One of the reasons I love listening to 99% Invisible podcast[1]. Not just a great designer is unknown, but the hallmark of a great design is that its almost invisible unless you look for it.
The BSD releases did not form a complete OS and were not runnable except in combination with source code from ATT Unix, which was emphatically proprietary software. The first release of BSD that was unequivocally legal for anyone to acquire and run without getting ATT's permission was 4.4BSD-Lite in June 1994. (Yes, organizations did create OSes from BSD Networking Release 2 (Net/2) released in June 1991, but legal uncertainty hung around them for years.)
In contrast, by 1984, Stallman had already formed a close working relationship with a competent lawyer (Eben Moglen) to devise a legal strategy to maximize the probability that everyone will continue to enjoy a list of freedoms (chosen by Stallman) around any software put under the GPL.
> The BSD releases did not form a complete OS and were not runnable except in combination with source code from ATT Unix, which was emphatically proprietary software.
Is that the measure: a complete OS? When exactly did GNU ship a complete OS?
IMHO none of the above is relevant to the question which was first. IMHO both were not first. IBM, among others, were shipping source code with their product, until they didn't. OSS is and was a reaction to an only object model. And there were seeds at Berkeley and MIT.
And Stallman isn't strictly responsible for the MIT strain. As Keith Packard said in his "A Political History of X", the X11 project chose not use the GPL license, because Stallman was simply too annoying.
The fact that BSD was incomplete is relevant because it illustrates the fact that the only people who could run BSD were shops that had a source-code license for the proprietary AT&T Unix.
> the only people who could run BSD were shops that had a source-code license for the proprietary AT&T Unix.
So -- finally! -- that's the measure of OSS? It must run on non-proprietary systems? Not simply the source code? OSS that runs on Windows or MacOS or VMS is not actually OSS?
You figure that Linux is the first non-proprietary system in 1991? Not 4.3BSD released in 1989?
I think you can understand my and others reluctance to state definitively Stallman was first, when by a dozen different metrics he wasn't. I'm still trying to understand what he was supposedly first at? First to find a lawyer?
Linux is important. GNU is important. BSD is important. And they remain important. I don't think any of them are made more important by distinguishing only one and not the others. Like -- as much as it pains me to say it, because of how I loath Stallman and the FSF, GCC was more than important to the entire ecosystem for years. Until LLVM, it was required. Etc, etc.
I want to say around 2006 or 2007 was the first time a 'normal' *nix hacker could install and boot[0] a complete GNU OS[1] and get something resembling work done (ie edit and compile C code in vi or emacs). (yes I know the question was rhetorical)
[0] without having to to a bunch of bootstrapping steps and other hackery
[1] Technically 'shipped' by Debian rather than GNU/FSF
> but legal uncertainty hung around them for years.
I mean if we're going to split hairs and play this game, SCO claimed ownership to alleged Unix code in Linux which wasn't initially resolved until 2008 or so (and further continued for another decade). That never stopped anybody.
Yes, but not having a copy of the source code for ATT Unix stopped everyone from using BSD or any system based on BSD till 1991. Again, before then BSD was very far from being a complete OS.
So BSD has severe shortcomings as an answer to the question that started this thread, namely, "Can you show examples of impactful open software that predates fsf and stallman?"
The first time any BSD code was made publicly available was Networking Release 1 (just contained the networking stack) in 1989, or around 5 years after Stallman started the GNU project. It took until Networking Release 2 in 1991 for the code for a runnable BSD operating system to be made publicly available. Prior to that, BSD was based on proprietary UNIX source code, and anyone who wanted to run it had to purchase a source code license from AT&T.
> or around 5 years after Stallman started the GNU project.
So 5 years after he started with an empty repo and some political ramblings?
GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
There is a lot of deliberate ignorance of public domain code being posted on BBSes at the time. I'm not discounting anything Richard did but let's not rewrite history here.
> So 5 years after he started with an empty repo and some political ramblings?
Or around 4 years after the first public GNU Emacs release, 4 years after the first public GNU Bison release, 3 years after the first public GDB release, and 2 years after the first public GCC release.
> GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
Correct, just like how the initial public BSD release was just the networking stack (worthless on its own).
> There is a lot of deliberate ignorance of public domain code being posted on BBSes at the time.
Not sure where you got that from. Nobody claims that Stallman was the first one to come up with publicly releasing source code. I will say that a lot of the "public domain" software from back then lacks the uniformity you see from later movements like free software or open source. Some of it isn't even public domain, and has a license like "this is copyright me, any modified copies must have my copyright statement preserved, this software may not be used for commercial purposes".
> GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
People were installing GNU onto existing Unix systems because GNU was better than they were distributed with. Maybe they did that with components of BSD Net/1 - no one has ever told me they did but it probably happened - but that was definitively post GNU.
Anyway, I'm not sure if this matters so much to the debate. Stallman was reacting to a change. He rambled politically and wrote some code to back it up because he used to be able to do things, and now he could only do them if he would write some code and win some allies.
> GNU did not have a working system until Linus released Linux in 1992. They had pieces and components which were worthless on their own.
Whether or not GNU had an OS or would ever have an OS has nothing to do with anything, though. What are you trying to illustrate? Those "pieces and components" are some of the most used pieces of software in history.
Sharing (typically via tape) of software utilities use to be very common in every user group from the start (1960s). It was just the culture, and expected. Especially IBM mainframe users, DEC VMS.
Of course the answer to your question depends on the definition of 'open source' and 'impactful'.
Does Cody have an agent mode? I have the free vesion and it doesn't seem to. IMO coding assistant without agent mode is useless, it's useful just only for asking questions.
Copilot used to be much worse than Cursor but they have agent mode and MCP now.
Also I use Cody as a backup because I thought their ollama support means I can code on the plane, but when I actually tried, it stills requiring SourceGraph access and failed.
All you need is plot -log(x) for x between 0 and 1 and you will see that log(x) transforms a uniform line into an exponential decay (towards 1). Its being said in a fancy way. This is also the origin of the log likelihood loss function in ML
Terence Tao recently gave a lecture on Machine Assisted Proofs that helped even common folk like me to understand on the upcoming massive changes to Math within the next decade. Especially, its fascinating to see how AI and especially Lean might provide an avenue for large scale collaboration in Math Research, to bring them on par with how research is done in other sciences
I see many folks trying to build UI for multiple databases, when excellent open source solutions like DBeaver exist. Is there a reason to use this UI compared to DBeaver, through which I can interact almost all major databases?
Yes that's what I wanted to know, in particular I use DuckDB with DBeaver all the time to explore/play with parquets and other stuff - why would I prefer their new UI?
Hi, congrats on the show HN. Is it possible for you to Provide some comparison of this tool against other existing tools that can sync Postgres to Elastic or other third-party data providers.
I tried to give a detailed comparison with PGSync in another comment. But in a nutshell, PG to Elastic is just one use-case for PG-Capture. The goal for PG-Capture is to be a schema-based Change-Data-Capture utility for Postgres that lets you integrate into your existing stack.
It has no opinion on what you should use to capture low-level events (Debezium, WAL-Listener...) and what you should do with the resulting high-level events (indexation, caching, event bus..).
I am pitching it as a PG to Elastic tool simply because it is a widespread use-case that everyone understands.
I feel like the way to think about troubleshooting is to think about it as an umbrella encompassing reliability and quality engineering in software. If you can find ways of showing how reliability and quality of a software can be broken and how it can be improved (simultaneously), then you have a career to make.
Don't wait for stuff to break and react. Be proactive and find ways to demonstrate how it can break and how to fix it.
I don't like being pedantic, but there is a fundamental difference between bill and law. It takes a few people in legislature to introduce a bill but takes majority to create a law with the executive ascent.
The bills have been introduced in 50 states, only 5 have legislated these bills into laws.
[1] https://99percentinvisible.org/
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