Re: Ideas are not like candy.

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

On Wed, 6 Mar 2024 14:24:49 -0500, DFS wrote:
>

They couldn't do the kernel part, though, and the Linux kernel came
along at just the right time.

>
"This is the original announcement of the GNU Project, posted by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983."
>
I'm not a Stallman fan but *nix was a cluster fuck in 1983. AT&T's second anti-trust suit had just been settled and they could sell Unix. They'd been giving it to academic institutions, with a very arcane licensing for proprietary firms. I forget what variant on the Unix name I was using in 1983 but it fell off the back of a truck in Cambridge MA and ran on a PDP-11. >
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars
>
Hurd never got off the ground. When Torvalds wrote a kernel loosely based on Tannenbaum's Minix in 1991he didn't expect it to go anywhere.
>
Microsoft and SCO were also muddying the waters with Xenix. MS dropped Xenix although you have to wonder how much ultimately wound up in NT.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
   Microsoft hired a group of developers from Digital Equipment Corporation led
   by Dave Cutler to build Windows NT, and many elements of the design reflect
   earlier DEC experience with Cutler's VMS, VAXELN and RSX-11, but also an
   unreleased object-based operating system developed by Cutler at Digital
   codenamed MICA. The team was joined by selected members of the disbanded
   OS/2 team, including Moshe Dunie.
   Although NT was not an exact clone of Cutler's previous operating systems,
   DEC engineers almost immediately noticed the internal similarities. Parts of
   VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures, published by Digital Press,
   accurately describe Windows NT internals using VMS terms. Furthermore, parts
   of the NT codebase's directory structure and filenames matched that of the
   MICA codebase. Instead of a lawsuit, Microsoft agreed to pay DEC $65–100
   million, help market VMS, train Digital personnel on Windows NT, and
   continue Windows NT support for the DEC Alpha.
Microsoft done "cadged" it!  :-D
--
Beauty and harmony are as necessary to you as the very breath of life.