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roansh | 3 years ago

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

discuss

order

pavon|3 years ago

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.

anjbe|3 years ago

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

jasinjames|3 years ago

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.

e40|3 years ago

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

ARandomerDude|3 years ago

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

wbl|3 years ago

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.

jrochkind1|3 years ago

Really proud to be a part of history.

duxup|3 years ago

I hope everyone is ok with cursing….

alar44|3 years ago

Fine. You?