Comment by ofalkaed
1 day ago
When this got released I really expected someone in the opensource community to run with it, but as far as I know no one has. Back around 1990 a Graphic designer that had his office n the same building as my mom worked in let me copy his Photoshop 1.x disks and nothing has ever compared to it for me. When will we get the linux port of Photoshop 1.0? I would love to see how it develops.
If they did, they can only send you screenshots
> 2. Restrictions. Except as expressly specified in this Agreement, you may not: (a) transfer, sublicense, lease, lend, rent or otherwise distribute the Software or Derivative Works to any third party; or (b) make the functionality of the Software or Derivative Works available to multiple users through any means, including, but not limited to, by uploading the Software to a network or file-sharing service or through any hosting, application services provider, service bureau, software-as-a-service (SaaS) or any other type of services. You acknowledge and agree that portions of the Software, including, but not limited to, the source code and the specific design and structure of individual modules or programs, constitute or contain trade secrets of Museum and its licensors.
It would be trivial to distribute a patch and a link to the original source. The patch can be distributed under whatever license the author wants. The resulting binary then becomes an unlicensed derivative work, the person who compiled it can use it however they want but are not allowed to legally distribute it.
My personal thoughts are: open-source software is great, probably the ideal condition, but I wish the general software distribution environment was not effectively all or nothing. open-source or compiled binary. I wish that protected-source software was considered a more valid distribution model. where you can compile, inspect fix and run the software but are not allowed to distribute it. Because trying to diagnose a problem when all you have is a compilation artifact is a huge pain. You see some enterprise software like this but for the most part it either open-source or no-source.
I am a bit surprised that there is no third party patch to get photoshop 1.0 to run under modern linux or windows, not for any real utility(at this point MS paint probably has better functionality), but for the fun of it. "This is what it feels like to drive photoshop 1"
I was talking about more than just a literal port, running with it is broader than just a literal port. I guess my general point is that I am disappointed that all these releases of historical code have so little to show for being released.
Edit: Disappointed is really not the right word but I am failing at finding the right word.
What would you expect to happen? Photoshop 1.0 is an almost unusably basic image editor by modern standards. It doesn't even have layers (they were introduced with Photoshop 3.0 4 years later). Even if the code was licensed in a manner that allowed distribution of derivative works (which it isn't), it's written in Apple's Pascal dialect from the mid-80s and uses a UI framework that's also from the mid-80s and only supports classic Mac OS. CHM didn't even release the code in a state that could be usable out of the box if you happen to have a 40 year old Macintosh sitting around. Here's a blog post showing how much work it took someone to compile it: http://basalgangster.macgui.com/RetroMacComputing/The_Long_V...
I think Adobe decided to release the code because they knew it was only valuable from a historical standpoint and wouldn't let anyone actually compete with Photoshop. If you wanted to start a new image editor project from an existing codebase, it would be much easier to build off of something like Pinta: https://www.pinta-project.com/
I think there's two parts to this:
1) these historical source code releases really are largely historical interest only. The original programs had constraints of memory and cpu speed that no modern use case does; the set of use cases for any particular task today is very different; what users expect and will tolerate in UI has shifted; available programming languages and tooling today are much better than the pragmatic options of decades past. If you were trying to build a Unix clone today there is no way you would want to start with the historical release of sixth edition. Even xv6 is only "inspired by" it, and gets away with that because of its teaching focus. Similarly if you wanted to build some kind of "streamlined lightweight photoshop-alike" then starting from scratch would be more sensible than starting with somebody else's legacy codebase.
2) In this specific case the licence agreement explicitly forbids basically any kind of "running with it" -- you cannot distribute any derivative work. So it's not surprising that nobody has done that.
I think Doom and similar old games are one of the few counterexamples, where people find value in being able to run the specific artefact on new platforms.
you literally said:
> When will we get the linux port of Photoshop 1.0?
The appropriate word is "mistaken". It was explained that the licensing restrictions do not allow for a port, literal or otherwise. And "the linux port of Photoshop 1.0" is not something anyone wants when Linux already has far more capable photo editing software, and when much of this code is devoted to solving problems--e.g., interfacing with ancient hardware--that no longer exist.
Your disappointment seems to be a form of FOMO, but there isn't actually anything that you're MO here.
The source is now readable but it’s not open source at all.
It is open source but not free software.
No, it’s source available but not open source. Open source requires at minimum the license to distribute modified copies. Popular open source licenses such as MIT [1] take this further:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
This makes the license transitive so that derived works are also MIT licensed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License?wprov=sfti1#Licens...
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Open Source is the same thing as Free Software, just with the different name. The term "Open Source" was coined later to emphasize the business benefits instead of the rights and freedom of the users, but the four freedoms of the Free Software Definition [1] and the ten criteria of the Open Source Definition [2] describe essentially the same thing.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
[2] https://opensource.org/osd
It’s is “source available” but not open source.
It's "source available" [1], not open source [2].
Words have meaning and all that.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
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I understand it was a very unique and powerful piece of software in 1990 but why would it be such a game changer to have the 1.0 running on Linux today?
What about GIMP or any of the other open source image editors?
Just supporting a modern OS's graphical API (The pre-OSX APIs are long dead and unsupported) is a major effort.
You could try having an LLM port it to Linux :) As an aside I was always (well, no longer) hoping that Photoshop gets ported to Linux because at least an IRIX port existed, so there has to be some source code with X11 or whatever library code.
https://fsck.technology/software/Silicon%20Graphics/Software...
Photoshop was ported to IRIX using Latitude, Quorum Software's implementation of Mac OS System 7. Apple later acquired the Quorum's code and it became part of Carbon.
There's System 7 for Unix 'natively', with either Executor (there's a fork under Github) or some other project: https://www.v68k.org/advanced-mac-substitute/
https://github.com/autc04/executor
https://github.com/jjuran/metamage_1/
If it uses Motif and IrisGL (now MESA3D) the amount of porting effort it's near NIL.
And, for purity/completeness, avoid Maxx Desktop and/or NSCDE; EMWM with XMToolbar it's close enough to SGI's Irix desktop.
https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html
As an experiment, I gave the source zip file to Claude and told it to make a WASM version of the app, by translating the Pascal to Go.
It nailed it, first try.
I cannot, unfortunately, share a link to the website it created because of the license.
LLM translations of historical software to modern platforms is a solved problem. Try it, you'll see.
I used https://exe.dev/ and their Shelley agent to drive Claude. Give it a try, it is jaw dropping.
Can you post a video demonstrating you using it?
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That's a bit of an extraordinary claim: what did Claude do about the important non-Pascal parts: the resource fork and the 68k assembly?
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