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From: sean@dsl.pitt.edu (Sean McLinden)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: You get what you pay for (was: Re: Motif -> Open Look look & feel)
Message-ID: <1990Jul23.212721.8898@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
Date: 23 Jul 90 21:27:21 GMT
References: <9007210429.AA09366@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU> <3725@auspex.auspex.com> <1990Jul23.142314.6541@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu>
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Organization: Decision Systems Laboratory, Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
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In article <1990Jul23.142314.6541@cadre.dsl.pitt.edu> I wrote:
>This is, of course, highly speculative. It would make for an interesting
>social study (perhaps NSF would fund it), for someone to seriously examine
>what the social and commercial effect was of that first little DARPA grant
>to Berkeley to develop the BSD distribution. The knowledge from such a
>study might be quite valuable to the industry and would (IMHO) cause a
>lot of people to rethink what their roles should be in the commercial side
>of this industry.

I have been giving this a little more thought, and suspect that it might
make for a rather fascinating case study. As a prelude to such a study it
would be important to collect a lot of facts (I have already been corrected
on a few), as well as some opinions from many of the people who were part
of the Unix development process.  Given that a large number of these people
frequent these news groups I would be interested to know (by mail, since
the rules of the net preclude me discussing this, here), if there would be
some sort of interest in a discussion of Unix development history (in another
newgroup, or a new newsgroup, like "comp.unix.history"). Some of
this does appear in the literature, but not in the detail or with the color
that would be necessary to do a real study.

Please don't follow up to this, here, I've already taken liberties with
this newgroup in following up to my own posting which is, decidedly, far
afield from the original topic.

Your unwilling indulgence is appreciated.

Sean McLinden
Decision Systems Laboratory
University of Pitsburgh Medical Center