On Mon, 2010-02-15 at 09:05 +1100, Peter Chubb wrote: > What's the earliest reference to open source anyone knows? I found > this in a 1965 paper:
How like Unix does the following story sound? Open Source (not as a name) existed in IBM in the old mainframe systems. Systems Programmers, who are now systems administrators, were hard core programmers. IBM had (from memory) Share tapes which was supplied by an independent group of users called share(?). Programmers wrote useful utilities and sent in this code. The code went to the various systems programmers on tape who used this code, enhanced and sent it back. This code was shared between sites. I think that TSO (Time Share Option) started like this originally however I may be wrong. TSO was a command line for Mainframe which was batch oriented until then, yes punched cards. Systems Programmers also worked on the Operating System itself. While it was proprietary the source was supplied and the Systems Programmers patched the source and returned the patches to IBM. I believe that the reason it became the most stable system available was the bazaar of programmers on installed systems, not the cathedral of IBM support. As a sideline the source was effectively stolen by another vendor who created a competing system. There was a lot of politics and there was a really strange settlement. IBM was forced to share the source with the other vendor by the US government. Ken -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
