Mike Miller wrote: > On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Brian Hurt wrote: > >> On Thu, 21 Oct 2004, Mike Miller wrote: >> >>> It is interesting that so many people believe that VMS is superior >>> to UNIX OSs, yet VMS is basically dying and being replaced by >>> UNIX/Linux. This has been going on for a decade or so, at least at >>> universities. >> >> >> Unix has one advantage VMS doesn't/didn't have: Unix is open source. > > > Well, some UNIX OSs are open source, some are not. A decade ago when > many university systems were switching over from VMS to UNIX, I didn't > hear much about open source. I'm not sure why they were doing it. It > could be that DEC was just charging too much and universities were > saving money with UNIX. I don't know. Anyone know the history? > There's an extensive history online as part of the whole SCO debacle(see http://www.opensource.org/sco-vs-ibm.html or http://salon.com/tech/feature/1999/11/30/lions/index.html), but the basic reason Unix is so popular in academics is that AT&T made the source code available for a fairly low licensing fee which made it very popular for teaching and research. In the early years most networks were using proprietary networking protocols so DEC stuff used DECNet and pretty much only talked to DEC stuff, same with IBM, etc. Having source code made it easier to play with stuff like tcp/ip, uucp, etc. I can still remember when the U dumped BSD for VMS on the public VAX back in the early 80's - it wasn't a real popular move in some quarters. And stuff was always expensive back then, so if you already had access to Printer Brand A and didn't want to buy DEC Printer XYZ it was a lot easier if you already had source code to a print driver that you could hack until it worked with A. That made unix a lot more flexible. 'Open Source' has always been there. In the early days of Unix, CP/M and Apple a lot of people wrote software that they simply dumped into the public domain. It wasn't until the advent of the IBM PC that we started to see the whole shareware approach. There were a number of usenet newsgroups devoted to distributing source code for applications, utilities, etc. --rick _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list