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From: Jesse Pollard <jesse@cats-chateau.net>
To: Jeff Randall <randall@uph.com>, Larry McVoy <lm@work.bitmover.com>,
       "Downing, Thomas" <Thomas.Downing@ipc.com>,
       Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Why DRM exists [was Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!]
Date: Thu, 1 May 2003 07:43:17 -0500
References: <170EBA504C3AD511A3FE00508BB89A9202032941@exnanycmbx4.ipc.com> <20030430152041.GA22038@work.bitmover.com> <20030430105554.A15778@uph.com>
In-Reply-To: <20030430105554.A15778@uph.com>
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On Wednesday 30 April 2003 10:55, Jeff Randall wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 30, 2003 at 08:20:41AM -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > My point wasn't about theft, it was about reimplementation.
> > I stand behind that point, what I've seen for more than a decade is
> > reimplementation after reimplementation.  I'm not saying there is no
> > value to that or that it is illegal or that there are no improvements
> > (compare Unix diff to GNU diff if you want to see some imrovements).
> > There is tons of value in having free versions of useful tools.
> > There is also tons of value in the creation of new work.
> >
> > What I haven't seen is a lot of revolutionary work.  All of that seems
> > to come from commercial companies and at a pretty slow pace.  There are
> > a lot of false starts, commercial failures, whatever.  But a few slam
> > dunks as well.
>
> Mosaic was pretty revolutionary for it's time.. as was Sendmail..
> source was available for both from the start.

Mosaic is/was derived from two sources - gopher for network communication 
(derived from network news and/or e-mail) and SGML combined with display only
word processor applications (postscript and pdf previewers).

sendmail was derived from a message routing protocol originally using UUCP, 
written to promote research in message routing, and flexibility to reduce the
re-implementation time required on earlier applications. (somewhere there is a
quote from Eric Allman along the lines of "...If I had known how popular it
would become I would have asked for a dime for each installation...")

Neither looked revolutionary at the time.
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