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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

Kermit was in the same space as Zmodem. I remember it fondly, as they were very progressive around "open source" way back in the early 90's, and probably earlier. They accepted what was essentially a "pull request" over USENET discussions forums from me to add a feature.

http://www.kermitproject.org/ckfaq.html

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Except they were never open. You could download the code, but you were not allowed to distribute modifications to it.

The project was cancelled in 2011, and according to the web page it's open source now, and I think that the open sourcing didn't happen until then.

I did put "open source" in quotes for that reason. At the time, it what somewhat novel to be able to get the source code at all, and even more novel that the writers would accept code from end users to put back into the product.

>At the time, it what somewhat novel to be able to get the source code at all

Really? IIRC, in Jason Scott's excellent BBS documentary (you should go watch it. Like, right now. It's that good), Thom Henderson (from SEA. Remember them? I don't, because I wasn't alive. Which is why I have to rely on documentaries) said that it was expected in UNIX circles, which is where Kermit originated.

Or were you on PC? I don't know, I wasn't alive.

For commercial end users of SunOS, Ultrix, etc, most of what we used was closed source.

Kermit was not the only software you could get source code for. However, the entire ecosystem was much smaller than what exists today.

I'll concede it may have been different in more academic environments.

shrugs

Of course, in the early days of unix, you got the OS in source form, but those were long gone by then. AFAIK, a lot of independently developed utilities were distributed in source form, in part because it was common to have to edit the sources and compile yourself if you weren't on the exact same architecture as the author. But that's just what I've heard.

"... Jason Scott's excellent BBS documentary (you should go watch it. Like, right now. It's that good)"

Agreed. The BBS documentary is superb and really, really entertaining and engrossing. Especially the episode(s) on fidonet.

I honestly found the compression and artscene episodes more interesting than fidonet. Although fidonet was good too.

Link to BBS documentary :

https://archive.org/details/BBS.The.Documentary

Thanks. Many memories of acoustic-coupler time spent on Compuserve and local BBSes.

They were for the definition of "open" which was current then - ie that the source or specification was available.

This is open source but not free software. Open source is still better than closed.

I remember receiving a 2400' tape for our VAX 11/750 from Lancaster University (UK) containing a full dump of their Kermit repo. Having pulled off the relevant VAX/VMS, PC and various other program formats, we had a way to transfer files between a number in-house development systems. This would have been about 1983.

That's pretty cool, what feature did you add?

Basically a toggle to turn off character set translation for rlogin sessions, to get past an issue with network connected modems.

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