the night before at the wrap up dinner, maddog did his usual charity auction. the clock-made-of-a-linux-mag-cd-signed-by-linus-himself fetch $700, but the real show stopper was to be the lions' book. john lions wrote a book called "lions' commentary on unix 6th edition, with source code", on which topic wikipedia says:
Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code by John Lions (1976) contains the complete source code of the 6th Edition Unix kernel plus a commentary. It is commonly referred to as the Lions book. Despite its age, it is still considered an excellent commentary on simple but high quality code.
For many years, the Lions Book was the only Unix kernel documentation available outside Bell Labs. Although the license of 6th Edition allowed classroom use of the source code, the license of 7th Edition specifically excluded such use, so the book spread by samizdat. It was commonly held to be the most copied book in computer science.
what they didn't mention is that at&t actually reneged on their agreement with lions and the book couldn't be published for many, many years. as lions came down with a terminal illness, his friends rallied and convinced SCO (when they were still a unix company out on the west coast) to give the "ok" to a reprint and they did. now they are setting up a permanent chair at the university of new south wales, where lions taught, in john lions' name. it's going to take 500,000.
usenix is ponying up for a chunk of that (half, IIRC), and the book being auctioned was to go towards that amount. whatever the book fetched, linux australia would match from its own pockets, and in turn usenix would match that sum.
well, the copy maddog brought with him was signed by people you may have heard of such as dennis ritchie, ken thompson, van jacobson, linus and a few other such luminaries. it was also signed (on a separate page, of course ;) by the speakers at linux.conf.au 2006.
rusty russell did the honors of auctioneer and the book reached into the low thousands, then the bidding stalled. so jeff waugh (jdub) got up on stage and announced that if it reached $6,500 he'd shave his hair off. this was met with applause and bidding edged up to (IIRC) $4,444.44. and it sort of stalled again. so i went up and noted that whilst i didn't have the flowing locks of jdub, i sure would like to help things along to where jdub's challenge was met and he lost his hair. so i offered a mention in the about box for kde 4.0's plasma desktop if the bidding reached 5,000, and for each 500 up to jdub's 6,500 i'd fix a (fixable) bug in kde of the winner's choosing. bidding quickly reached 6,500.
but that wasn't the end of it. jdub went back up and offered a mention in planet's release notes; mysql offered a mention in mysql 5.1; rusty russel donated his mustache; david s. miller his beard; and greg "groggy" leheya of bsd fame offered his beard as well.
bidding reached 10,000. much hair was lost.
who spent that much? a bunch of lions' old students got together and raised a mighty pot to ensure the book went back home to the university of new south wales where it will adorn a wall for years to come in his memory.
in accordance with this, the "thank you" in the plasma about box will bear the name of john lions' and a recognition of his contributions as author, teacher and researcher to the world of computing.
and jdub shaved his head. bwuahahaha! ;-)
7 comments:
And what was the (fixable) kde bug?
at&t actually renigged on their agreement
"Reneged". Oddly, http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=renigged offers a whole bunch of alternatives that aren't words either before it gets to "reneged". Although Google offers it first for dictionary searches, stick to http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/renigged
That's for a good cause, I've seen photocopies of parts of Lions' book.
The hacker in question was one Greg "Groggy" Lehey, also, I believe, of MySQL fame (who gave a great talk on using Linux to help brew beer).
I was lucky enough to attend your OSDW mini-conf, and I just wanted to say thanks very much - it was a most excellent two days. I'm fully intending to be one of the people who comes away from that and actually starts contributing. On that note, is there a copy of your slides from that talk available somewhere?
Cheers.
@p0z3r: i dunno yet. they have yet to claim that part of the prize =)
@spectra: check out osdw.org ... they are all there on the schedules page. i need to create an L.C.A. page on their, but i haven't gotten around to it. if you look through the stuff for the san diego show, though, you'll see most of the materials are there already ;)
Awesome story. I'll have to remember this one for the grandkids :-)
Actually, according to Jamie Wilkson's blog, the text the winning bidder/s chose to claim was "The KDE Project uses and recommends the GNOME DESKTOP' in the KDE 4 about dialog."
Are you reneging on your deal, Aaron? :)
lol ... i said the name of your choice, not the eulogy or silly sentence of your choice.
and directly after the event i spoke the bidder and he suggested lions ;)
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