Sure We’re Open Source – Not

Alas, apparently that silly press release last week has totally confused the writing fraternity into thinking the 1990’s were actually the 1980’s (see Fun Friday – Homer’s Illiad to be “Improved” for Silicon Valley). Aside from the fact that Clinton and Reagan were both absolutely adored by the American people, I don’t think the 1980’s were really enough like the 1990’s to easily confuse the two decades, do you?

In this piece in cnet, “Unix got its start at AT&T, but Sun co-founder Bill Joy was instrumental in an open-source variant developed at the University of California at Berkeley. For half the company’s history, Sun used this BSD version of Unix in a product called SunOS”. I wonder what they’ve been drinking today?

Back in the 1980’s, BSD required an AT&T source license to obtain source code – a considerable expense for a company. SunOS required an AT&T license as well. At Symmetric Computer Systems, to sell our BSD-based Symmetrix 375 computer required an AT&T license and we only used BSD – not System V! Afraid it was true for everyone. But that’s not all.

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