[Commons-Law] Re: Re: The gates of intellectual property (Lawrence Liang)....(Supreet) (Hasit - EOF)

[Hasit seth]

Supreet,

I have nothing more to say in this regard.  Just a few comments and
annotations to your technical points.

> Sorry for nitpicking but BSD is not clone of linux, GNU is not a clone
> of Unix, and Linux is not Unix clone.

Thanks for pointing out the typo, I should have said "BSD is a clone
of UNIX".  Other things are allright.  All the *NIX family members
have similar command/utilities (even the command names), shells, IPC
(pipes, etc).  Innovation has been in the area of file systems,
schedulers,  memory management, networking, clustering, etc.  But is
pretty unfair to retrospectively compare later developed *NIX (which
is "derivativee" of UNIX in more ways than one) with the original UNIX
(till the versions when development was alive).  By clone I did not
mean a replica, but I do maintain that it is pretty much the same
stuff.

The basic thing is that AT&T licensed UNIX source code to more than a
few academic places and also to industry.  A lot of people got to look
at UNIX and its source code, studied it, used it, liked it and got
used to it.  Then academics and their students wrote their own
versions of it - from a learning-toy version like MINIX to BSD to
Linux.  Commerical vendors like Coherent did their own thing; and so
also the licensed onces - e.g., XENIX from Microsoft ;-) A huge flame
war between Andrew Tannebaum (of MINIX fame) with Linus Torvalds
(linux creator) is well documented, with even the original creator of
UNIX - Ken Thompson - chiming in for a minor point.  It is nicely laid
out in original email format here:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html .  I
personally think it was an apple vs. oranges debate comapring Minix (a
learning toy) with Linux, but when such giants argue what are apple
and oranges - everything is fair flame game!

I just have one sad lament, with all the Linux/Linus and GNU/Stallman
praise/worship going around, the original geniuses (Ken Thompson -
http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/thompsonbio.html, Dennis Ritchie
- http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/, Brian Kernninghan, McIllroy,
Presotto, Pike... and the whole CS group in those times) at AT&T Bell
Labs who originally created UNIX / C, great documentation/books, all
the wonderful utilities - above all the VERY CORE CONCEPTS underlying
UNIX - get very little credit in comparision.  To me those are the
heroes, rest may have re-done it better or "freed" it notwithstanding.
 A brief history of Bell Lab's innovation mostly UNIX related stuff is
here: http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/blcontributions.html .

> 
> MS-DOS was created by computer manufacturer Seattle Computer Products
> as 86-DOS, commonly known as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System).
> In a sequence of events that would later inspire much folklore,
> Microsoft licensed QDOS to IBM on behalf of SCP. Microsoft acquired
> the system from SCP shortly before the PC's release
> 
> IBM and Microsoft both released versions of DOS. Originally, IBM only
> validated and packaged Microsoft developments, and thus IBM's versions
> tended to be released shortly after MS's. However, MS-DOS 4.0 was
> actually based on IBM PC-DOS 4.0, as Microsoft was by then
> concentrating on OS/2 development. Microsoft released its versions
> under the name "MS-DOS", while IBM released its versions under the
> name "PC DOS"
> 
I see that your source is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS .  A
more accurate source is Tim Patterson who wrote the QDOS
http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Byte/History.html and
http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Articles.aspx ).  I updated the
Wikipedia page with this link :-) Updation, One of the great
facilities at Wikipedia.  The history of Tim Patterson's SCP, QDOS and
Microsoft is more synergistic than we may think. The name of QDOS says
it all about how finished a product it was, but we should give full
credit to Patterson for orginating it.  Microsoft was orginally a
BASIC developer, they even sent IBM to CP/M author to look for a OS
before they took over QDOS.  Tim documents it all very well how QDOS
was taken over by MS (they paid for it) and then further developed it.

> 
> Its complete mis-conception that MS was only OS producer and came up
> with application to support there Windows platform.
> 
> MS-Word, lot of people do'nt know started of as DOS software to kill
> Word Perfect and Word Star.
> 
Doesn't change much of what I said. And I do not see why an OS maker
should limit itself to OS only and not develop Apps?  Wikipedia says
(not my edits) "Like many other producers of successful DOS
applications, WordStar delayed far too long before deciding to make a
version for the commercially groundbreaking Windows 3.0."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordstar

 
> Gambas  along with many other efforts are there to help developer
> start of in open source development. IDLE and wing IDE for python,
> Anjuta, glade, Kdevelop, QT designer for C/C++, Bluefish, Quanta for
> web application development.
> 
> Visual basic might be a nice platform for 3 tier application
> development, however if you look at it N tier application Microsoft
> has not been able to come up with any development platform. I see VB's
> success as a mixed bag because, it took Microsoft quite a while to get
> out of VB frame of mind while applications have migrated from PC to
> web.
 
I totally agree with all that you say above.  Most these IDEs are
based on IDE concepts developed in Borland's Turbo series and
Microsoft's Visual studio and many earlier academic projects like
Oberon, etc.


> If cost of platform  was the only criterion, BBC computer, or Amiga
> would be the most successful platform. But it had to do with opening
> up of hardware architecture  hence vendor down you road could help you
> out with support unlike amigas and BBC's
> 
I agree with you that opening of architecture (publication of IBM PC
Technical Reference Manual and add-on card architecture) was the
principal reason for PC to develop so much over other "personal
computers/home computers" of those early (and wonderful) days  of PC
computing.
I do not know how BBC micro or Amiga was cheaper than PC-Clones.  I
did use BBC micro in the 80s and also Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ which was
similar to BBC in the "home computer" category. ZX used to cost around
Rs. 5,000-7,000 but without a monitor (just like BBC/Amiga with a TV
hookup) and came without no disk storage.  Siva PC/XT then was around
Rs.35,000-40,000 and came with a much powerful processor, floppy
drives, hard disk and monitor - all of these were optional with BBC/ZX
in those days.  It was applications and tiny processing power of
BBC/Spectrum that didn't allow these platforms to flourish as compared
to PC, cost being only a minor factor.  Amiga did cool stuff with
their later machines and OS but that was niche stuff.

Regards,
Hasit Seth