UNIX. It is reported that they considered ‘the problems with UNIX were too deep to fix’. Instead they focused their energies on the design and implementation of a new operating system that became known as Plan 9. The Plan 9 operating system at one level will feel familiar to anyone with a UNIX background; many of the UNIX commands and utilities are available in Plan 9 and programs are written in C. Plan 9 however, is fundamentally different in its structure." Inferno is dual licensed; the Free version is distributed with subcomponents under the GPL/LGPL, the MIT-template, the Lucent Public License, and Free Type, or, "if the result of your work using Inferno will not or cannot be made Free Software," you can choose the Vita Nuova Commercial Developer Licence. Plan 9 is distributed under the Lucent Public License Vs. 1.02. Here are the earlier chapters of Dr. Salus' book:
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The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin
~ by Peter H. Salus
Chapter 14. BTL after UNIX: Plan 9 and Inferno
In July 1990, I flew from Boston to London for the
UKUUG Conference. (I was to give a talk on UNIX
standards and specifications.) But there were three
talks on the program that blew me away.
They concerned "Plan 9" a new OS being worked on at
Bell Labs. It was named Plan 9 from Bell Labs after
"Plan 9 from Outer Space," perhaps the worst science
fiction movie ever filmed.
Plan 9 is a UNIX clone. But it presents a consistent
interface which is easy to use. I am not going to
go into it at any length. But, it was the successor
to UNIX, which, Rob Pike said, was dead: "It's
been dead for so long it doesn't even stink any more."
1
Rob delivered the keynote address at the UKUUG: "Plan
9 from Bell Labs." He's now at Google.
Dave Presotto then spoke about "Multiprocessor Streams
for Plan 9." He's at Google, too.
Tom Duff talked about "Rc -- A Shell for Plan 9 and
UNIX Systems." Tom's now at Pixar, the proud owner
of parts of several Oscars.
Fifteen years later, what had been the UNIX group (1127)
has been dispersed. In addition to Rob, Dave and Tom,
- Ken Thompson retired to California;
- Brian Kernighan is a Professor at Princeton;
- Phil Winterbottom is CTO at Entrisphere;
- Gerard Holzmann is at NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software;
- Bob Flandrena is at Morgan Stanley;
- Sean Dorward is at Google;
Dennis Ritchie and Howard Trickey remain at Lucent/BTL.
But, before it disappeared, the "1127 group" made yet another
contribution to OS development: Inferno.
Inferno is a compact OS designed for building "cross-platform
distributed systems." It can run on top of an existing
OS, or as a stand-alone. The nomenclature owes much to
Dave Presotto, who founded it firmly in Dante. The company
marketing Inferno is Vita Nuova; the communications
protocol is Styx; applications are written in type-safe
Limbo, which has C-like syntax.
The 4th edition of Inferno was released in 2005 as free
software, but under a mixture of licenses. 1In the July 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum, there's an article
"The End of AT&T" with the blurb:
Once the world's largest company, Ma Bell will soon vanish. But its
innovations -- from the transistor to communications satellites to laser
cooling-live on. By Michael Riordan
Note what's important. CS isn't.
Dr. Salus is the author of "A Quarter Century of UNIX" and several other books, including "HPL: Little Languages and Tools", "Big Book of Ipv6 Addressing Rfcs", "Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Imperative Programming Languages", "Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond", and "The Handbook of Programming Languages (HPL): Functional, Concurrent and Logic Programming Languages". There is an interview with him, audio and video,"codebytes: A History of UNIX and UNIX Licences" which was done in 2001 at a USENIX conference. Dr. Salus has served as Executive Director of the USENIX Association. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view
a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way,
Stanford, California 94305, USA.
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Authored by: iceworm on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 04:35 AM EDT |
Don't forget to prievew =:-)}}} [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: iceworm on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 04:37 AM EDT |
Please include clickable links. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: iceworm on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 04:55 AM EDT |
As usual amongst Geeks, the names are most intriguing.
I can't imagine
why "Unix" is dead any more than I can
imagine what goes on within the
Linux kernel running this
box on which I am logged in and making this
reply. Well, I
shall stick to evangelizing and system engineering.
iceworm [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 05:32 AM EDT |
I think this is a good place to bring this up as this guy is and was a
pretty influential person in the history of Perl development. He managed the
release (the so called Pumpking) of one of the longer lasting perl versions. And
his company has now used the law to have all of his computer equipment
confiscated, apparently with little justification.
What is happening is
not right, and people on Groklaw should know about it. It could happen
apparently to almost any Open Source developer that works at home.
See
the article on
slashdot.
Please Support Chips cause. If you've used Perl then you've
benefited from his help whether you know it or not.
[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: dopple on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 07:42 AM EDT |
Tom's now at Pixar, the proud owner of parts of several
Oscars.
"See, over here we have an arm... Here's a leg.. oh, and
here's a head, we're especially proud of that one. Sooner or later we'll put
together a Frankenstein Oscar and rule the world!"
*ahem*.
Sorry. :)--- Never play chicken with Nazgul. It only gets you wounds
that never heal and an annoyed judge. [ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Groklaw Lurker on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 10:47 AM EDT |
"...It was named Plan 9 from Bell Labs after "Plan 9 from Outer
Space," perhaps the worst science fiction movie ever filmed..."
Perhaps the worst?
Dr. Salus, you may have understated the film's paucity of redeeming value as a
serious science fiction film. As a comical spoof of the genre however,
"Plan 9 from Outer Space" is likely to enjoy a cult following well
into the current century.
God bless your soul Ed Woods...
---
(GL) Groklaw Lurker
End the tyranny, abolish software patents.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 01:07 PM EDT |
With all due deference to Dr. Salus, these "chapters" consisting of a
couple of paragraphs fail to satisfy ... I'm left hungering for more meat.
These are more like outlines of chapters, no?[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 02:04 PM EDT |
A while back I read a report that Microsoft was concerned at the job postings
from Google. Seems the people being searched for were those whose expertise
would apply to operating systems, as opposed to search engines.
Then we see here the following people from Bell Labs who were working on a new
operating system:
Rob Pike, Dave Presotto and Sean Dorward.
That a quarter of this high powered team ended up at Google could explain a lot.[ Reply to This | # ]
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Authored by: inode_buddha on Friday, July 01 2005 @ 11:21 PM EDT |
"In the mid-80s Bell Labs stopped research and development into UNIX. It is
reported that they considered ‘the problems with UNIX were too deep to
fix’."
Now, I have seen this quoted many times before, particularly during the time of
sale to the current SCO Group.
Look at the time-frame.
My question is, "Were the problems mentioned of a legal nature, a financial
nature, or a technical nature?"
AFAICT Ransom Love (Caldera CEO) said as much during the SCO purchase, if you
want to take the legal perspective.
The financial perspective, you say? What about Novell and Sun?
What about the technical stuff? Is *any* of it protectable? And this, after
being promulgated in universities worldwide for decades?
---
-inode_buddha
Copyright info in bio
"When we speak of free software,
we are referring to freedom, not price"
-- Richard M. Stallman[ Reply to This | # ]
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