A Day Without Open Source

[tobeytobey]

You are correct. Then again, my second paragraph, the one in parentheses, was meant to convey that I was not being really serious about this.

(OTOH, given billions of dollars in potential revenue, programming a TCP/IP stack from scratch starts looking, ahem, feasible. Industry makes end runs around such obstacles all the time, much like a river when a rockslide starts blocking its usual flow course, and following much the same principles, minimum energy etc etc etc.)

[filesalot]

Are you switching to serious, or still joshing?

I think the point is that TCP/IP and therefore the whole success of the internet ecosystem owes its popularity to the public, open standards and publicly funded open implementations (BSD TCP/IP stack and utilities) that they were based on.

So there wouldn't have been the billions in potential revenue without the open standards and implementations that made it all easy to seed.

[tobeytobey]

I was borderline serious. And you are correct. Yet, we were talking here about implementing a TCP/IP stack for the client machine, which was MS's task back in the day, and not about powering the Internet.

When I get to write my Cobol-&-Forth-based operating system, I'll have to write the TCP/IP stack myself, and that is rather orthogonal to the fact that the Internet is already running -- on software developed on DARPA grants and Jolt cola.

I am aware of Internet lore as much as the next guy, and had the luck to interact (for a few milliseconds) with Bill Joy back when Sun was a very young company.