[H-GEN] Who are we? What are we doing? How did it come to this?

[James C. McPherson]

On 17/05/12 02:59 AM, Paul Gearon wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:56 AM, Benjamin Fowler
> <ben.fowler.bjf at gmail.com <mailto:ben.fowler.bjf at gmail.com>> wrote:

>> 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.

That's what I recall too. The founding group (I include myself
in that, since I was there and took part) was cognizant that there
was more than just one Unix or Unix-like OS to use on a system at
home, and it was recognised that we could learn from everybody
else's experiences with those different environment. As students
we had access to OSF/1 from Prentice-maintained systems, those of
us in Maths and Physics had SunOS and Solaris access. Those who
were lucky enough to have access to VISLAB could use Irix. Why
exclude people just because their options at home were limited
by the hardware available?

> 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).

It's ok, I took my cloak off years ago. I just used Solaris at work
in UQLibraries though, home use was several years later, and in the
meantime I had Linux to keep me going.

> 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.

I don't recall there being any constitutional change to remove the
acceptance of Unix/Unix-likes other than linux.
  
>> 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.

/me puts up hand...

> 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.

That jives with my recollections too.

  
James C. McPherson
--
Solaris kernel software engineer, system admin and troubleshooter
               http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog
Find me on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescmcpherson