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


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