Red Hat Certified Challenge: History of open source
by the editorial team
Thanks for your submissions to the first round of the Red Hat Certified Challenge! The topic was history of open source. The judges have answered the questions and ranked their difficulty to determine a winner.
The next topic is open source and the law. Get your questions in! Answers will be posted two weeks from today.
As for this round’s questions, read the experts’ answers and see how you would have done.
What open source e-mail project did Eric S. Raymond describe as a sociological experiment? Submitted by Eliot Eshelman.
None of the RHCEs had any trouble with this one. The answer is Fetchmail. From Raymond’s design notes: “The beta testers didn’t know it at the time, but they were also the subjects of a sociological experiment. The results are described in my paper, ‘The Cathedral And The Bazaar.’”
When was the last time RMS [Richard Stallman] shaved? Submitted by Luis Cerezo.
Jon: He shaves it every morning, but a hair grows back every time someone doesn’t preface “Linux” with “GNU.”
Karlos: I believe the topic was “Open Source History.” I’m pretty sure that RMS hasn’t shaved since before he had those annoying printer problems. As such this would in fact be a pre-historic event.
Note: None of the RHCEs really took this as a serious question, and since Luis didn’t give an answer, much less a source, we’re pretty sure he didn’t either. As it turns out, Wikipedia doesn’t know everything.
What is the origin of the name of the X Window System? Submitted by Joshua M. Hoffman.
All of the RHCEs could identify that X was named because it came after W, but Karlos gave the complete answer Joshua was looking for.
Karlos: Didn’t even bother with Google here. Directly from Wikipedia, “X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system called W (the letter X directly following W in the Latin alphabet). W Window System ran under the V operating system. W used a network protocol supporting terminal and graphics windows, the server maintaining display lists.”
Somebody important said on Aug 26, 1991 at 3:12 am that Linux is not portable because it uses 386 task switching, and it probably will only support AT hard disk. Who was it? Submitted by Agustin Casiva.
Again, none of the RHCEs had any trouble with this one. The answer is Linus Torvalds.
The winning questions
When it came down to choosing a winner, we had two really good questions, so we’re going to send them both prizes.
x86 was the first processor architecture the Linux kernel compiled on. Although there had been ports of Linux to other processors, what was the first other processor architecture that the Linux kernel could be compiled on that supported more than one processor architecture from the same source? Submitted by Barry Brimer.
Barry’s answer was simply, “Alpha,” and his source was Linus Torvalds’ Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary, page 132. Our RHCEs had a little more to say about it.
Karlos: This one took me a lot of time. I knew that the m68k was the first non-x86 port, but that was also really a fork. So I started digging around. I was really suprised at the dearth of information on Google. And several supposed kernel source browsers were either not functioning or disagreed on the contents of specific versions. I knew that the first few archs were: m68k (which had already been eliminated), PowerPC (which I thought had mostly developed outside the official Linus tree as well), Sparc (I actually ran Linux on an IPC), and Alpha (which I had also had one of). It wasn’t until I started searching for the linux history of each processor that I found the answer through Google on the sixth hit for “linux sparc history,” which clearly states that Alpha was in fact the first non-x86 arch “in-tree.”
How might a Unix hacker in the 1970’s have pronounced the question mark character and why? Submitted by Joshua M. Hoffman.
Paul: From http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_16.html:
ques /kwes/
Common: query;; ques. Rare: whatmark; [what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback. Because the “?” symbol is used in the C programming as a conditional statement…? would cause ambiguity in a person’s statement.
Ivan: From http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html:
The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable “P”; from the LISP convention of appending the letter “P” to denote a predicate (a Boolean-values function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn’t. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: “Foodp?” “Yeah, I’m pretty hungry.” or “T!”; “State-of-the-world-P?” (Straight) “I’m about to go home.” (Humorous) “Yes, the world has a state.”
[One of the best of these is a Gosperism (i.e., due to Bill Gosper). When we were at a Chinese restaurant, he wanted to know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: “Split-p soup?” –GLS]
What Ivan found was the submitted answer, which also included another site about the P convention. Karlos adds, however:
Karlos: I really want to see more justification for this. The MIT-AI hackers used an OS they wrote called ITS for PDP-10. Unix didn’t really displace ITS until the early ’80s. And, the ‘p-convention’ was a LISP thing not a Unix thing. So, unless the submitter was a Unix hacker in the ’70s who pronounced “?” as “pee,” or directly knows someone who did so, I would take issue here.
I submit that we were all correct in answering the question. “How might a Unix hacker in the 1970’s have pronounced the question mark character and why?” [emphasis added] I posit that a Unix hacker in the ’70s might have pronounced the “?” in any/all of the ways we have answered.
Thanks again to all of you who asked questions. Don’t forget to get your questions in for the next round!