Caldera releases original unices under BSD license

q[alex] writes "Caldera International has done a very good thing. They have released the "Ancient" Unices they inherited when they purchased SCO under a "BSD-style" license. The license is available here, instructions on finding the source are here. Caldera (and before that SCO) had required people to obtain a free (as in beer) but somewhat restrictive license in order to get these old sources. The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool."

Yes!

Now we can see how these "unix" thingies work and write one that works on PCs!

Great!

Never would have thought Caldera would have done something as community-oriented as this, given their history of late.

However, a big thank-you from this Slashdot reader for their act. I appreciate it, and I know I'm not alone...

Why is this cool?

The new BSD-style licensing only applies to the 16-bit PDI-11 versions and some of the early 32-bit releases (excluding System III and System V), but it's still very cool.

I don't mean to sound like a stick in the mud here, but why exactly is this cool? This source code was obviously available before, for people who actually needed it. Why, then, is the simple fact that anyone can get to it now a "cool" thing?

Will this spawn development of breakthrough products? Will this help administrators of these old system finally take control of their network?

Or is this just another geek trophy to have, print, wave around over coffee, and ultimately collect dust on shelves full of other useless time-wasting trinkets?

--SC

Re:Why is this cool?

It is great to have this available for study. And, this might inspire a whole new generation of PDP-11 emulators so you can sit down and actually run the original bits (emulation of an ASR-33 not considered mandatory).

Computer Science would also be served well if the original Multics sources/binaries were released. Although it would be much harder to write a Honeywell emulator!

Re:Why is this cool?

Of course, in order to partially emulate an ASR-33, you could perhaps connect an IBM selectric up to your computer while running a looped recording of gunfight and an idling 58 chevy with one blown piston. For the final touch, you could replace the room's light switch with a dimmer switch and wiggle it back and forth whenever you are printing something out.

Re:Why is this cool?

This is why it's cool:

[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
(syntax errors like =|, =&, and the rand() API changed)
[~/new/usr/src/games]% gcc -O2 -o wump wump.c
[~/new/usr/src/games]% wump
Instructions? (y-n) n
You are in room 8
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 10 6 18
Move or shoot (m-s) m
which room? 10
You are in room 10
I smell a wumpus
There are tunnels to 19 8 1
Move or shoot (m-s) s
Give list of rooms terminated by 0
8 6 0
You slew the wumpus
Another game? (y-n)

ewww...SCO/UNIXWARE

As a sysadmin at a company who uses these Unices, I would recommend that the hobbyist stay away from them. They're cludgy at best. I figure that this'll fare well mainly for those that are stuck with them, and need the source (we are slowly migrating to Linux/Solaris).

Re:Double ewww...SCO/Open Server

First off--you're dissing an operating system released by one company in 1993, because a different company has released the source to a different OS, which was written by still a third company, decades before the one you're complaining about. How, exactly, is this even remotely on-topic?

That said, even though it isn't on-topic, I'd like to respond, for personal reasons: I'm one of the half-dozen engineers responsible for maintaining SCO OpenServer. (In point of fact, I'm the one responsible for that DHCP client you mentioned. BTW, if you think it's easy to maintain an entire OS distribution with a team that small, try it sometime.)

I could post voluminous defenses of why OSr5 is the way it is, but won't bother. I'll just say this: Some of your complaints are quite valid. (Others aren't--where in the world did you get the idea we don't have ELF libraries?) But it can essentially all be chalked up to the fact that we're talking about a legacy OS from 1993 which is neither intended to be, nor sold as, a state-of-the-art kernel in 2002. (For that, you want OpenUNIX 8.)

OSr5 is successful in the marketplace because it does what a lot of people need, does it well, does it extremely reliably, and does it in essentially the same way that it's done it for a decade (modulo those changes necessary to ensure that it runs well and takes advantage of the most current hardware)--which means no surprises for resellers and vertical-app vendors. There are fancier kernels nowadays, but nothing else on the market is as stable a platform, and for all its admitted outness-of-date, I'm very proud of it.

To bring this back within hailing distance of the topic: I fervently hope that one day OSr5 will be open source too. I don't really expect it, unfortunately; not all of the code belongs to Caldera. Bits of the XENIX-compatibility code, as you noted, are licensed from Microsoft, and what are they odds they'd ever agree to open-source anything? But it would be very satisfying.

Plaintext license

Here's the text of the license before it gets slashdotted or for those who don't want to bother with PDF:

January 23, 2002
Dear UNIX enthusiasts,
Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source code, including creating derived binary products created from the source code. The source code for which Caldera
International, Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems: 32-bit 32V UNIX
16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Caldera International, Inc. makes no guarantees or commitments that any source code is available from Caldera International, Inc.
The following copyright notice applies to the source code files for which this license is granted.
Copyright(C) Caldera International Inc. 2001-2002. All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the
following conditions are met: Redistributions of source code and documentation must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the
following disclaimer. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.
Neither the name of Caldera International, Inc. nor the names of other contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
USE OF THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED FOR UNDER THIS LICENSE BY CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL CALDERA INTERNATIONAL, INC. BE LIABLE FOR
ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR
OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Very truly yours,
/signed/ Bill Broderick
Bill Broderick
Director, Licensing Services

* UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the US and other countries.

This will make for cool reading

Especially the code commentary as I am no expert in programming. Anyone else going to scan through this like the pre .9 linux kernel for a feeling of what the people were thinking when they wrote it? Didn't someone bind up the linux kernel with commentary bolded it would be cool to see the same thing here.

I've been using this same software for a year now

to play around with the old Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition with source code by John Lions.

It is amazing how much you can learn from this old stuff. And now we can discuss, modify, and share the code with each other.

This is really great! Thanks Caldera!

Re:I've been using this same software for a year n

Absolutely. Someone's already put a link to Amazon for the book, so go check it out. It's amazing how damned interesting it is to read it, to see how things like task switching and process creation are actually done. (Keep in mind I came into Unix as a hobby, so I haven't taken any of this in CS courses.)

Someone was asking up above what the point was. Aside from learning from reading yet more code, this is as close as we can get to original Unix. If I was given the chance to check out the original manuscript for, say, the Revelation of St. John (I'm atheist, but religion fascinates me), I'd jump at the chance to see what changes have been made between the original and what we've got now. You'd learn an awful lot about how things have changed -- not just the book itself but everything else. I think that would apply with Unix just as much.

Couple things: buckrogers, I downloaded the source for the PDP-11 version a year or so ago. The original tarball has been lost in the mists of hd upgrades, but I do remember not being able to correlate Lions' code sections with the source I downloaded. Has your experience been any different?

And another thing: I'm sure I went picked up the code -- just the code -- for the PDP-11 version, way back when. Now, though, I can't seem to find it on their site. I thought I checked through the directories pretty thoroughly -- can anyone tell me where it is, or provide a link to their own copy?

Now, of course, I've got to check out the PDP-11 simulator [freshports.org]. (I'm sure I heard about one that was written in Java, but when I did a search on Google [google.com] it seemed like every damn CS student in the world has built one as a class project...someone else'll have to provide the link.)

Re:I've been using this same software for a year n

Try compiling:

ftp://minnie.tuhs.org/pub/PDP-11/Sims/Supnik_2.3 /s ources/sim_2.3d

build the pdp11 emulator.

download an image of the v5 root partition and save the contents below to a file named v5init:

set cpu 18b
att rk0 v5root
boot rk

from the shell, type "pdp11 v5init". at the boot prompt, type "unix".

Voila. Remember that "cd" doesn't work, but "chdir" does. The only thing coming close to a backspace key is the # key.

Thanks -- and not just to Caldera.

I think it's wonderful that Caldera decided, pretty much without even being directly asked, to free the sources to historical Unix.

It's noteworthy that they decided to do this just a few days after, finally, the successful end of Perry Metzger's long campaign to free the historical Unix *documentation* (perhaps more useful, these days). It sure seems to me that once they seriously considered Perry's request they must have realized the PR benefits they could reap by freeing the source code, too.

Thanks, Caldera -- and if you too are grateful to Caldera, you should probably be grateful to Perry as well.

interesting, but...

I guess this is for; as they say, "enthusiests". I think pretty much all modern UNIX archetecutes have surpassed any code in what has been released.

And to my dismay it doesn't include Xenix. Would have been nice to finally have an open source Microsoft product =P

Ancient Code

The good news is you can't have a VM flamewar running on a machine that lacks virtual memory.

The bad news is: 'TECO' r00ls; 'ed' suX0rs.

Original UNIX Source

Wanna see the original UNIX source? Check this book [amazon.com].

Ancient Code

The source code is actually engraved in stone and the kernel is a small rock.

Yuck - Old style BSD license

Their "BSD-style" license is actually the old-style BSD license, which includes the particularly onerous Advertising Clause:

All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed or owned by Caldera International, Inc.

What most people think of now as the BSD license does not contain such a clause, and has not for quite some time.

Re:Yuck - Old style BSD license

Both you and the other poster in response to the parent are quite mistaken about what the advertising clause means.

Copyright reproduction clauses exist in *every* version of the BSD license. The license & copyright must be reproduced with the product regardless of the advertising clause. What the advertising clause does is require that in any advertisement for the product, that credit is given. This can be interpreted to apply to things like newspaper ads, where at the bottom they'd have to say "contains code copyright regents of the university of california" or in a radio ad, where they'd have to have one of the voices giving credit... this makes per-word advertising impossible.

Copyright reproduction clauses are good, advertising clauses are bad. There are webpages out there that can cover the issue in more detail than what I just described.

A Day Late, a Dollar Short

Now if they had only done this as recently as 10 years ago, then they and us might actually have gotten some real economic value out of this. Now it is merely destined to be a curiosity in the history of UNIX as Linux spreads all over the planet.

I'd like to say "I told you so", but now it's just a symbolic victory.

Caldera is a wonderful company.

I applaud the good folks at Caldera for taking this course of action. This will benefit many people:

• Folks who continue to use these unices will now have more control over their system.
• Free operating systems may benefit from the knowledge and experience present in the original unices.
• Just about anybody who wishes to study and expand the system will now have the ability to do so.

This is also a good marketing move by Caldera. Hey, what have they got to lose by this? I think they have only to gain.

xxxxxx O xxxxxx H xxxxxx xxxxxx W xxxxxx E xxxxxx L xxxxxx L xxxxxx

But not the good stuff

excluding System III and System V

so in other words.. useless..

seriously, in this day and age, how can the System V source NOT be released!

oh well, might be interesting to look at the really old stuff, to get some insight into Dennis Ritche.. ;)

Excellent, ....good code, some of it....

People are scoffing, but oh what a kludge, caldera only did it for the publicity, who cares.

There is some GOOD code in there, some is crap just like all projects.

There are/were some code segments that were optimized VERY well, and hy dont laugh I remerber USING a pdp-11.

Point is the horsepower ot these machines sucked by modern standards, things we take for granted were MAJOR tasks, some of those routines were refined over a lifecycle longer than BSD and Linux combined.

My dad, a coder starting in the 60 tought me in about 1979, when he handed over his collection of computer mags, Byte and the lot, you can NEVER , EVER have too much source code, good or bad.

Im could care less what Caldera's motives are theyre a dead fish. When was the last time YOU installed that distro ? BUT they should be congratulated, I agree they should open up the other sources as well, but who am I to ask, hey while youre at it all people reading this post should give me all their old ????, see dosent fly. Its theirs , they bought it, and paid for it, sorta.

Im gonna grab it asap, there about 4 things I hate in the 2.4.18/2.5 series kernel, BSD IMHO dosent have the solution in theirs either, I keep looking , Im at a mental roadblock so to say(nothing new there) if these sources even point me in the right direction to solve one of those problems I will be etternally greatful

Re:Excellent, ....good code, some of it....

There is some GOOD code in there, some is crap just like all projects.

Very true. Two real howlers in PDP-11 UNIX:

• Dumb scheduler. Three compute-bound processes near the head of the process table would starve out all other processes.
• Really dumb malloc. O(N^2) speed. It's Knuth's fault. When he discusses memory allocation in the original edition of Fundamental Algorithms, he gives a bad algorithm, says it's bad, and leaves the good one as an exercise for the student. UNIX used the dumb one, right out of the book down to the variable names.

"unix-like" OS

Does this mean we can copy

#include

from one of the source files and no longer have to say that linux is a "unix-like OS"?

--
Mike
Sick of being corrected on this.

As someone that has recently acquired a pdp11/04..

I applaud Caldera's move. A few weeks back, when I had started searching for just this thing, I was directed to the SCO website, SCO having been bought by Caldera. As luck would have it, SCO's own free license for original unix was missing, and I was dissappointed. A quick glance though, and it seems that Caldera's license is much more agreeable. Now all I need, is a 9 track drive. ;-)

BSD code

If you want to have access to the Ancient BSD source codes, have a look at CSRG Archive CD-ROMs [mckusick.com].

I wonder if there are archives of mailing-lists also, since you can't use code without comments :-)

Most interesting part

# fgrep Vote *.c
// Vote Adams in '96!

Reading the install notes.....

is really amazing.

If you ignore the instructions for copying the system from magtape to disk (!), everything else looks very similar to the install notes for most modern unices today....

They tell you to 'cat' files to the printer, 'tar' together items for backup storage, 'sync' before you turn the machine off, and remember to check 'df' regularly to make sure your users don't fill up the disk, and clean out the /tmp directory periodically.

Reading documentation written 30 years ago which almost hasn't changed at all is really a beautiful thing. (Well, some things have changed. During bootup, the 'mem' line reports user-available memory in bytes. :)

Hats off to the developers of a system which is so flexible that hasn't really needed interface changing at all to adapt to 30 years of great changes in computer design and usage!

It might improve emulation

the iBCS or binfmt_coff ABI modules [slashdot.org] for Linux

WOW!

I wish more companies would release almost useless code!

SCO charged for this

SCO charged $100 for this shit. And they had some bullshit license and all of that.

Now if Caldera open sources UnixWare, I'd be more surprised. That could be really useful. Although I'm not holding my breath.

Anyway, it's cool of Caldera to do this, albeit I doubt it will mean much in the long run...

It's a first for BSD!

A first one for the BSB license. I've never heard of a company being acquired under a BSD-style license before.

Now all you need is a PDP-11 or VAX!

Maybe you thought this was going to be a funny post. It is not. My claim: it is *wonderful* fun to play with early unices on their original machines. If this news story interests you, you should get yourself a PDP-11 or a VAX.

You can still find PDP-11s and VAXen if you look hard enough -- sometimes with little or no impact on your wallet. After one year of searching, I possess five 11s and three VAXen, and I've even had to pass on some acquisition opportunities. Plus, while some 11s are serious big iron, some are almost as small as an average PC. More recent VAXen actually do come in average-PC form factors.

There are also several large and very competent Internet communities centered around these machines. They're not that hard to locate. Join one of these, and you've got nearly instant help with getting yourself set up and running. Need tapes? Need that paper tape controller board? No problem. The only catch, of course, is that you'll have to do the same one day for all the future vintage hardware fans that are just now being born (as in babies, children, offspring).

So go grab yourself a PDP-11/73 and a VT220 and throw 2.11BSD on it. You'll enjoy every minute of it.

Coolness factor

Hey, for all the "worthless code" grumbles I've read, I think Caldera deserves a lot of credit for this. I think it'll be useful to read and reread this code until I get some idea of how to handle multi-usered, multitasking memory in 64K or less.

That's one thing you won't get from reading code written for systems with >64M.

Those were the times...

#define NINODE 50 /* number of in core inodes */
#define NPROC 30 /* max number of processes */"
-- Version 7 UNIX fuer PDP 11, /usr/include/sys/param.h

does this apply to the CSRG archives as well?

Is this just the ATT stuff, or does it apply to the CSRG archive as well. To get the CSRG, you had to go to SCO to get a personal license for ancient unix source. It was free, but was kind of restrictive. Now, this source, seems to cover the same stuff as the CSRG discs. The 4BSD is the most relevant thing there. Anyone know? Thanks.

the irony of it all....

isnt it a tad ironic that after years of fighting and lawsuits to strip all of the AT&T stuff out of BSD, a good portion of the code from that era ends up under the BSD lisc?

PDP-11 hangman runs on linux

I've just "ported" hangman form PDP-11 version of BSD to SuSE 7.2. Runs very nicely on my 1.4G athlon 8-).

It only takes a two line change to the source and a one line makefile tweek.

Maybe I should make it into an RPM and stick it on freshmeat 9-)

Debian GNU/Unix

Debian GNU's Not Unix/Unix

Grin

Wow!

Does anybody know if I will be able to run this on my PDT-11?

(Which as far as I know has a whopping 56k words of RAM).

Roger.

UnixArchive mirror online at Wiretapped

If you're finding that poor old minnie is getting a bit hammered with downloads, try here:

http://www.mirrors.wiretapped.net/UnixArchive/ [wiretapped.net]

ftp://ftp.mirrors.wiretapped.net/pub/UnixArchive/ [wiretapped.net]

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.mirrors.wiretapped.net
Addresses: 203.220.0.25, 210.9.80.201

(If anyone else is mirroring from minnie, you may like to add the --links -and -safe-links flags to your rsync command, and make sure the filesystem you're writing to is mounted "nodev" as there's a bunch of character/block special devices in the 2.11BSD trees)

Re:All right!

If Microsoft put Windows 3.1 under the GPL, we'd run it. :)

Re:I don't understand...

Linux is built from the ground up to resemble UNIX, but technically speaking, it's not a UNIX. It doesn't have a line of source code from the original Unices (AFAIK). So, no need to get permission!

Re:I don't understand...

here's my uneducated answer:
the original thing was called minix written by a prof in finland so that he could teach his students basic unix w/o the exorberant prices. it was all his own code that just used the same types of commands etc...
linus took that idea and made a full blown kernel out of it... cause he didn't use any of the unix source is your answer

Re:I don't understand...

He bettered it. Made an OS that behaves the same way from scratch and had many people to help improve. That's just my meager understanding, though. I'm not really in the know in that department. (It's a wonder I read/., eh?)

Re:I don't understand...

He called it a "unix workalike", not a "unix". Simply picking the right terms. Also, he wrote everything himself, and I don't think you can copyright API's (the UNIX syscalls in this case).

I use GNU/Linux and can't get a girlfriend!

Dear Slashdot Readers

I use GNU/Linux and can't get a girlfriend, no matter what I do. From what I can tell, not too many of you have girlfriends either; I must make it clear right now that I do not want advice from you. I am seeking the advice of those who have consentual, regular, heterosexual intercourse with a well adjusted woman.

You may be wondering why I placed so many restrictions on the type of sexual intercourse. Being a GNU/Linux user, I can get all the men I want, but my ass hurts from years of anal sex. I am tired of pillow-biting. I have met women at Linux User Groups (LUGs) but they didnt want sex the way I wanted it - they brought their strap on and rode my chute like the men did. The date would end with her taking me to a gay bar and selling my ass to a drunk and bearded kernel hacker.

I am convinced, therefore, that I need to meet women that do not use GNU/Linux.

I have tried dating regular women, but find it hard to make conversation. I was surprised that regular women do not give a shit about Free Software or the Microsoft monopoly which leaves me with nothing to discuss. Some women tried to talk about the weather, but I don't keep up with the weather from my mums' basement.

I have had some success, I dated one girl several times. She picked me up from home, mum liked her. I am sure dad would have too, but he left us soon after I installed Slackware on the family computer. I can still hear him crying and see him moping around the house, saying "I knew he was different; I could handle a gay son, but this .... a fucking GNU/Linux hippy". He sounded so defeated. She wanted to go to the beach, but my skin is not adjusted to the sun and my skin peels while at the beach. This was not a turn on for her and when she came back to my mum's basement that night we were going to have sex but the raw skin was too much for her.

Going out at night for a meal can be difficult too; all restaurants refuse to serve smelly GNU/Linux hippies. The only place we can go for food is the McDonald's drive through, but she doesnt like waiting in her car in the heat of the day when I tend to smell the most. She doesn't like the stares she gets from the drive through staff.

I could go on, but I won't. I now seek your advice. [slashdot.org]

Thank you.

Re:I don't understand...

Unix is defined as a collection of standards, not by someone's IP.

I'm not even sure that Linux can be considered Unix - although it's pretty close to POSIX (but there again, so is Windows NT).

Re:fdsa

MOSIX [mosix.org] is clustering software that has run with Bell UNIX, BSD, and Linux, and originally ran on PDP/11's.

Re:What will this code be used for?

soo then, oss community IS linux?

Re:I don't understand...

Linux isn't UN*X until someone pays for the trademark.

Until then it is reaching for 100% POSIX compliance.

So no, due to that little fact (and a whopping load of others), there is no way Linus got permission to make his own version of Unix simply because he wouldn't cough up the cash for the UN*X trademark.

The story (AFAIK) basically goes that he wasn't too happy with what he saw in computing back when he was using university computers in '91. He asked digital and intel for machines on which to create a new operating system. Intel delivered first, so he started developing an operating system from scratch for the i386 that was similar to what he was used to at the university, but better for him, and (being self developed) free. When he told others (and Andy Tannenbaum (sp?) himself) he was initially laughed at until he coughed up the goods, at which point development snowballed into what is today known as Linux.

Unfortunately for Tannenbaum, he decided to keep his Minix O/S tied to his books, and therefore it has all but died. Too bad, really, since the book isn't that bad of a read, and reasonably priced (for a university level computer book) and at the time Minix was far superior to Linux.

Re:Microsoft goes Open Source!!!!

There just might be an accidental line or two of Xenix code (I gather, an incredibly "standards compliant" 80286-compatible System V clone) that wound up getting published and licensed with this new policy from Caldera (the ultimate heir of MS-Xenix????).

Unlikely. The UNIXes they're releasing are AT&T UNIXes that predate System V picking up various bits of Xenix. (Heck, they predate System V, period.)

The original Xenix was a V7 port to the PC (and I think there was also a PDP-11 version, as well as a 68K version used by some Radio Shack/Tandy 68K-based machine); it predated System V, and wasn't a clone, it was based on AT&T code.

Re:IN other news

it was a joke (not so funny, though). try to laugh.

Re:16bit x86 now?

Try finding diskettes for the Microport System V/2.4 port for the 286, or for Xenix for the 286. They actually worked! I would let you use mine, but I inadvertantly tossed them several years ago :-( .

There was something cool about having 5 or 6 people on a 10 or 12 mhz 286 with 6 Mb RAM, actually getting something useful accomplished, and quickly...