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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

It does make you a bit concerned that HPE may have lost or misplaced the Irix source code.

So far we've been pretty lucky that the stewards of old legacy operating systems have been at least somewhat careful not to lose the source code, still much is lost, and rebuilding the binaries is a challenging exercise in it self.

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I had a hunt online and there is definitely source code out there, but unfortunately the interesting stuff like 4dwm, the display stack and OpenGL is not present - understandably, because those where what gave SGI their edge.

Cf: this slightly inflammatory reddit thread https://www.reddit.com/r/IRIX/comments/132hsko/irix_source_c...

They probably have some kind of source code for it. There exists source leaks out there, fwiw. But as far as people who understand and can work with it? All gone.

TFA suggests that there haven’t been any source code leaks or publications of later versions, such as the mentioned 5.3.

6.5.5 and 6.5.7. My guess? They probably wanna test the waters before committing to that.

Big chunks of the 5.3 kernel source was definitely leaked to a select group of developers by a very disgruntled Crayon[1] during The Occupation[2]. Kuroi-san apparently is not part of that group.

Source: I saw the contents of that tarball, and it was authentic.

[1] Cray employee's self-applied moniker [2] Crayons' description of the period following the acquisition by SGI.

You can buy Irix source code CDs on eBay. They are not cheap.

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