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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

So where did this come from? The readme says,

> This is the SunOS 4.1.3 SUNSRC CD-ROM

which almost sounds like it was an officially distributed archive, somehow? I mean, I can't personally think of any reason for Sun to make a CD distribution of SunOS (was it called the OS/net gate yet?) for purely internal use, although maybe I'm just missing perspective, but the https://github.com/Arquivotheca/SunOS-4.1.3/blob/413/Copyrig... looks to my very-non-lawyer eyes like all-rights-reserved and 4.1.3 was well before opensolaris, so... leak of some kind?

Edit: Looking at the copyright file again, it has a part number. Did Sun license sunos? That certainly feels like it was meant for use outside of Sun, but doesn't really explain why/how

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In the 1980s, it was common for vendors to offer source licenses to their customers, at times for an additional fee. DEC sold customers the OpenVMS sources (Compaq/HP continued the practice, and maybe VSI is keeping it up); IBM caused a lot of controversy in the early 1980s with the announcement that they were going to stop allowing customers source code access to MVS. Against that background, unsurprising that to learn that Sun sold source licenses to their customers for SunOS as well.

Microsoft did this with NT too, IIRC...

I think Microsoft was a lot more restrictive with source licenses - generally only universities for research purposes (and Windows Research Kernel was never the full OS anyway), some ISVs with specially negotiated deals, and some government agencies. The average customer couldn’t get access to the source code. Whereas, OpenVMS for example, I think basically any licensee could order the source.

NT 3.5 and 4.0 on 4 (IIRC) and 8 processors machines required to be compiled from source on the target host, the shipping kernel only supporting 2 processors and cross-compilation not being an option. Fun times :)

Recompile the whole OS or just the HAL?

Why wouldn’t cross-compilation be an option?

IIRC you had to recompile the Kernel and the HAL. I don't remember the details but compiling on anything but the very machine targeted wasn't practical.

Microsoft still does this too, shared source is still a thing if you’re an important enough customer/vendor/university:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

Sun licensed SunOS and Solaris source to pretty much anyone who asked (and wanted to pay for it)

All of the proprietary unix vendors would sell source licenses to a greater or lesser extent. There's IRIX and AIX source trees out there if you go looking, licensed for university use back in the day.

Is anyone aware of IRIX source code actually available somewhere?

https://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=379560

would be fun to find the Iris source and try to port it to some newer hardware

Port it to the ultra fast MIPS CPU in your router.

Wow, had no idea that was the case for IRIX. Learn something new every day.

Looking at the whole GH org, it seems like someone just using GH for warez distributions since:

> https://github.com/Arquivotheca/WinNT5_src_20201004 (Contents from "nt5src.7z") -> Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.

But, honestly, who tries to use a Microsoft web property to host the nt5src.7z?

And yet, https://github.com/Arquivotheca/WinCE-src_20201004 is still alive. Go figure.

> And yet, https://github.com/Arquivotheca/WinCE-src_20201004 is still alive. Go figure.

Goes to show about how much Microsoft still cares about Windows CE, I guess.

Most of CE source was not particularly secret, it shipped on Platform Builder discs.

>Private Shared Source Code is an optional component of the Windows Embedded Compact 7 Platform Builder toolkit that can be installed during the setup process.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/windows-embedde...

GWES and some drivers (eg. filesystems) were "Premium", but this repository doesn't contain it either.

If you try googling `nt5src GitHub`, you’ll find a bunch of working repositories.

IIRC almost all Unixes followed the /src model you really only see in BSD today. Sometimes it was a separate license or only given to Universities and 3rd party developers. But before Linux it was assumed you could build the kernel and base userspace from there like you could with Bell Labs/AT&T.

The University/3rd party part was true even for Microsoft with NT and CE in the late 90s/early 00s. My little CS department got a CE dev kit with software, a device, and the source. I goofed around with it and was pretty quickly frustrated.

This also wanders into my memories of hating Sun version numbering and naming. SunOS grew SysV and became Solaris, but it was still SunOS. But it wasn’t. And then they preceded the Java-ism of the minor version being generally accepted as the major and conflictingly published materials both ways.

I feel bad for the devs where what they did made sense to them and then marketing took over. Naming and versioning are hard enough problems alone.

That is after all how UNIX spread after the UNIX 6th Edition Commentary book, and given how AT&T was forbiden to profit from their research results at Bell Labs.

I don't know, but for what it's worth, this was probably the single most heavily traded source tree on #hack in the mid-1990s. Everybody had it.

Would you build your business on top of code you didn't have the source for?

We can get into the weeds with blackbox firmware and what not, but it's darn useful to be able to look at the OS code to figure things out when it's acting weird.

Many successful businesses have been built on closed-source Windows and MacOS, is predecessors, and MS-DOS before that. All closed. So yes, I would.

but it's darn useful to be able to look at the OS code to figure things out when it's acting weird.

As the other sibling comment here notes, we did that even if we didn't have the source code; we just looked at the Asm instead. People like Andrew Schulman and Matt Pietrek made themselves famous by doing that.

The vast, vast majority of successful businesses - probably more than 99% - are, so.. yes?

Yes, why not? Many people did and succeeded.

Wdym? Most UNIX vendors shipped source code...

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