Lions Book
The Lions Book is a John Lions annotated edition of the source code of the Unix V6 operating system .
In 1976, Professor John Lions of the University of New South Wales in Australia wrote detailed comments in the source code of Unix V6, which his university had licensed for teaching purposes. He used this work in his lectures. He made a copy available to AT&T , who reprinted it for internal use. John Lions was given permission to share his comments - henceforth called the Lions Book - to other universities that had a source license.
In 1979 AT&T changed its mind and banned the book from being distributed. At that time, however, there were already so many copies in the world - completely legally - that spreading it via samizdat could not be avoided. It was not until 1996 that there was an official edition published by the publishing house “Peer-To-Peer Communications” ( ISBN 1-57398-013-7 ) - partly at the instigation of Dennis Ritchie . The cover of this issue shows two students secretly copying the book. Even after such a long time, Ken Thompson described the book as the best description of Unix internals.
The ban of the book was an impetus for Andrew S. Tanenbaum , Minix to develop, so he had for his lectures material.
Although AT&T was right, many legal owners of the book felt it was incorrect to deny other institutions access to this unique source - especially since AT&T itself used the book for internal purposes. An awareness of injustice did not arise under these circumstances. AT&T also avoided taking vigorous legal action against this samizdat.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ 'You are Not Expected to Understand This': An Explainer on Unix's Most Notorious Code Comment - The New Stack . In: The New Stack . January 15, 2017 ( thenewstack.io [accessed January 22, 2017]).