Launchpad to be free

[jack-rp9/bkPP+cDYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org (Jack Coats)]

I remember in the '70s and '80s running IBMs VM operating system.  We had
a source code license.  I even took Amdahl classes about it, where we did go
through the source code to understand EXACTLY how things worked.  It wasn't
open source, but the source was available for customers as part of
their rental/lease
price.  This included all their OS related stuff, including code that
wrote channel
programs, emulated hardware (whether it was there or not), etc etc.
Mainly in assembler, rather than PL/S or something else.

Some of the code was ugly, but pretty readable.  You also learned to believe the
code, not the comments. ... I did especially like the full page "This
space for rent."
signs in the code. ;)

In those days for interactive use we used CMS as a single user OS to
run under VM
in a virtual machine.  Initially it was written by Columbia
University, but has been re-named
since. (from Columbia Monitor System to Conversational Monitor System when IBM
started marketing it).

At one time IBM was trying to reduce the amount of source available,
and there was
an almost universal uprising from VM systems programmers.  Not the
fact that the source
was gone, but without it doing low level debugging was almost
impossible.  We had some
great systems geeks that could read core dumps better than the Sunday
comics, but not
everywhere was so fortunate.  IBM relented for a while.  I moved on to
UNIX where OS
source availability has been generally available at least enough to
learn the basic
architectures, even if your specific OS was not easily available
(HP-UX, AIX, SunOS, but
old AT&T, Minix, Linux, BSD, etc have been as time goes on).

The MFT, and MVS (the big batch systems) were not in my area, but I
think my friends in those OS support
areas said they had the OS code available too (mainly PL/S if I remember right).

Once cheaper hardware became more prevalent, source code availability
tightened up,
so by the time M$oft came around the generic policy was Object Code
Only for OS's.

Enough of reminiscing.... FOr now anyway.

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 8:29 PM, Jerry Feldman <gaf-mNDKBlG2WHs at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 02/28/2009 08:22 PM, David Kramer wrote:
>>
>> I don't buy that for a second. ?Microsoft thrives on being just
>> incompatible enough with every standard that you can't easily run
>> someone else's software in its place. ?Going open source would also mean
>> exposing all their file formats, as well as the code they put in to
>> intentionally break compatibility.
>>
>
> This is typical of industry leaders. Look at IBM in 60s and 70s.
>