The need for cooperation as central motivation in Unix and GNUproject

chomwitt · Today 02:33:10

For computer science at Bell Laboratories, the period 1968-1969 was somewhat unsettled. The main reason for this was the slow, though clearly inevitable, withdrawal of the Labs from the Multics project.From the point of view of the group that was to be most involved in the beginnings of Unix (K. Thompson, Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, J. F. Ossanna), the decline and fall of Multics had a directly felt effect. We didn’t want to lose the pleasant niche we occupied, because no similar ones were available; even the time-sharing service that would later be offered under GE’s operating system did not exist.
What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form.We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.
The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System , Dennis M. Ritchie

RMS:The AI Lab of the 1970s was by all accounts a special place. It was a bit like the Garden of Eden,It hadn’t occurred to us not to cooperate.
The demise of ITS, and the AI Lab hacker community which had sustained it, had been a traumatic blow to Stallman. As a programmer used to working with the best machines and the best software, however, Stallman faced what he could only describe as a “stark moral choice”: either swallow his ethical objection for “proprietary” software – the term Stallman and his fellow hackers used to describe any program that carried copyright terms or an end-user license that restricted copying and modification – or dedicate his life to building an alternate, nonproprietary system of software programs.
RMS:I asked myself: what could I, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? It wasn’t until I examined the question for a while that I realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the problem.
Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution

Last edited by chomwitt (Today 02:38:15)

stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn · Today 03:41:19

Don Marti was editor-in-chief at Linux Journal once upon a time and his website is absolutely overflowing with very interesting intriguing thought-provoking stuff!

https://blog.zgp.org/

once on his main webpage find the "Start here" and/or the "About me" sections/sub-headings and have a go!

way down in the "Bonus links" area is a link to a long but must-read commentary regarding the sorry state of search:

https://travellemming.com/perspectives/ftc-letter-google-censors-indie-publishers-with-ai/

Last edited by stargate-sg1-cheyenne-mtn (Today 04:07:04)

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The need for cooperation as central motivation in Unix and GNUproject

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