Looking Closely, Observing, Labeling And Listing Like Scientists: Fill & Download for Free

TL:DRYour contrary evidence is nearly always either gravely misunderstood or borderline criminally deceptive.—————The Scientific Case Against EvolutionRead that, OP.Is this the kind of thing you’re talking about?I gave it a read. Seems pretty compelling. There’s no denying, this was written by a man with a PhD who understands citations and how to be thorough in your points.This ‘paper’ could be all a person needs to read to believe evolution is false, and that life required a creator.Let’s have a closer look, just at this paper, and it’s author, Henry M. Morris.First, good ol’ boy Henry. It’s true, he has a PhD.In hydraulics. He has a PhD in hydraulic engineering.Now, I have no doubt you need to be a smart guy to get a PhD in hydraulics. In fact, I’m pretty sure you need to be a smart person to get a PhD in anything.However, I have a bachelors degree in Audio Engineering. If I wrote a paper on the formation of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks that went against the current scientific consensus on the matter, would you take my paper at face value because it reads compellingly, or would you maybe want to look deeper?In Henry’s case, he believes in the literal interpretation of the Bible as an inerrant inspired text. Which isn’t a problem, y’all can believe what you want.But when you start with a foregone conclusion, you get a cognitive bias. Your ‘findings’ end up with statements like this:In closing this survey of the scientific case against evolution (and, therefore, for creation), the reader is reminded again that all quotations in the article are from doctrinaire evolutionists. No Bible references are included, and no statements by creationists. The evolutionists themselves, to all intents and purposes, have shown that evolutionism is not science, but religious faith in atheismFalse Dichotomy:A false dichotomy or false dilemma occurs when an argument presents two options and ignores, either purposefully or out of ignorance, other alternatives.Henry has decided that by presenting his statements and references that are specifically aimed at debunking evolution, that it’s automatically evidence for his specific creator. What about aliens, Henry? Maybe it was a cosmological entity’s fart that gave birth to us all.Even if you successfully debunked evolution, you would still need to separately show support for your Young Earth Creation, as specifically ‘documented’ by the Bible. Even if you proved a creator was necessary, you still have work to do to prove it’s the one you believe in.Anyone ever noticed that it’s never a non-religious scientist that agrees with creation? Even if evolution was disproven by a sceptical scientist, in the pursuit of honesty they would admit that this doesn’t do anything to support Creationism.Anytime there’s a sceptic of evolution that doesn’t appear to hold a faith, they aren’t denying the credibility of the over-arcing theory explaining the phenomenon, more that evolution doesn’t explain everything (it doesn’t try to), and that there is definitely a percentage of the population that supports ‘Darwinism’ with an almost religious ferocity. Which is true, but much like we don’t look to a fundamentalist to try and get a picture of a religion as a whole, so do we not look to Darwinist blowhards that don’t actually know that much about the topic. They tend to misrepresent evolution too. See Eugenics.It was actually really hard to find any information on non-religious scientists denying evolution. All I could find was an article from the Discovery Institute quote-mining particular scientists in support of the ‘freedom to express scepticism against the mainstream view’, but nothing about evolution being completely wrong.It would appear that no scientist is ever converted to Christianity or some other religion on the veracity of that religion’s ‘origin of the universe’ story.Young Earth Creationists are a strictly Abrahamic religious populace.Henry also states in his article that we do not see evolution happening.This is a fairly common argument; we can’t see the change over millenia of our primordial ancestors gradually changing in front of our eyes, so clearly evolutionists are just guessing. It’s a religion!First of all, the lack of a case for evolution is clear from the fact that no one has ever seen it happen. If it were a real process, evolution should still be occurring, and there should be many "transitional" forms that we could observe. What we see instead, of course, is an array of distinct "kinds" of plants and animals with many varieties within each kind, but with very clear and -- apparently -- unbridgeable gaps between the kinds. That is, for example, there are many varieties of dogs and many varieties of cats, but no "dats" or "cogs." Such variation is often called microevolution, and these minor horizontal (or downward) changes occur fairly often, but such changes are not true "vertical" evolution.This is the very first paragraph, after the introduction. I doubt most scientists would get past this paragraph. This would be understandable, as his PhD is in Hydraulics. An area of engineering.Pretty different to biology, paleontology, geology, taxonomy, etc.His statements show that he’s already got some pretty strange views on evolution, and a scientist might read this paragraph and think:Why is this man with a PhD in Hydraulics writing an article on biology?Why has he written it without checking what is understood about evolution by other scientists with PhD’s in maybe… Biology?What the heck is a kind? Never seen that term in any biological papers before…“dats” and “cogs”? What?Thus, no point reading any further.But, we need to ensure that the reader understands why his misrepresentation is incorrect.If it were a real process, evolution should still be occurring, and there should be many "transitional" forms that we could observe.This is a blatant misunderstanding, and is completely wrong. It’s a misunderstanding because it seems as though the author expects us to see a bonobo give birth to a person, or that the fossil record should show a half-man/half-ape.Well, to the first point, don’t ask us to prove something we don’t even suggest to be the case.To the second point, it sort of does. If we’re looking at a fossil and we have to actively try to figure out whether or not it’s just a homo sapiens skeleton or something else, that sounds pretty damn transitional to me.It also fails to take into account the time-scale required, and how we therefore need to approach other avenues of observation.As an analogy, have you ever actually seen the Earth go around the sun?No.Not a single person in the history of humanity has actually seen the heliocentric model’s effect take place. We’d have to get really far away, set our video camera ‘down’ towards the sun and earth, wait a year, and then bring the footage back and play it back super quickly so we can see the earth go around.We don’t do that.Instead, we observe other things, things that only seem to be explained by heliocentrism.Evolution is the same. I’ve never seen the tetrapod that was the ancestor to my Staffy/Labrador that passed away a couple of months ago, but the fossil record shows a ‘snapshot history’ of biological life that keeps changing the deeper you go. A flood wouldn’t do that. You know what might? Life changing over time.Even those who believe in rapid evolution recognise that a considerable number of generations would be required for one distinct "kind" to evolve into another more complex kind. There ought, therefore, to be a considerable number of true transitional structures preserved in the fossils -- after all, there are billions of non-transitional structures there! But (with the exception of a few very doubtful creatures such as the controversial feathered dinosaurs and the alleged walking whales), they are not thereYes they are.List of transitional fossils That’s just one page. There’s hundreds. Some even have pretty pictures.The other problem here is his mention of the term ‘kinds’. It’s the most disingenuous term to use when describing taxonomy, because it kind of means bugger all. Anytime the term ‘kind’ is pressed upon, it falls apart for lack of definition. We have a perfectly functioning taxonomical system that has worked in helping us define different species, genus, family, etc, for a couple of centuries now. For some reason, the creationist world has decided “Nah, stuff that. Let’s just call them all ‘kinds’”“What does that even mean?” the real scientists ask.“Whatever we need it to at any given time!” responds the creationist.There’s another thing that seems to pop up anytime the “EVILution is WRAOUNG!!!” topic comes up.Henry characterises it quite well here:And so, at first glance, one might have to conclude that life could never, in fact, have originated by chemical means.5Being committed to total evolution as he is, Dr. Orgel cannot accept any such conclusion as that. Therefore, he speculates that RNA may have come first, but then he still has to admit thatHe goes on to make the point that evolution is clearly wrong because we have no real idea how life really began.He’s partially right, abiogenesis is a tricky field, and most of the hypotheses therein are speculation with some experimentation at best (to my knowledge). Some of the work being done is making great progress towards showing that the basic building blocks can happen naturally (or at least as naturally as ‘replicating early earth conditions in a lab’ can be)But, did you see what I did there? Did you see how I called it something else? Did you notice the word Abiogenesis? That’s how ‘titles’ and ‘labels’ work. We call different things by different names, so that we can tell which is which.The Theory of Evolution doesn’t have any comment on the actual beginnings of life. It’s an explanation as to why life is as diverse as it is.I wouldn’t tell a software engineer that he doesn’t understand computers just because he can’t show me how to build one.I wouldn’t tell a racecar driver that his driving ability cannot be proven unless he’s able to demonstrate how the car is built.We don’t know what happened at/before the Big Bang. But our universal laws seem pretty competent to explain how the universe does what it does now.Denying evolution by asking how life began has two states of condition:MisrepresentationMisunderstandingYou either know you’re asking an irrelevant question to confuse the listener, or you’re genuinely misunderstanding what the Theory of Evolution is there to explain. Either way, simmer down for a sec because both you and the listener will probably be very quickly taught this fact:Abiogenesis is Chemistry.Evolution is Biology.They’re not even in the same field.Still, one of them has literal tonnes of research papers documenting it, the other is still mostly in the testing-the-hypothesis stage.I’m gonna stop there, this is a huge answer already.Apologies to all if this reads in a provocative or inflammatory way, I’m really not meaning it to.But years as a teenager trolling on online message boards is hard to un-do.I’m trying to do better.EDIT:Thanks David Massie for the point on Abiogenesis being more chemistry than biology.2nd Edit: the ancestor to my late Stab-rador Tess was definitely a tetrapod, but not a therapod. Tess didn’t have any bird-like characteristics like a therapod would. She was a dog, not a parrot.

This is not an “answer” but an analysis of the range of answers given. “Hate” is an exaggeration as the factors forwarded are merely annoyances or unexpected differences; readers from less developed nations would label the laments as “Rich Country Concerns” (i.e. petty for most people). My answer is based on decades of life and travel in Western Europe - not Eastern Europe.The major gripes are that things are not as “convenient”, dimensions are small, people are “unfriendly” and the customer is not “always right” in Europe. Let’s see if those “complaints” are worth writing home about or if they are merely misinterpretations, natural counterparts to lifestyle or just plain different.I. Lack of Creature Comforts typically found in the US, taken for granted.A. Relative lack of air-conditioning in Europe1. Year round indoor temperature control is near universal in the US. The US has wider weather extremes and, apart from California, Hawaii, highland Rockies and the coastal Pacific Northwest, weather extremes between summer and winter in the northern US are much greater than much of Western Europe, so many new residences are equipped with year-round (heating & cooling) electrical HVAC systems.2. In southern US States, air-conditioning is an essential public health requirement for most of the year. In most of the rest of the US, air-conditioning has been needed only in the summer daytime i.e. for a month or two. Apart from the desert climates (Southwest USA) or the Mediterranean climate (coastal California), the summers are humid in the US, rendering fans and evaporative cooling mostly ineffective in making interiors more comfortable. So, air-conditioning and/or dessicant systems are the only means for dealing with humid summers. (The drier climates in the southwest could be addressed with evaporative coolant systems but they would require an ample water supply that is not available in the parched southwest, so a/c’s are also used in that zone).3. Most homes in the South USA can afford air-conditioning since electricity and equipment are inexpensive compared to Europe.Most dwellings, rich or modest, in the southern USA have air-conditioning used almost year round for at least part of a day.Equipment is highly affordable, for example, at as little as $125 for a room unit in the US, whereas, in France, the cheapest portable a/c is around €250 (window a/c is not common in France), and the more ubiquitous mini-split systems cost at least €1,500 installed.Electricity costs a mean of some 50% less in the US than in Europe where the most expensive rates, in Denmark, are nearly 2.5 times higher. In southern USA, air-conditioning accounts for over 25% of total energy usage in a residence annually.4. Until recently, W. European summers were too short to justify the costs of installation, especially since summers are when Europeans head to the coast, mountains or overseas. Hot, humid summers in W. Europe used to be short, a week to a month, coinciding with annual summer holidays when the French or others Europeans travel to the coast, mountains or another continent i.e. summer is when the homes are mostly unoccupied. Suddenly hotter and longer summers in Europe only since the 1980s, trending to longer duration and greater intensity; new residences are more likely to include air-conditioners; for older dwellings with their thick stone exterior wally are not easy to install HVACsa. Until the 1980’s, there was little practical or economic justification for air-conditioning in much of Western Europe. Before then, there was usually only about two weeks a year when air-conditioning would have been nice. However, most Frenchmen and Italians (possibly other Europeans) take long summer vacations to the seaside or overseas, so installing HVAC systems for 2 weeks per year when homes were empty, made no sense. Older houses with walls of stone that were several feet thick provided insulation in the day when shutters were closed.b. In older parts of European cities, retrofitting older (pre-War) construction is prohibitively expensive for most with solid brick or stone walls at least a meter thick and no dropped ceiling to hide ductwork. In addition, traditional floor-to-ceiling doors are very expensive to exchange for costly thermally insulative versions. For that reason, split mini HVAC systems that only require small holes penetrating the exterior walls are the most common form.B. Rental Automatic Cars only at certain airports or in luxury cars. Within many European cities, public transit is dense, inexpensive and quicker than personal surface transport; parking space is at a premium and taxes on fuel make it nearly 3 times more costly than in the US. For that reason, manual gearboxes are the norm since they tend to be more efficient. Automatics are viewed as “luxury” or “wasteful of fuel”. That may be changing with all electronic transmission/propulsion systems today - but, at the moment, plan only on renting at larger airports or cities if you can’t drive a stick shift.C. Lack of drive-up vending or services. Pharmacies, dry cleaners and banks are neighborhood businesses in much of Europe i.e. people walk to them from home or get to them by public transit. Even shopping for groceries, bread, meat, fruit etc. is often a neighborhood affair with mom-and-pop merchants with whom one has a daily social contact. On many levels, the idea of getting “fast food” while sitting in a car is so un-European - where meals are social events, not refueling sessions; “fast food” is only when one has little money or time; chain retailers are the antithesis of neighborhood merchants. This is changing. For example, in France, suburbanites who have a car-dependent lifestyle now can order groceries online and simply have them loaded into their cars at the end of the day e.g. “Auchan Drive” for Auchan, a Walmart-type mass retailer, - almost pronounced like “Ocean Drive”.II. “Confusing Metric System”Really? A decimal based measurement system versus an unintuitive system dating back before the Middle Ages? The Metric is logical, already adopted by scientists, non-US manufacturers and even US sports (The 10K run is for 10 km).This “annoyance” is the fault of previous US Administrations that did not implement, as every other government did, the SI system as it had agreed to do in writing!III. No tap water in restaurants? No ice in drinks?This is certainly available in most of the West European countries in which I lived. In France, you simply ask for a “carafe d’eau”. You don’t have to buy bottled water; however, in some countries where the quality of water can be in question, it just makes sense to drink only bottled water. (PS. Also in Flint, Michigan.). Many US restaurants fill water glasses with ice (a uniquely N. American penchant) produced in machines that are not systematically sterilized or handled without hand washing.IV. “Inconvenient hours”.The reason why you can’t get 24/24, 7/7 retail or even 2-day Amazon deliveries is simply that the Quality of Life of employees is a priority.Ever wonder why American stores are open on “holidays” (aka. opportunities for retailers to make money)? (The ONLY exception is Thanksgiving.)Once, I took a long time to get a cab in Paris (pre Uber), and I asked the driver why, when there was high demand as people were heading for dinner, were there not more taxis to meet demand. His reply, “Well, we have to have dinner as well. Not so?”What life is like in one of the “fulfillment centers” of Amazon on the 2 am shift, on a Saturday? It’s awful, kept away from family at home and American retail staff may begin to hate “holidays” due to stressful hoards of mad shoppers who would trample over others to get the latest do-dad.In Europe, barring after hours entertainment (nightclubs, concerts, restaurants…) the only reasons for abnormal hours is for essential or crucial services (hospitals, air traffic controllers, public utility technicians, police…); being able to buy a widget or beer at 3 am is NOT essential. Workers during such shifts usually are paid a “hardship premium” (like overtime) and explains why much is self-service (tickets, fuel, food dispensers…) over there versus some lowly-paid worker in the US would be on the “skeleton shift”.V. Paying Toilets(“Dame pipi” above). Unlike access to healthcare, access to a private firm’s toilet is not regarded as a right in Europe but as a convenience reserved for clients. With space at a premium (restaurants are often small) in many European cities, allowing the general public to freely use toilets is hard to justify, especially in hotspots where they could overwhelm a small resto’s toilets.That said, I’ve never been refused access if I simply asked before I used them! Perhaps the real issue is not knowing how to ask i.e. making the effort to learn a few phrases of a local language to ask to use the bathroom. With smartphones, there is no longer any real barrier to common courtesy.As for paying, if it helps pay for an attendant, the place is kept clean and supplied and avoids it being used for illicit practices. Have you seen what free access public toilets in the US look like? (Bus stations, beach facilities…)VI. Anti-American discrimination.Unwarranted flack for Mr. Trump’s words and actions. It reminds me of Indian Sikhs and Middle Eastern Christians in the US being poorly treated by prejudiced ignoramuses as being “Islamic terrorists”, since neither label was applicable.I suspect that it’s not just visitors to Europe but to everywhere outside the US that may face anti-American tirades. Mr. Trump has stepped on almost everyone’s toes except those of the political leaders of Saudi Arabia, Israel and N. Korea. Unfortunately, his presidency is a consequence of a political and election system that allows someone to be president without a numerical majority of votes, and a bipartisan political landscape (two-party vs multi-party spectrum) where the majority party prefers to keep the gig going instead of doing their job. However, don’t let it bother you.There’s little risk of significant adversity except in conflict zones.It’s unfair, especially as Americans overseas (travelers but also especially the 6–8 million US expatriates) tend to be those who are also displeased by Mr. Trump (euphemism for a persistent lesion on the national character). I can only suggest that you avoid the issue with either “I don’t talk about politics” or “I’m Canadian”; you can even say, “I fully agree with you; that’s why I’m exploring other countries as an escape.”If one think that is unfair, it pales in comparison to the flack that some minorities face everyday in their home country. The pain of constantly being labelled and pre-judged (pre-judice) without cause by strangers is a fact of their daily challenge. One could take it as a positive experience if you are not normally subject to daily discrimination in that you learn some empathy for people facing unwarranted negative prejudice.It will pass and can be seen as a temporary state of affairs, similar to the treatment of Nippo- and German Americans during WWII. From public harassment to internment, it was, thank goodness, temporary and now regarded as grossly unfair.VII. Strikes of Public Transport and other industrial action disruptions.Unfortunately, according to country, industrial action is part and parcel of many societies. Some countries, like Italy, are subject to wildcat (unannounced) strikes in the face of a perennially weak government. Others, like France, only allow strikes approved by local authorities so that they can be properly policed and roads blocked off; most occur in the late spring (May-July); there is even a nationwide calendar you can access at Liste des grèves en cours et à venir en France – Cestlagreve (“Strike’s On!”).France also has a “Revolutionary” streak in its societal DNA. At least once a decade, the combination of pent up frustration by various groups, springtime weather and a street party appeal leads to nationwide protests. The most recent event of this type is the “Yellow Jacket” protests, drawing on disaffected citizens far and wide beyond the initial protest against sky-high gas taxes; even then, the demonstrations are scheduled on Saturdays in cordoned off parts of various towns - it is not a chaotic, disruptive, unplanned event and the police are there to prevent hooligans who wish to provoke trouble within the mostly peaceful crowds.Whatever your views of the right to strike and/or organize into labor associations, the strength of collective employee lobby groups (i.e. unions) is probably why living wages are the norm in Western Europe. (I don’t know Eastern Europe.)VIII. Human interaction - Inappropriately smiling Americans vs Cold Europeans.A European’s stereotypical view of Americans’ demeanor.An American’s stereotypical view of Europeans’ demeanor.Until very recent history (mid-late 20th Century), Europeans mostly stayed within their own borders and were not exposed daily to many strangers in some way. They often didn’t even move very far in search of a job. As such, they may lack the veneer of a salesman’s “sunny disposition” that seems to be ingrained into Americans from a young age; in the US, one moves thousands of miles for work, and then repeats it in a few years, so instant communicativeness and courteous interactions are a necessity - but they are a means to an end more than reflection of an inherently “nicer nature”. The formulaic “Have a nice day.” was first introduced by retailers’ marketing management as studies showed that even robotic expressions of greetings translated into more sales; today, it has spread beyond shops but is said without conviction or thought. Europeans don’t usually smile in public unless there is a specific reason or situation - and Americans misinterpret that outward appearance as “coldness”. Watch how they interact with one another and you may observe that you are not being treated very differently (I’ve found the opposite; people often go out of their way to be helpful to visitors, especially those who make the effort to learn the locals’ language a bit.)IX. Small & narrow dimensions.This is a natural consequence of cities that have grown organically over centuries, before coaches and cars. I am amazed at how well cars can get through the maze of narrow streets in historic centers. However, cities are generally compact and accessible on foot or via public transit as a result. The benefit is a sense of place, culture and history, and continuance of a neighborhood unit. If you want wide roads, you can simply live in the modern suburbs in splendid social isolation.X. Most Annoying Single Impracticality - US Credit Cards not compatible with automated tellers and vendors in Europe.The first gripe that I have seen facing Americans is just after landing at CDG and attempting to buy a ticket to Paris or beyond from the airport train station. There are few human tellers as interactive kiosks are how most tickets are sold in France (?other EU). Although the systems may be a bit old (some dating back to the 1980’s), slow and not too intuitive, they all require compatibility with up-to-date electronic payment protocols.Therein lies the problem. European “smart” debit and credit cards are EMV-compliant with PIN Priority verification. From parking meters to some hotel chains, one uses a smartcard combined with a PIN. Most American cards are Signature Priority (although they may be PIN-capable) that can only be processed in Europe with a human vendor printing out a slip for signature.The situation is more than annoying if you are returning a rental car on the weekend and all the gas stations are unmanned. Short of begging a local to pay with his/her card with you paying him/her in cash, you would have to return the car as is. Some of the smaller train stations in France are only manned on a limited schedule, with interactive kiosks for ticketing; many just rely on Smartphone SNCF (national railways) apps.This “annoyance” is not due to exceptional European standards but due to the tardiness of US card issuers to upgrade their financial systems to be compliant with an international standard! It’s much the same that all major nations signed on to adopt SI units (kg, km etc.) BUT the US reneged on the transition from Imperial to Metric (even as the UK and Canada implemented Metric systems)! It was due to the lobbies of US manufacturers combined with institutional inertia that we now have a confusing mix of Imperial and Metric in today’s world.Solutions?As individual travelers, there are several possible solutions that must be planned a few weeks in advance if you don’t want your week long tour of Europe to be an exercise in transactional frustration.Contact your card issuers and ask specifically if they can make your cards “PIN Priority”. The front-line Cust. Serv. may not even know what that means so you may have to insist on finding someone who knows. If you can’t, it means you should seek out another solution.Identify US-based card issuers that produce PIN Priority EMV-compliant cards. There are a few Credit Unions or store cards that do this and I believe that Wells Fargo’s Propel Amex card can be programmed to be PIN Priority.The final solution is to activate contactless payment systems via the smartphone or even the RFID-containing smart card. Check out which systems would be used (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Android Pay…) in the country of destination.

I was a little surprised that so many people tried to answer this question, circled around the answer, but really did not answer it correctly. Instead, some authors have fallen into the ‘popular’ (urban legend) style answer as opposed to what really happened. I realized that so much of the actual answer is because so many of the things that happened, occured at a time before many of you were on the scene (so I should not be surprised). In the interest of trying to get history right and having been a small-time protagonist / lived a bit of the drama, I’ll try to explain it as best I can and offer places for you to research and form some of your own opinions.The short answer which you have been given is that Linux is a current implementation of the UNIX ideas or trade secrets – which does makes it “UNIX” via the ‘Turing test’ – it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, even tastes like duck when you cook it. The US courts have actually defined this (even as Linux was being born as you will see). As was amply described by others, Linux is a rewrite of the UNIX ideas even though it is not wholly based on the original UNIX source code that was originally derived from AT&T. Please remember Linux is not the only rewrite of UNIX and is hardly the first. It is the most successful – see my answer to Would it be possible/advantageous to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust when the language is stable?The key point to remember here is that the UNIX ideas/trade secrets are open and ‘free.’ The source code (primarily C) to the original UNIX implementation while ‘open,’ was also ‘licensed’ and that license required a nominal fee for academics and larger ‘fair and reasonable’ one –for commercial folks (more in a minute).Thus, you are actually correct in that Linux is built on UNIX trade secrets but that is different from using the licensed implementation, which is what some folks seem to be getting excited. That said, we need to remember that the Linux source is also licensed. It turns out the terms of the Linux license (the GPLv2) has restrictions that require the user to make the sources of Linux available at no direct cost if some person asks you for them, instead of requiring that user to pay fees for them. This is the typical definition of ‘free’ as in ‘beer’ part of the “Free and Open Source Software.”As I like to say: The original UNIX implementation was and is Open Source Software which was different from many other commercial systems of the day. While Linux, and current other UNIX implementations such as current BSD implementations of UNIX are both ‘Free and Open Source Software.’Now that I’ve explained the end state, let’s look at what happened, why this so confusing to someone coming in from outside the UNIX/Linux community, and why it sometime gets a little contentious - particularly if you only know some of the history. Things like the SCO case et al. are fairly late in the game and are not actually the real basis for why Linux is ‘open’ – contrary to the belief of a lot of hackers (to be honest, I believed the same until I was suddenly educated in the early 1990s – more in a minute). It’s confusing but fascinating to consider the history.The real history here all goes back to an argument/legal entanglement between the US gov. and AT&T with the 1949 anti-trust suit (History of AT&T - Wikipedia) and “AT&T Divestiture & the Telecommunications Market” (John Pinheiro, Berkeley Technical Law Journal, 303, September 1987, volume 2, issue 2, article.) The argument was settled with the 1956 ‘consent decree’ that had extremely important side effects for us in the computer and electronics businesses. Quote from Wikipedia here:In 1949, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit aimed at forcing the divestiture of Western Electric, which was settled seven years later by AT&T's agreement to confine its products and services to common carrier telecommunications and license its patents to "all interested parties." A key effect of this was to ban AT&T from selling computers despite its key role in electronics research and development. Nonetheless, technological innovation continued.My non-legal description of the decree is in return for granting AT&T a legal monopoly for the phone business in the USA, AT&T had to agree to a number of behaviors. One of them was they were not allowed to be in the computer business (and IBM was not allowed to compete with AT&T in the phone business either BTW), but the other was that all AT&T had to agree to continue to work with the academic research community and industry at large as it had done in the past, but must make all of its inventions available to the academic community at no charge and license them for ‘fair and reasonable terms’ – but remember all of those licenses were monitored by the US gov.The first major invention that we outside of AT&T got from the decree was the transistor. While it was invented in 1947 at Bell Telephone Laboratories (a.k.a. BTL or Bell Labs) in Murray Hill, NJ; clearly it was places like Fairchild Semiconductor, TI, Intel etc. that would make the money on the invention. We as consumers and as a society clearly have benefited greatly. AT&T simply had to the license the device (the transistor) to anyone and they did. In fact, AT&T had an office in Murray Hill called the patent and license group whose sole job was to write those licenses for firms that wanted them (side note – this is how UNIX got its start, as a word processing system for those same folks, but that’s a different story and described elsewhere).Key point #1 is that by the late 1960s, early 1970s when UNIX comes on the scene, AT&T is required by law to license its technologies to everyone and actually has processes and procedures to do just that.We know that over time the world’s largest and most complex computer system was being developed in the Bell System, the phone switching network; but remember, AT&T is not allowed to be in the computer business. However, doing computing research made perfect sense for them, given what they did build, since the core of telephone system was a computer. And as a side product of building the phone network, just like the transistor, another core technology started to be created by them, software and algorithms, which would of course lead to UNIX (but I’m ahead of myself). The Murray Hill team has PhD Mathematicians, Physicists, and others of said academic bend, that continue to publish papers about the ideas in the open literature describing those ideas which are quite different from all other computer systems being discussed at the time in the same places. They developed the code and ran it internally; just like they built transistors and used them, so their research was also ‘applied’ or in patent terms ‘reduced to practice.’ Note the original Ken and Dennis UNIX paper was published in: CACM July 74, Vol 17, No 7 Pages 365-375.So, by 1974 when they publish the UNIX paper, AT&T has a technology it is not allowed to directly sell, and in fact it is required to make the technology available to ‘all interested parties’ … but … because they have published about it and it drew outside interest, quickly the academic community starts asking about it. By the rules of the 1956 consent decree, AT&T was required to make it available to them. The Murray Hill Technology license office did so with the only fee being a ~$100 tape copying charge (which even was reported to have not been collected sometimes if you brought a disk to Ken and he copied the bits for you instead of mailing – a little known factoid). Anyway, the small fee covered what it cost AT&T to write and mail the tape. The key point is that if you were an academic institution it was extremely easy to get a license for UNIX and copies of the UNIX implementation from Ken and Dennis and many, eventually most, did.Note the description of code was ‘open’, as it was published in journals, papers and books, plus the sources themselves used to build the entire system were ‘freely shared.’ At the time, we had conferences and traded code back and forth. I was and am still part of that. In fact, I am a past President of USENIX Association that was created to make sure sharing of information easy USENIX Notes 2010 04 . It was very much what we now call the ‘open source culture’ as different groups modified the code. The most famous collection of modifications to the UNIX trade secrets became the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) from the EECS dept. at UC Berkeley (UCB) and distributed to their licensees (which of course all had an AT&T license).So here is where it gets a little messy and possibly hard for the modern user to understand. What has changed really is the economics behind the open source culture and the cost to be a member of the same. The real ‘barrier to entry’ to use UNIX was not the cost of the code, but the cost of the hardware to run it on. A smallish DEC PDP-11/40 class system such as an PDP 11/34 with max memory (256K bytes) would just barely suffice to run UNIX, but that was on the order of $50K-$150K after disk, tapes, etc. If you wanted a PDP 11/70 class system which could address as much as 4M bytes, it was closer to $250K. So another key point is that in those days, you did not own the hardware yourself, you used a system owned/operated by someone else.Even when a ‘commercial’ UNIX license was purchased, which added an additional $20K to the cost of the system, the real cost of a UNIX installation was the cost of acquiring the hardware to run it. I think this is issue is forgotten and is what tends to put some people off today when the history gets written. Having access to that kind of hardware was sometimes not quite so easy. Because the hardware cost was so expensive, you needed to be part of group that did. Most researchers were academics at Universities and that is where we tended to have access to the equipment.But not all universities were as liberal with access to the resulting system. This meant that easy access to the UNIX source code as it was at MIT, CMU or UCB in USA or Cambridge, Edinburgh, Vrije Universiteit (Netherlands), CERN or the like in Europe; was at many institutions not available. In fact, some academic institutions were known to be particularly difficult to get access to computing resources, particularly if you were an undergraduate in those days. A number of my friends about 10-15 year younger than I or some the same age from very large public institutions have expressed to me the difficulties they had trying to obtain access to the sources, and have they felt that in those days UNIX was a ‘club.’ I’ll accept that observation but you needed to be able to have access to the hardware to be part of the ‘sources club’ and not students all could, but once you met the hardware membership, the sources themselves were free and open and the IP (trade secret) always was available to anyone that could read English, even if you we not part of that ‘club.’My point here is that the cost of the installation was high due to the hardware cost not the software cost or its availablity, which is the opposite of today. Software and training to use the software is what most dominates the cost of a computing environment in today’s world (thank you Moore’s law).As a result of such high value for their computing facilities institutions often kept access to the UNIX source locked up at the local installation. It is this action that makes many current users claim UNIX was ‘closed’ and in fact if you were a developer at that time and did not have someone providing you access to hardware, chances were you as a developer were not going to see the software sources either. So, I’m sympathetic to the claim; although as I said, the problem was not with UNIX or its license, it was the economics of the time that different intuitions solved in different ways. (I personally, as did most system folks of those days, made sure I was employed by someone with a license, so it never really seemed to be an issue for me.)But the story is hardly over, for instance, Linux is not even on the scene yet! The courts make a huge change on January 1, 1984. AT&T is broken up; and with it the 1956 consent decree is abolished. So now the UNIX ideas become an interesting issue.AT&T has spent that last 10 years teaching the academic community about a different way to build computers. AT&T has demanded its supplier (DEC) support the AT&T technology in its product for them. Their own employees have been the primary authors of numerous text books on different techniques, from compilers to how UNIX itself was built! Companies have been formed to build systems to run just their technology. In today's, vernacular, UNIX has gone ‘viral’ and has a bit of a life of its own.So by the First of January 1984 the difference between the UNIX ideas and UNIX source code implementation start to become acute. Is UNIX the C source code or is UNIX the ideas that Ken and Dennis wrote about in 1974? This is the crux to your own question, why it is confusing, and why so many people get it wrong.At the time, the hacker community, of which I was a part, answered the question ‘it was the C sources that we got from AT&T that said ‘Copyright AT&T …’ mumble’. The belief (urban legend) was that as long as we did not use any code from AT&T, we were not using AT&T’s ideas (boy, were we wrong – but I digress again).Part of the problem was some legal precedent has been set in the 1970s, both concerning sources, and publication. Apple had published the sources to the BIOS for the Apple-II computer in its user manual, which was in fact common for computers in the day. A Philadelphia company, Franklin Computer, created an Apple-II ‘clone’ and by retyping the source and making a few small changes, created a new binary image BIOS for their own product. The original sources were copyright by Apple, but the question for the US courts was did the copyright protect the binary results in the ROM or just the code on the paper in the book? Apple sued and won Apple vs Franklin - Wikipedia. Around the same time, IBM has also published the sources to its BIOS for the IBM PC, so when Compaq and other later PC clone vendors appeared, the solution developed had been to take two teams. One team was ‘dirty’ and read the IBM source BIOS listing, but wrote function descriptions of the contents. A ‘clean’ team which never saw the actual IBM code, took the functional descriptions and implemented a new BIOS. Then example user code was tested against both the IBM and clone BIOS and it was repeated until the same behavior was obtained with BIOS implementations.Thus, from two cloning experiences, there was an agreed upon model in the computing business of how to create something that some had a defined “copywrite” – take an existing specification of the sources, ensure that the none of your actual developers (the actual writers of the code) were never able to see the original copywritten source and become a ‘clean room team’ using the functional descriptions generated by the first team (dirty team) and second team can build the new system from the specs alone. This will have important implications for UNIX (and Linux and another other clone – in a minute).In fact, the scheme was so popular firms popped up to do just that. I was a Sr. Scientist at Locus Computing, which was the premier UNIX consulting house in the 80s and 90s doing exactly this type of work for the usual firms. We had large numbers of people, I was personally always on a ‘dirty team’ (which will be obvious in a minute).Also besides all of the academic work happening with UNIX, as I said, there is a huge UNIX industry that has been born. One of the things that occurs is that there are efforts both inside and out of AT&T to define what the ‘ideas’ behind UNIX really are. The first successful version was the November 1984 /usr/group standard which defined UNIX officially for the first time. Two years later it would be replaced by IEEE P1003 POSIX [note, I was a member of both groups]. I believe that the current standard is: IEEE Std 1003.1-2008, 2016 Edition and Single UNIX Specification, Version 4, 2016 Edition. Also, note that shortly after the original P1003 standard was published the US gov. started creating its own definition of UNIX called FIPS 151, which by today has degenerated into a testing suite for POSIX conformance, see Validation Services for Federal Information Processing Standard 151-2. The key point here is that AT&T originally created UNIX, but clearly if we inside and out are all arguing about what it is, the ideas our now outside of AT&T too!So, let’s review the world in the late 1980s, early 1990s when any bright hacker is given access to Intel 386 based PC and wants to run UNIX on it:UNIX has been created by AT&T and the ideas published in the early 1974 in open literature.AT&T was required to make the UNIX ideas available and has, with now many thousands of source licenses around the world.AT&T employees have published in open literature, via books, etc. many ideas that make up UNIX including the core UNIX interfaces.An industry has been born around the UNIX technology, with a lot of firms producing products based on the ideas.IEEE has published a formal definition of the UNIX ideas.Besides the original AT&T UNIX implementation, there are a number of other implementations now in the ‘wild’ from Idris to Coherent which were written in C. Mach and Minix, were are also in C but use microkernels adding new technology, an implementation in Pascal (French SOL project), which would later become the C++/Chorus implementation just to name a few.There are also a ton of system modifications done based on the original work from Research, from Universities around the world such as CMU, MIT, Cambridge … but the version from the UC Berkeley, a.k.a. BSD clearly has a huge following and runs on just about all types of mainstream HW by the 1990s, including the Intel 386.Numerous companies are building UNIX based product, too many to name but Microsoft, IBM, DEC and at this point even AT&T themselves are a few.The team at UCB realize that their code no longer has any code left in from AT&T. As hackers, we all believed that since we no longer had code that contained an AT&T copywrite, we were not bound by the AT&T license. Some of the BSD team formed a company, called BSDi, and began to market a version of BSD UNIX that could run on a 386 based PC, starting with the BSD code and some work described in a series of DDJ articles Porting Unix to the 386: the Basic Kernel [Again, full disclosure, I helped Bill debug the original disk interface and am referenced in the articles.]It turns out getting access to the 386BSD distribution from UCB was extremely easy for any BSD licensee. It was officially available for FTP download and many licenses did grab the images – it was a very well known ‘secret’ address that was passed by word of mouth hacker to hacker.Life was good, for about $1500 you could purchase a fairly reasonable computer that had graphics, networking etc… running BSD UNIX and it was your own. Remember, this is different from before where the computer was owned by someone else. Also, the truth is if Linus had known about the FTP site, since his University was licensed for the 386BSD code; Linus could have downloaded it. However, he didn’t know about the ‘secret’ FTP site and he did have a copy of Minix, but he discovered that Minix in those days was a toy compared to BSD – so he wrote his own OS; while many of the rest of hacked on 386BSD.As I said life was good for us in 386BSD land … until … well AT&T decides to sue BSDi and UC Berkeley, see court docs from USL vs BSDi.So, a number of us hacker types get scared, we think it’s a suit based on copyright protection and 386BSD is going to go away – UNIX ‘source’ is not ‘free’ as in beer. We hear about this system that sort of works, no networking, no graphics, but it uses the 386 VM hardware and we start hacking (the rest is history). The key is that Linus has used all those materials I described above that are ‘open’ and has built a respectable clone of the UNIX ‘ideas’. He gives his sources away, asking for help, he gets it. We all help him make it better and the story ends right…But here is where we (the hackers) were wrong. The AT&T/USL suit was not about copyright, the suit was about trade secrets. AT&T is suing that UNIX is an idea, it is not about a specific implementation. If they are win, it means all of the UNIX ‘clones’ needed to be licensed!!!And in the end the US courts agreed, AT&T invented it, AT&T can define it. It’s AT&T trade secret … but …(nasty but …)The problem was that all us folks had been educated with the UNIX technologies and ideas. The court’s term for it was we were ‘mentally contaminated’ when we saw AT&T sources and read their papers. Moreover, folks like Linus and folks that build clones were contaminated with the ideas when they read books or read the POSIX specification. The point is, UNIX was a technology and an idea, but it was no longer a secret the moment they licensed it and AT&T could not claim it be.Which is an interesting ‘catch-22.’ AT&T was required by the 1956 consent decree to license its technologies to interested parties. So how could it have trade secrets? – good Quora question.An interesting aside, another question for the Quora readership might be what would have happened if AT&T had won the ruling, could it still be classified as secret and BSDi and UCB in violation? What would/could have happened to Linux/Minix and all the other clones [I’ve asked some legal friends and they said it would have been messy and lots of lawyers would have made money.]Ok, so BSDi/UCB wins, BSD is allowed to be ‘free’ as in beer, UNIX ideas are now legally defined as ‘unlicensed’ for us all to use, you would think it was over, settled. Of course, it was not, because while BSD was caught up in legal limbo, the hacker community moved on and ‘Linux was the bomb.’At this point, Linux is the premier UNIX implementation and is where much of the primary work is going. But what about that nasty SCO thing folks mentioned? Well of course it was not clear at the beginning that Linux would ‘win’ the copyright case, and SCO (who had the Microsoft UNIX assets of many years earlier when Microsoft got out the UNIX business) clearly wanted to try slow Linux down in some manner and/or reap some type of royalty from it by demonstrating that somehow some of copyrighted UNIX technology had made it into Linux.This time the case was about copyright, but I’ve often wondered how the SCO lawyers could ever have thought they had any chance with it given the results of the USL case. The US court had already decided, UNIX is a technology and set of ideas, it was originally a trade secret but no longer. AT&T and any whomever (which the courts I believe eventually decided was Novell) owned the ideas, but no claims could be made against the original ideas. They were published.Others have discussed this case, so I’m not going to spend much time on it, although it was important in that is seems to have finally closed the lid, as I have not heard any other legal dances of importance to the UNIX community since.You asked a seemly simple question and got an old man’s long winded answer, but I hope you see that what seems simple has some very deep rooted complexity and may not be everything that it seems. The good news is that all of the UNIX technologies are open and have been open since their inception. The primary implementations are now free as in beer too which is even better. In closing, if you want to examine the technology, I suggest reading two more of my Quora answers: Clem Cole answers: Which Linux kernel version's source code is better for newbie to read? , Clem Cole answers: How would Unix run on modern-day systems? , and then going to The Unix Heritage Society and their UNIX Source Tree Page.Someone asked me in the hall ‘what about the UNIX trademark’ – you never talked about. The reason was because in this case today it is pretty much irrelevant (that was not always true). So, I’ll add it as a closing note. Yes, there is a formal mark about what is UNIX and to be allowed to use the mark you must meet the definition of POSIX as defined by OpenGroup and complete their tests. That is a branding thing and at one time it mattered when you were trying to market your system and we used different processors and your firm was trying to find both unique differentiation and value. At one point Microsoft even made sure that Windows could meet the ‘POSIX compliant’ label and be sold as a version of UNIX - Clem Cole's answers: Is Windows POSIX compliant? Today Windows 10 actually includes a complete Linux subsystem (and repositories from Ubuntu), that you just have to turn on – go figure.Edited 2017-08-14 to fix a few typos and some of my dyslexia. Apologies– to the reader. And added the Locus reference after reminder by a friend of mine, as well as the UNIX trade mark comment. Tweaked again at the suggestion of Páll Haraldsson - many thanks for fixing the typos. Tweaked again 2017–12–15 at the request of Tom Dufall where I also added some clarity on some questions that have come to me independently.