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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
John Lions wrote the first, and perhaps only, literary criticism of Unix, sparking one of open source's first legal battles.
Nov 30, 1999 | Before there was an Open Source Initiative, before the Free Software Foundation was even a twinkle in St. iGNUcius' eye, Unix hackers were fighting lawyers and commercial interests for the right to copy and distribute source code. The fight began, in part, due to the beliefs of an avuncular Australian professor named John Lions, who thought that by making source code available and using it as a teaching tool, he could encourage the highest possible standards in programming. As the first anniversary of his death approaches and the open-source movement kicks into higher and higher gear, it seems a propitious time to remember Lions' contribution.
I stumbled across Lions' books in 1996. I'd majored in literature and seemed to have spent my entire life searching for a witty, literate man. When I finally found the man who would become my fianci, he was a Unix hacker. This baffled me. I couldn't begin to imagine how the arid world of over-lit computer labs and humming server rooms could have produced someone so much droller and more insightful than my fellow humanities graduates. So I did what I always do when I want to get inside someone's head: I browsed his bookshelves.
There I found -- and devoured -- Eric Raymond's hilarious "The New Hacker's Dictionary." Written up from the legendary Jargon file, it describes a literary culture weirdly like my own, complete with movements, jokes, manifestoes and Great Works. And speaking of great works, I also found on those shelves the first editions of the Lions books. The books -- a two-volume set titled "Source Code and Commentary on Unix Level 6" -- include not only the entire source code for the Unix Version 6 kernel but also a detailed and often witty discussion of it written in the mid-1970s.
The genesis of Lions' books is, of course, tied to the Unix tradition that began 25 years ago when the magazine Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery -- technology's equivalent to Nature -- published a paper by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the two Bell Labs employees who created Unix and the C programming language. The paper was called "The Unix Time-Sharing System" and included a description of the operating system, a justification of its design and a few notes on why it was built in the first place. The article captured the imagination of many a programmer, including Ken Robinson, a teacher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), who wrote away for a copy of the new operating system. When it arrived, Lions, his colleague, read the source.
Source code is the blueprint for software, like a set of spells that humans can read and use to control machines. Given source code, a programmer can modify an application by fixing bugs or adding features. But most commercial software is sold only in machine-readable form. Access to source code is power.
Lions' career had followed the classic path for an Australian academic of his generation. In 1959, he took a first-class honors degree from Sydney University and promptly left the country. He earned his doctorate at Cambridge in 1963 and spent the next decade working for Burroughs Corp. in Canada and Los Angeles. By 1972 he was married and had a young family. He moved back to Australia and took a position as senior lecturer in UNSW's department of computing. He would teach there for the rest of his working life.
The Unix code base enchanted Lions -- so much so that he decided to make significant changes to two of the courses he taught. Until then, most teachers of operating systems loftily imparted general principles about programs their students had probably never seen, or encouraged students to build toy operating systems of their own. Unix offered a third approach. It ran on a comparatively affordable computer system, a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP 11 -- a machine that UNSW already owned. Unix was compact and accessible but offered a remarkable set of features. To top it off, in Lions' words, it was "intrinsically interesting." Unix could be read and understood with far less effort than IBM's bloated OS/360 and TSS/360 (which, funnily enough, are pygmies by modern standards), but it had the industrial-strength functionality to which homemade toys could never aspire. One student, Greg Rose, remembers, "John expressed this by saying, 'The only other big programs they see were written by them; at least this one is written well.'"
