[H-GEN] Who are we? What are we doing? How did it come to this?
Paul Gearon
gearon at ieee.org
Wed May 16 12:59:43 EDT 2012
On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Benjamin Fowler
<ben.fowler.bjf at gmail.com>wrote:
>
> On 16 May 2012 08:25, andrew laidlaw <aa_laidlaw at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>>
>> ST wrote:
>>
>> Who are we? We're the Home Unix Machine Brisbane Users Group. This is
>> very approximate, for various values of 'Unix', 'Home' and 'Brisbane'.
>>
>> ST wrote:
>>
>> Some questions I come to, with the dissonance I see from the earlier
>> questions I pose, I come to this question:
>> - Is it acceptable to expect the ideals of Open Source or Free
>> Software to be followed by other members of our group?
>>
>> At face value, the points stephen is making are not entirely without
>> merit. Why should a member of a unix group adopt open principles?
>>
>
>
> The only message I really got out of chats with some of the founding
> members of HUMBUG over the years, is that the intent of HUMBUG was for
> people interested in tinkering with Unix-like operating systems at home,
> free or proprietary, to come together to swap tips and stories and
> socialize. There was nothing in our mission about advocating for Free, or
> Open Source software, per se.
>
When I first joined HUMBUG (I forget... was it '94 or '95?) I used Solaris,
as did at least one other member I can name (but he'd probably prefer I
didn't drag his name into it). I didn't start using Linux until '97. Others
were using various flavours of BSD. HUMBUG was about learning and exploring
the various flavours of Unix-like operating systems in period when Windows
was making life miserable for most of the world. Of course, Linux was
extremely popular in HUMBUG, and became a de facto standard for the home
*nix community shortly thereafter. But unless something changed that I
didn't hear about, HUMBUG explicitly supports all Unix and Unix-like
operating systems.
The fact that we have people who dabble in Open Source at all, is just a
> byproduct of the fact that the most accessible unices to home users just
> happen to be Free or Open Source. This does not (and never has) precluded
> people from playing with proprietary OSs at all, and I know of at least a
> couple of hardcore proprietary unix developers on these lists.
>
Solaris stopped being a viable home system pretty quickly, and was
eventually open sourced anyway. Almost every other Unix-like variant was
(or became) open source. And of course, the free software and open source
movements both grew from Unix roots. So it's natural that HUMBUG would
attract free and open proponents. Indeed, HUMBUG was probably the only
place for them to go for a long time. These ideals were still struggling to
gain acceptance in the 90's, so it seemed appropriate that HUMBUG would
promote them heavily. But HUMBUG did this because it was inclusive, not
because it excluded commercial systems.
My 2c.
Paul
>
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