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Technology: View from the top
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The seventh and subsequent licenses explicitly prohibited the kind of teaching that Lions had been doing. The USG also sought to control distribution of the commentary. It failed. Even then, Unix hackers were not the types to take this sort of treatment lying down. Seventh edition Unix was released in 1979, at about the same time that photocopiers were becoming affordable. Engineers added two and two. The Lions books were secretly copied and passed from hand to hand. Fourth- and fifth-generation photocopies became treasured possessions. The books were literally samizdat, the homemade literature of the resistance.

"Because we couldn't legally discuss the book in the university's operating systems class, several of us would meet at night in an empty classroom to discuss the book," said Reintjes. "It was the only time in my life when I was an active member of an underground."

This awkward situation lasted nearly 20 years. Even as USG became Unix System Laboratories (USL) and was half divested to Novell, which in turn sold it to the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Ritchie never lost hope that the Lions books could see the light of day. He leaned on company after company. "This was, after all, 25-plus-year-old material, but when they would ask their lawyers, they would say that they couldn't see any harm at first glance, but there was a sort of 'but you never know ...' attitude, and they never got the courage to go ahead," he explains.

Finally, at SCO, Ritchie hit paydirt. He already knew Mike Tilson, an SCO executive. With the help of his fellow Unix gurus Peter Salus and Berny Goodheart, Ritchie brought pressure to bear. "Mike himself drafted a 'grant of permission' letter," says Ritchie, "'to save the legal people from doing the work!'" Research, at last, had won.

In 1996, Peer to Peer Communications reprinted the Lions books. It was fortuitous timing; John Lions was seriously ill. The moment the books arrived in Australia, Goodheart took several copies to him. "As you can imagine, his face just lit up," Goodheart wrote at the time. "He was thrilled with delight and we all celebrated the occasion with champagne. His health is much worse than I thought but he was able to understand that his work was finally published. He tends to fall asleep during even the shortest conversation and very rarely says anything. Marianne is not sure if he understands everything but I think he does ..." Lions wondered aloud what had become of the UNSW crest.

"He actually burst into loud hysterics when I read out the comment on the back cover, 'The Most Famous Suppressed Manuscript in Computer History,'" Goodheart wrote. "Marianne said it had been a long time since she'd seen him so happy. John's daughter Liz was there and she popped a question to him. 'Dad, do you really understand this gobbledygook?' John replied 'No,' and burst into further laughter ..."

John Lions died on Dec. 5, 1998. Three years or so before his death, he had discovered a box of first editions of the "Commentary and Source" in his basement, slightly water-damaged but otherwise fine. He gave a set to a young programmer he knew. They were among the eight or 10 irreplaceable books my fiancé brought with him when we moved to San Francisco last year. He's working on the Linux kernel now -- a system rich with brilliant programming because its source code has always been available.

I like to think John Lions would approve.
salon.com | Nov. 30, 1999

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