[Nottingham] [Talk] *TODAY* Wednesday 06/03/2013: Unix, GNU Not Unix, Linux, and What Next?

[Martin]

On 06/03/13 13:19, Martin wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> I'd like to tell you a story ;-)
> 
> 
> *TODAY* Wednesday 06/03/2013
> 
>> Unix, GNU Not Unix, Linux, and What Next?
>> http://nottingham.lug.org.uk/event/unix-gnu-not-unix-linux-and-what-next

And quite a story too even if we didn't quite get through it all. It
started with some lofty ideas and a scavenged pdp7...


In something of a prescient coincidence, tidying up one of my Gentoo
systems has removed a long and old utility from 1993!

GNU ed
http://www.gnu.org/software/ed/manual/ed_manual.html

That has lasted a long time before falling off the dependencies list...
I'm sure there must be even older GNU utilities still in there from the
early days...


A second coincidence just stumbled across:

An important part of the success of unix was the easy use and reuse of
multiple small utilities to very flexibly and quickly bolt together
solutions for more complicated tasks. There is the comment for this from
Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike in The Unix Programming Environment: "the
idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among
programs than from the programs themselves."

Another important part is that unix came with all the source code and
documentation to allow the users to learn and develop the system further
for themselves and everyone. All decades before what came to be known as
'FLOSS'.

Those ideas are now being picked up by Mozilla for "web based" Open Science:

Will open science be web-based?
http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Will-open-science-be-web-based-1810259.html

"... At the moment, what few open source science applications there are
tend to be domain specific. That makes it hard to take advantage of one
of the key strengths of free software: re-usability...

... The trick to successful open source collaboration is not to deliver
complete systems but to look at components that can be usefully [bolted
together to be] reused in different situations..."



rms has lived through and been an important part of the early days that
has lead to GNU/Linux as we know it today, and lots more far wider
ranging...

10th/11th March 2013

A Free Digital Society
http://nottingham.lug.org.uk/event/rms-a-free-digital-society

Copyright vs. Community in the Age of Computer Networks
http://nottingham.lug.org.uk/event/rms-copyright-vs-community


Good interesting stuff!

Cheers,
Martin



The Unix Programming Environment 1984:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environment

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