[sf-lug] BASH vs DASH to SH vs DASH ?

[Rick Moen]

I wrote:

> Because until recently the literal Bourne shell (Stephen Bourne's work
> for AT&T Bell Labs) was proprietary, free / open source
> re-implementations have sprung up.
[...]
> It's unclear whether the historic Bourne shell will ever be available
> under an open source licence, but basically the world has moved on, and
> if it suddenly appeared under (say) a permissive 2-clause BSD licence,
> hardly anyone would care any more.  For interactive use, bash or ksh 
> is a lot better.  For scripting, ash/dash is perfectly fine (or bash or
> zsh, if you don't mind the bloat).

The reason the latter paragraph slightly contradicts the earlier one was
I started out thinking 'I think the historic Bourne shell got released
as open source at some point', but by the time I got five paragraphs
down I was starting to doubt myself, because the Wikipedia article
seemed to suggest 'no'.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_shell
says 'License: [under discussion].'  That's because of a confusing
argument OpenSolaris/CDDL advocate Georg Schilling is involved in, here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bourne_shell#License 

FWIW, even though the Wikipedia article is currently unclear because of
Schilling's largely non-helpful participation, my initial recollection
is correct.  Caldera International did a mass-release of full source
code for several historic UNIX releases up to 1979's 'version 7' for
16-bit PDP-11 and '32V' (a 32-bit VAX port) under 4-clause BSD licensing
in 2002.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090219220353/http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Caldera-license.pdf

So, the 1979 Bourne shell source code went open source in 2002 -- gosh,
only a quarter-century late -- was picked up by several Unixes including
OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, and is maintained here:
http://heirloom.cvs.sourceforge.net/heirloom/heirloom-sh/

But, honestly, nobody really cares, because the world really _has_ moved
on.