Hacker News Reader

Comment by roansh | Hacker News Reader

How would you feel if your commits become publicly available for everyone to see forever?

That ship sailed nearly half a century ago. All of this source code was previously licensed to research universities starting in 1975. The earlier releases weren't under FLOSS license like we know them today, but with the intent that researchers would be reading, learning from, and modifying the code. And they did! creating later BSD Unix releases with more open licenses whose code was shared more widely under more permissive licenses.

Finally, the people who created this repo are some of the primary authors of the code. They wanted this to be in the open.

There was an interesting discussion in 2019 after a group of people started cracking the passwords of the original Unix developers that had been obtained from an old /etc/passwd file in this repo (https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/BSD-3-S...).

Rob Pike spoke out against the effort, calling it “distasteful.” https://inbox.vuxu.org/tuhs/CAKzdPgw0Vz8UFbK7c_Jr+RHGMssSxN=...

Nonetheless, in the end every password was cracked. Some highlights:

Steve Bourne: “bourne”

Dennis Ritchie: “dmac”

Kirk McKusick: “foobar”

Brian Kernighan: “/.,/.,”

Ken Thompson: “p/q2-q4!” (a chess move)

Bill Joy: cracked but not posted due to Rob Pike’s comments, but it contained a control character

Kernighan's is my favorite. The keyboard layout could be different, but im imagining him rapping his fingers against the three adjacent keys as if the motion itself were a secret handshake.

Isn't it cool? I mean, being in the history of a project like this... it could be around long after we are gone.

This is the point of GitHub. Also Unix was(/is) a masterwork of craftsmanship. Struggling to see a problem here.

Eh, I think the select and poll system calls are both kludges, the sockets API inferior to P9 dial, gethostbyname deeply problematic.

Then there are the ways threads interact badly with many classic functions, the way signal handlers play messily with everything else.

Don't even ask about X.

An important question:

Could I have thought of something at that time, with all the same constraints and without the benefit of hindsight, that would have been better?

For the vast -- and I mean vast -- majority of us, the answer to that question is a resounding No!.

At what time? Many of the issues are the result of evolution and bolting things on vs. redesigning things as conditions changed.

X is fantastic and amazing, not just for the time, even now. Not switching.

Really proud to be a part of history.

I hope everyone is ok with cursing….

Proud.

Fine. You?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com