Talk:A Commentary on the UNIX Operating System

Books Start‑class

	Books portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Books. To participate in the project, please visit its page, where you can join the project and discuss matters related to book articles. To use this banner, please refer to the documentation. To improve this article, please refer to the relevant guideline for the type of work.BooksWikipedia:WikiProject BooksTemplate:WikiProject BooksBook
Start	This article has been rated as Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.

Legality issues not explained

The article doesn't explain itself very well. Was the publication of Unix source code 1) Authorised by bell labs ? 2) Not authorised or 3) Initially authorized but later rescinded ? What effect did this have on the legality (in the United States and elsewhere) on publishing and circulating the book. Were initial publication but not subsequent reprints permitted ? Could libraries stock/lend old copies ? What is the legal status now and have electronic versions appeared ? 94.0.215.193 (talk) 23:12, 30 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

AT&T Bell Labs lawyers didn't authorize it (and never liked UNIX getting licensed before), but Ritchie, Thompson & other technical folks really wanted to see it get out there, and knew John, who did 3 sabbaticals at Bell Labs, first ~1978, i.e., he was on good terms with them. While lawyers were hassling him, we used his books for internal Bell Labs operating systems courses :-) We liked the idea that UNIX source code would permeate universities.

The Computer History Museum has bound copies of the 2 books, which I donated. They weren't my original copies, which I'd lent and never gotten back, but sometime during 1990s, before John's death in 1998, I visited him and he was kind enough to replace them, as well as sign them for me.JohnMashey (talk) 00:10, 6 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Simple "but" high quality code

These are not opposing terms. The text should be rewritten to say "simple, high quality code." Daniel Callejas Sevilla (talk) 10:39, 1 July 2016 (UTC)[reply]

=&

The "You're not expected to understand this" snippet includes a '=&' operator, which seems to be in the cited text too. This isn't a real C operator; can anyone confirm whether that was in the book too? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.123.122.250 (talk) 21:34, 28 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]