“Our strangest dreams sometimes take on a reality of their own. In January, Caldera, the latest owners of the “official” Unix source code, decided to release some of the older versions (up to “V7” and “32V”) under an open source license. While not as significant as it would have been, say, ten years ago, it is nice that everyone now has access to the code that first made Unix popular, and that led to the development of the 4BSD system that underlies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Apple’s Darwin (which in turn underlies Mac OS X). Since I was active in the computer field through almost all the years of Unix’s development, I’d like to comment briefly on the Caldera announcement in its full context.” Read the rest of the story at O’Reilly.
Why Caldera Released Unix: A Brief History
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I don’t suppose there is any hope of Caldera actually releasing the source code to the OpenUnix kernel under some OSS license? This would be far more interesting.
How can you write a complete kernel in 51K?
I want to see that!
Lot’s of kernels are smaller than that. It all depends on the feautures you wan’t. Check http://tinyos.millennium.berkeley.edu/ if you wanna see a really small kernel (Though not a unix).