The situation in many ways paralleled the AT&T UNIX lawsuit of the ’90s. It is every bit as ironic considering, for instance, that BSD folks were largely responsible for the success of UNIX. In SCO’s case, their OS (SVr4 UNIX) is based largely on the work of Research UNIX, BSD, and even includes a wide selection of GNU tools in userland.

Except this time, no offending code was ever demonstrated, just a straw-man argument and utter defeat.

Still, I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness over the whole affair. Santa Cruz Operation and System V UNIX were respectable in their time. My guess is that SCO along with UnixWare (the natural evolution of System V) will fade into oblivion along side the countless other dead UNIX implementations. Linux zealots often take jabs at other implementations, but I think UnixWare could have held a viable, if niche, place in the enterprise had been under proper stewardship.

As time goes on, the UNIX diaspora seems to be waning. We are left with, essentially:

• Linux, with a mostly GNU userland as the heavyweight contender
• The BSDs, perhaps equal or greater in architectural quality but relatively unknown giants. We can however lump Mac OS X in here which is the most widely used.
• Solaris, which might be considered an open source System V fork. An interesting OS that has a a great lineage and potential, but lacks in trust and certainty for contributors at the moment.
• AIX, a System V and BSD hybrid with plenty of IBM thrown in for good measure. Perhaps the gold bar and only remaining competitive mid-iron standard due to IBM’s silicon prowess.
• HP-UX, an older System V linage perhaps on a slow deathbed due to reliance on the vapid Itanium

History has been unforgiving to those companies that try to unfairly weasel programmers and users in this market. The lesson is to work with and encourage your development community and not bite the hand that feeds. My eyes are on Oracle for the time being. Sun had a hard enough time nurturing the Solaris community despite being a favorable company, and Oracle can just as easily kill this operating system through boneheaded maneuvers if it is not careful.

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As most programmers, I see tendencies of over optimism in myself.  Yet Mike Judge’s Idiocracy seems like a strange window into the future.  Part of me thinks that government should include an open source heuristic computer simulation doing minimax on wealth creation(aka technology) and personal well-being to aide in decision making.

I suggest a new field of research:  Computer Aided Government (CAG).  How can we wire sensors and algorithms into society to enable us to make optimized decisions?  How can we use game theory, statistics, Bayes’ Theorem, simulation, sensors, neural nets, etc. to improve the human condition?  I think IBM is on to something big with their Smarter Planet initiative.

And just to reel it in if you think I’m bat shit insane, think that the current best forms of government were originated over 300 years ago if not earlier.  This was before many forms of computation and logic had been explored and applied.  Surely technology can improve this field as it has for nearly every other facet of life.  I think open source computer scientists can step up in a big way here.  Research in the field could affect billions to come.

Think on it and comment.

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Microsoft has been denying any problems like this in the media.  Comment if you have had similar experience on Nvidia hardware or Intel graphics.

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Unfortunately, IBM’s “transmogrifier” utility doesn’t work very well in Wine, so you should preprocess older books in Windows before running them through the boo2pdf web service (download is on that page).

Source code is now available from boo2pdf gitweb.

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Motivation

I have a large collection of old IBM machines and documentation. I want this documentation indexed by my own search facilities and Google for easy retrieval. PDF is widely read, while BookManager requires proprietary software and no search engines I know of parse it. This will probably be useful to Mainframers as well.

Take the web service for a spin here:

http://ps-2.kev009.com:8081/boo2pdf/.

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