I’m a big believer in the notion that one of the best ways to become a master programmer is to study the code of those who already are. There was a time when that was a lot harder than it is today. Once upon a time there was no Linux and Unix source code was not available. Eventually, the BSD and early AT&T Unix source code became widely available and it became easy to study how the masters did it.
I’ve collected all that code and spent many happy hours studying it and absorbing its lessons. Sadly, it’s scattered across a bunch of CDs and the hard disks of decommissioned computers. It would be nice to have the collection organized and easily accessible.
Diomidis Spinellis to the rescue. He’s created a GitHub repository of most of that code and is working on filling in the metadata as much as possible. The project makes it easy to browse the code for fun or to look up some particular aspect. The project is on-going and it would be great if the later Unix code was also made available. The Unix source code is an important part of our profession’s cultural heritage and it would be nice to have it all available in a unified git repository.